Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I Page 18

  “I think if we once get this stone home,” said Miller, “I’ll try that quarter dress on it. Looks to me like it might be easier to keep up a clean grind.”

  Finally the ground was dry, and Al Junior walked to the cliff face. The other boys were all down below, breaking camp or bringing the horses up to the quarry. Only Miller and Taleswapper watched as Al Junior finally carried his hammer to the cliff face. He had a little more cutting to do, to get the circle to its full depth all around.

  To Taleswapper’s surprise, when Al Junior set the chisel in place and gave a whang with the hammer, a whole section of stone, some six inches long, split away from the cliff face and crumbled to the ground.

  “Why, that stone’s as soft as coal,” said Taleswapper. “What kind of millstone can it make, if it’s as weak as that?”

  Miller grinned and shook his head.

  Al Junior stepped away from the stone. “Oh, Taleswapper, it’s hard stone, unless you know just the right place to crack it. Give it a try, you’ll see.”

  He held out the chisel and hammer. Taleswapper took them and approached the rock. Carefully he laid the chisel onto the stone, a slight angle away from perpendicular. Then, after a few trial taps, he laid on a blow with the hammer.

  The chisel practically jumped out of his left hand, and the shock of impact was so great that he dropped the hammer. “Sorry,” he said, “I’ve done this before, but I must have lost the skill—”

  “Oh, it’s just the stone,” said Al Junior. “It’s kind of temperamental. It only likes to give in certain directions.”

  Taleswapper inspected the place where he had tried to cut. He couldn’t find the spot. His mighty blow had left no mark at all.

  Al Junior picked up the tools and laid the chisel against the stone. It looked to Taleswapper as though he put it in exactly the same place. But Al acted as though he had placed it quite differently. “See, it’s getting just the angle on it. Like this.”

  He whanged with the hammer, the iron rang out, there was a cracking of stone, and once again crumbled stone pattered on the ground.

  “I can see why you have him do all the cutting,” Taleswapper said.

  “Seems like the best way,” said Miller.

  In only a few minutes, the stone was fully rounded. Taleswapper said nothing, just watched to see what Al would do.

  He set down his tools, walked to the millstone, and embraced it. His right hand curled around the lip of it. His left hand probed back into the cut on the other side. Alvin’s cheek pressed against the stone. His eyes were closed. It looked for all the world as though he were listening to the rock.

  He began to hum softly. A mindless little tune. He moved his hands. Shifted his position. Listened with the other ear.

  “Well,” Alvin said, “I can’t hardly believe it.”

  “Believe what?” asked his father.

  “Those last few cuts must have set up a real shiver in the rock. The back is already split right off.”

  “You mean that millstone is standing free?” asked Taleswapper.

  “I think we can rock it forward now,” said Alvin. “It takes a little rope work, but we’ll get it out of there without too much trouble.”

  The brothers arrived with the ropes and horses. Alvin passed a rope back behind the stone. Even though not a single cut had been made against the back, the rope dropped easily into place. Then another rope, and another, and soon they were all tugging, first left, then right, as they slowly walked the heavy stone out of its bed in the cliff face.

  “If I hadn’t seen it,” murmured Taleswapper.

  “But you did,” said Miller.

  It was only a few inches clear when they changed the ropes, passing four lines through the center hole and hitching them to a team of horses uphill of the stone. “It’ll roll on downhill just fine,” Miller explained to Taleswapper. “The horses are there as a drag, pulling against it.”

  “It looks heavy.”

  “Just don’t lie down in front of it,” said Miller.

  They started it rolling, very gently. Miller took hold of Alvin’s shoulder and kept the boy well back from the stone—and uphill of it, too. Taleswapper helped with the horses, so he didn’t get a good look at the back surface of the stone until it was down on level ground by the sledge.

  It was smooth as a baby’s backside. Flat as ice in a basin. Except that it was scored in a quarter dress pattern, straight lines radiating from the lip of the center hole to the edge of the stone.

  Alvin came up to stand beside him. “Did I do it right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Taleswapper.

  “It was the luckiest thing,” said the boy. “I could just feel that stone ready to split right along those lines. It just wanted to split, easy as you please.”

  Taleswapper reached out and drew his finger gently along the edge of a dress cut. It stung. He brought his finger to his mouth, sucked, and tasted blood.

  “Stone holds a nice sharp edge, don’t it?” said Measure. He sounded as if this sort of thing happened every day. But Taleswapper could see the awe in his eyes.

  “Good cut,” said Calm.

  “Best one yet,” said David.

  Then, with horses bracing against a rapid fall, they gently tipped it to lie on the sledge, dress side up.

  “Will you do me a favor, Taleswapper?” asked Miller.

  “If I can.”

  “Take Alvin back home with you now. His work’s done.”

  “No, Papa!” Alvin shouted. He ran over to his father. “You can’t make me go home now.”

  “Don’t need no ten-year-old boys underfoot while we’re manhandling a stone that size,” said his father.

  “But I’ve got to watch the stone, to make sure it don’t split or chip, Pa!”

  The older sons looked at their father, waiting. Taleswapper wondered what they hoped for. They were too old now, surely, to resent their father’s particular love for his seventh son. They also must hope to keep the boy safe from harm. Yet it meant much to all of them that the stone arrive safely, unbroken, to begin its service in the mill. There could be no doubt that young Alvin had the power to keep it whole.

  “You can ride with us till sundown,” Miller finally said. “By then we’ll be close enough to home that you and Taleswapper can head back and spend the night in beds.”

  “Fine with me,” said Taleswapper.

  Alvin Junior plainly wasn’t satisfied, but he didn’t answer back.

  They got the sledge under way before noon. Two horses in front and two behind, for stopping, were hitched to the stone itself. The stone rested on the wooden raft of the sledge, and the sledge rode atop seven or eight of the small rollers at a time. The sledge moved forward, passing over new rollers waiting in front. As the rollers emerged from the back, one of the boys immediately yanked the roller out from under the ropes hitched to the trailing team, raced to the front, and laid it in place directly behind the lead team. It meant that each man ran about five miles for every mile the stone traveled.

  Taleswapper tried to take his turn, but David, Calm, and Measure wouldn’t hear of it. He ended up tending the trailing team, with Alvin perched atop one of the horses. Miller drove the leading team, walking backward half the time to make sure he wasn’t going too fast for the boys to keep up.

  Hour after hour they went on. Miller offered to let them stop and rest, but they seemed not to tire, and Taleswapper was amazed to see how the rollers held up. Not a one split on a rock or from the sheer weight of the stone. They got scuffed and dented, but that was about all.

  And as the sun sank to about two fingers above the horizon, awash in the ruddy clouds of the western sky, Taleswapper recognized the meadow opening up before them. They had made the whole journey in a single afternoon.

  “I think I got the strongest brothers in the whole world,” Alvin murmured.

  I have no doubt of it, Taleswapper said silently. You who can cut a stone from the mountain without hands, because you “fi
nd” the right fractures in the rock, it’s no surprise that your brothers find in themselves exactly as much strength as you believe they have. Taleswapper tried again, as he had tried so many times before, to puzzle out the nature of the hidden powers. Surely there was some natural law that governed their use—Old Ben had always said so. And yet here was this boy who, by mere belief and desire, could cut stone like butter and give strength to his brothers. There was a theory that the hidden power came from friendship with a particular element, but which was it that could do all that Alvin did? Earth? Air? Fire? Certainly not water, for Taleswapper knew that Miller’s stories were all true. Why was it that Alvin Junior could wish for something, and the earth itself would bend to his will, while others could long for things and never cause so much as a breeze to blow?

  They needed lanterns inside the millhouse by the time they rolled the stone through the doors. “Might as well lay it in place tonight,” said Miller. Taleswapper imagined the fears that ran through Miller’s mind. If he left the stone upright, it would surely roll in the morning and crush a particular child as he innocently carried water up to the house. Since the stone had miraculously come down from the mountain in a single day, it would be foolish to leave it anywhere but in its proper place, on the foundation of rammed earth and stone in the millhouse.

  They brought a team inside and hitched it to the stone, as they had when they lowered it on the sledge back by the quarry. The team would pull against the weight of the stone as they levered it downward onto the foundation.

  At the moment, though, the stone was resting on built-up earth just outside the circle of foundation stones. Measure and Calm were working their lever poles under the outside edge of the stone, ready to pry it up and make it fall into place. The stone rocked a little as they worked. David was holding the horses, since it would be a disaster if they pulled too soon and rocked the stone over the wrong way, to lie on its dress face in the plain dirt.

  Taleswapper stood aside, watching as Miller directed his sons with useless calls of “Careful there” and “Steady now.” Alvin had been beside him ever since they brought the millstone inside. One of the horses got jumpy. Miller reacted at once. “Calm, go help your brother with the horses!” Miller also took a step that way.

  At that moment, Taleswapper realized that Alvin was not beside him, after all. He was carrying a broom, walking briskly toward the millstone. Perhaps he had seen some loose stones lying on the foundation; he had to sweep them away, didn’t he? The horses backed up; the lines went slack. Taleswapper realized, just as Alvin got behind the stone, that with ropes so slack there’d be nothing to keep the stone from falling all the way over, if it should fall at just this moment.

  Surely it would not fall, in a reasonable world. But Taleswapper knew by now that it was not a reasonable world at all. Alvin Junior had a powerful, invisible enemy, and it would not miss such a chance as this.

  Taleswapper bounded forward. Just as he came level with the stone, he felt a lurching in the earth under his feet, a collapse of the firm dirt. Not much, just a few inches, but it was enough to let the inside lip of the millstone fall that much, which rocked the top of the great wheel more than two feet, and so quickly that the momentum could not be stopped. The millstone would fall all the way down, right into its proper place on the foundation, with Alvin Junior underneath, ground like grain under the stone.

  With a shout, Taleswapper caught hold of Alvin’s arm and yanked him back, away from the stone. Only then did Alvin see the great stone falling upon him. Taleswapper had enough force in his movement to carry the boy several feet back, but it was not quite enough. The boy’s legs still lay in the stone’s shadow. It was falling fast now, too fast for Taleswapper to respond, to do anything but watch it crush Alvin’s legs. He knew that such an injury was the same as death, except that it would take longer. He had failed.

  In that moment, though, as he watched the stone in its murderous fall, he saw a crack appear in the stone and, in less than an instant, it became a clean split right through the stone. The two halves leapt apart from each other, each with such a movement that it would fall beside Alvin’s leg, not touching him.

  No sooner had Taleswapper seen lantern light through the middle of the stone than Alvin himself cried, “No!”

  To anyone else, it would seem the boy was shouting at the fall of the stone, at his impending death. But to Taleswapper, lying on the ground beside the boy, with the light of the lantern dazzling through the split in the millstone, the cry meant something else altogether. Heedless of his own danger, as children usually are, Alvin was crying out against the breaking of the millstone. After all his work, and the labors in bringing the stone home, he could not bear to see it breaking.

  And because he could not bear it, it did not happen. The halves of the stone jumped back together like a needle jumping at a magnet, and the stone fell in one piece.

  The shadow of the stone had exaggerated its footprint on the ground. It did not crush both Alvin’s legs. His left leg, in fact, was completely clear of the stone, tucked up under him as it was. The right leg, however, lay so that the rim of the stone overlapped his shin by two inches at the widest point. Since Alvin was still pulling his legs away, the blow from the stone pushed it further in the direction it was already going. It peeled off all the skin and muscle, right down to the bone, but it did not catch the leg directly when it came to rest. The leg might not even have broken, had the broom not been lying crosswise under it. The stone drove Alvin’s leg downward against the broom handle, just hard enough to snap both bones of the lower leg clean in half. The sharp edges of the bone broke the skin and came to rest like two sides of a vise, gripping the broom handle. But the leg was not under the millstone, and the bones were broken cleanly, not ground to dust under the rock.

  The air was filled with the crash of stone on stone, the great-throated shouts of men surprised by grief, and above all the piercing cry of agony from one boy who was never so young and frail as now.

  By the time anyone else could get there, Taleswapper had seen that both Alvin’s legs were free of the stone. Alvin tried to sit up and look at his injury. Either the sight or the pain of it was too much for him, and he fainted. Alvin’s father reached him then; he had not been nearest, but he had moved faster than Alvin’s brothers. Taleswapper tried to reassure him, for with the bones gripping the broom handle, the leg did not look broken. Miller lifted his son, but the leg would not come, and even unconscious the pain wrung a cruel moan from the boy. It was Measure who steeled himself to pull on the leg and free it from the broom handle.

  David already held a lantern, and as Miller carried the boy, David ran alongside, lighting the way. Measure and Calm would have followed, but Taleswapper called to them. “The womenfolk are there, and David, and your father,” he said. “Someone needs to see to all this.”

  “You’re right,” said Calm. “Father won’t be eager to come down here soon.”

  The young men used levers to raise the stone enough that Taleswapper could pull out the broom handle and the ropes that were still tied to the horses. The three of them cleared all the equipment out of the millhouse, then stabled the horses and put away the tools and supplies. Only then did Taleswapper return to the house to find that Alvin Junior was sleeping in Taleswapper’s bed.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said Anne anxiously.

  “Of course not,” said Taleswapper.

  The other girls and Cally were clearing away the supper dishes. In the room that had been Taleswapper’s, Faith and Miller, both ashen and tight-lipped, sat beside the bed, where Alvin lay with his leg splinted and bandaged.

  David stood near the door. “It was a clean break,” he whispered to Taleswapper. “But the cuts in the skin—we fear infection. He lost all the skin off the front of his shin. I don’t know if bare bone like that can ever heal.”

  “Did you put the skin back?” asked Taleswapper.

  “Such as was left, we pressed into place, and Mother
sewed it there.”

  “That was well done,” said Taleswapper.

  Faith lifted her head. “Do you know aught of physicking, then, Taleswapper?”

  “Such as a man learns after years trying to do what he can among those who know as little as he.”

  “How could this happen?” Miller said. “Why now, after so many other times that did him no injury?” He looked up at Taleswapper. “I had come to think the boy had a protector.”

  “He has.”

  “Then the protector failed him.”

  “It did not fail,” said Taleswapper. “For a moment, as the stone fell, I saw it split, wide enough that it wouldn’t have touched him.”

  “Like the ridgebeam,” whispered Faith.

  “I thought I saw it too, Father,” said David. “But when it came down whole, I decided I must have seen what I wished for, and not what was.”

  “There’s no split in it now,” said Miller.

  “No,” said Taleswapper. “Because Alvin Junior refused to let it split.”

  “Are you saying he knit it back together? So it would strike him and wreck his leg?”

  “I’m saying he had no thought of his leg,” said Taleswapper. “Only of the stone.”

  “Oh, my boy, my good boy,” murmured his mother, gently caressing the arm that extended thoughtlessly toward her. As she moved his fingers, they limply bent as she pushed them, then sprang back.

  “Is it possible?” asked David. “That the stone split and was made whole again, as quickly as that?”

  “It must be,” said Taleswapper, “because it happened.”

  Faith moved her son’s fingers again, but this time they did not spring back. They extended even further, then flexed into a fist, then extended flat again.

  “He’s awake,” said his father.

  “I’ll fetch some rum for the boy,” said David. “To slack the pain. Armor’ll have some in his store.”

  “No,” murmured Alvin.

  “The boy says no,” said Taleswapper.

  “What does he know, in pain as he is?”

  “He has to keep his wits about him, if he can,” said Taleswapper. He knelt by the bed, just to the right of Faith, so he was even nearer to the boy’s face. “Alvin, do you hear me?”