Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV Page 2

  So as I pick up my tale again that’s the day I choose to start with, mostly because I can tell you from experience that nothing interesting happened during those long months when Alvin was still trying to teach a bunch of plain folks how to be a Maker like him instead of . . . well, all in time. Let’s just say that while some of you are bound to criticize me for not telling all of Alvin’s lessons about Makering and every single boring moment of every class he held trying to teach fish to hop, I can promise you that leaving out those days from my tale is an act of charity.

  There’s a lot of people and a lot of confusion in the story, too, and I can’t help that, because if I made it all clear and simple that would be a lie. It was a mess and there was a lot of different people involved and also, to tell you the truth, there’s a lot of things that happened that I didn’t know about then and still don’t know much about now. I’d like to say that I’m telling you all the important parts of the story, telling about all the important people, but I know perfectly well that there might be important parts that I just don’t know about, and important people that I didn’t realize were important. There’s stuff that nobody knows, and stuff that them as knows ain’t telling, or them as knows don’t know they know. And even as I try to explain things as I understand them I’m still going to leave things out without meaning to, or tell you things twice that you already know, or contradict something that you know to be a fact, and all I can say is, I ain’t no Taleswapper, and if you want to know the deepest truth, get him to unseal that back two-thirds of his little book and read you what he’s got in there and I bet, for all he claims to be no prophet, I bet you’ll hear things as will curl your hair, or uncurl it, depending.

  There’s one mystery, though, that I plain don’t know the answer to, even though everything depends on it. Maybe if I tell you enough you’ll figure it out for yourself. But what I don’t understand is why Calvin went the way he did. He was a sweet boy, they all say it. He and Alvin were close as boys can be, I mean they fought but there was never malice in it and Cally grew up knowing Al would die for him. So what was it made jealousy start to gnaw at Calvin’s heart and turn him away from his own brother and want to undo all his work? I heard a lot of the tale I’m about to tell you from Cally’s own mouth, but you can be sure he never sat down and explained to me or anybody why he changed. Oh, he told plenty of folks why he hated Alvin, but there’s no ring of truth in what he says about that, since he always accuses his brother of doing whatever his audience hates the most. To Puritans he says he came to hate Alvin because he saw him trucking with the devil. To Kingsmen he says he hated Alvin because he saw how his brother went so far as to murder a man just to keep him from recovering his own property, a runaway slave baby named Arthur Stuart (and don’t that set them Royalists’ teeth on edge, to think of a half-Black boy having the same name as the King!). Calvin always has a tale that justifies himself in the eyes of strangers, but never a word of explanation does he ever have to those of us who know the truth about Alvin Maker.

  I just know this: When I first set eyes on Calvin, in Vigor Church during that year when Alvin tried to teach Makering, that year before he left, I’ll tell you, folks, Calvin was already gone. In his heart every word that Alvin said was like poison. If Alvin paid no attention to him, Calvin felt neglected and said so. Then if Alvin did pay attention to him, Calvin got surly and sullen and claimed Alvin wouldn’t leave him alone. There was no pleasing him.

  But to say he was “contrary” don’t explain a thing. It’s just a name for the way he was acting, not an answer to the question of why he acted that way. I have my own guesses, but they’re just guesses and no more, not even what they call “educated guesses” because there’s no such thing as education so good it makes one man’s guess any better than another’s. Either you know or you don’t, and I don’t know.

  I don’t know why people who got what they need to be happy don’t just go ahead and be happy. I don’t know why lonely people keep shoving away everybody as tries to befriend them. I don’t know why people blame weak and harmless folks for their troubles while they leave their real enemy alone to get away with all his harm. And I sure don’t know why I bother to go to the trouble to write all this down when I know you still won’t be satisfied.

  Let me tell you one little thing about Calvin. I saw him one day taking class with Alvin, and for once he was paying attention, real close attention, heeding every word that came from his brother’s lips. And I thought: He’s finally come around. He finally realized that if he really wants to be a seventh son of a seventh son, if he really wants to be a Maker, he has to learn from Alvin how it’s done.

  And then the class ended, and I sat there watching Calvin as everybody else went on out to get back to their chores, until only me and Calvin was left in the room, and Calvin actually talks to me—mostly he ignored me like I wasn’t there—he talks to me and in a few seconds I realize what he’s doing. He’s imitating Alvin. Not Alvin’s regular voice, but Alvin’s schoolteachery voice. You all remember when he got that way—I remember he learned that flowery fancy talk when he was studying with Miss Larner, before she came out of disguise and he realized she was the same Peggy Guester who kept his birth caul and protected him through his growing-up years. The big five-dollar words she learned in Dekane or from them books she read. Alvin wanted to sound refined like her, or sometimes he wanted to, anyway, and so he’d learn them words and use them and talk so fine you’d have thought he learned English from an expert instead of just growing up with it like the rest of us. But he couldn’t keep it up. He’d hear himself talking so high-toned and he’d just suddenly laugh or make some joke and then he’d go back to talking like folks. And there was Calvin talking that same high-toned way, only he didn’t laugh. He just did all his imitating and when he was done, he looked at me and said, “Was that right?”

  As if I’d know!

  And I says back to him, “Calvin, sounding like an educated man don’t make you educated,” and he says back to me, “I’d rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant,” and I said, “Why?” and he says to me, “Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.”

  Here’s my point. Well, maybe it’s not the point I started out to make, but I long since lost track of that. So here’s the point I want to make now: I know more about what happened during Alvin’s year of wandering than anybody else on God’s green Earth. But I also am aware of how many questions I still can’t answer. So I reckon I’m the one as knows but seems ignorant. Which kind are you?

  If you already figure you know this story, for heaven’s sake stop reading now and save yourself some trouble. And if you’re going to criticize me for not finishing the whole thing and tying it up in a bow for you, why, do us both a favor and write your own damn book, only have the decency to call it a romance instead of a history, because history’s got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can’t be untied. It ain’t a pretty package but then it’s not your birthday that I know of, so I’m under no obligation to give you a gift.

  2

  Hypocrites

  Calvin was about fed up. Just this close to walking up to Alvin and . . . and something. Punching him in the nose, maybe, only he’d tried that afore and Alvin just caught him by the wrist and gripped him with those damn blacksmith muscles and he says, “Calvin, you know I could always throw you, do we have to do this now?” Alvin could always do everything better, or if he couldn’t then it must not be worth doing. Folks all gathered around and listened to Alvin’s babbling like it all made sense. Folks watched every move he made like he was a dancing bear. Only time they noticed Calvin was to ask him if he would kindly step aside so they could see Alvin a little better.

  Step aside? Yep, I reckon I can step aside. I can step right out the door and out into the hot sun and right out onto the path going up the hill to the tree line. And what’s to stop me from keepin
g right on? What’s to stop me from walking on to the edge of the world and then jumping right off?

  But Calvin didn’t keep walking. He leaned against a big old maple and then hunkered down in the grass and looked out over Father’s land. The house. The barn. The chicken coops. The pigpen. The millhouse.

  Did the wheel ever turn in Father’s mill anymore? The water passed useless through the chase, the wheel leaned forward but never moved, and so the stones inside were still, too. Might as well have left the huge millstone in the mountain, as to bring it down here to stand useless while big brother Alvin filled these poor people’s minds with hopeless hopes. Alvin was grinding them up as surely as if he put their heads between the stones. Grinding them up, turning them to flour which Alvin himself would bake into bread and eat up for supper. He may have prenticed as a blacksmith all those years in Hatrack River, but here in Vigor Church he was a baker of brains.

  Thinking of Alvin eating everybody’s ground-up heads made Calvin feel nasty in a delicious kind of way. It made him laugh. He stretched his long thin legs out into the meadow grass and lay back against the trunk of the maple. A bug was scampering along the skin of his leg, up under his trousers, but he didn’t bother to reach down and pull it out, or even to shake his leg to get it off. Instead, he got his doodlebug going, like a spare pair of eyes, like an extra set of fingers, looking for the tiny rapid flutter of the bug’s useless stupid life and when he found it he gave it a little pinch, or really more like a squint, a tiny twitch of the muscles around his eyes, but that was all it took, just that little pinch and then the bug wasn’t moving no more. Some days, little bug, it just don’t pay to get up in the morning.

  “That must be some funny story,” said a voice.

  Calvin fairly jumped out of his skin. How did somebody come on him unawares? Still, he didn’t let himself show he’d been surprised. His heart might be beating fast inside his chest, but he still waited a minute before even turning around to look, and then he made sure to look about as uninterested as a fellow can look without being dead.

  A bald fellow, old and in buckskins. Calvin knew him, of course. A far traveler and sometime visitor named Taleswapper. Another one who thought the world began with God and ended with Alvin. Calvin looked him up and down. The buckskins were about as old as the man. “Did you get them clothes off a ninety-year-old deer, or did your daddy and grandpa wear them all their lives to get them so worn out like that?”

  “I’ve worn these clothes so long,” said the old man, “that I sometimes send them on errands when I’m too busy to go, and nobody can tell the difference.”

  “I think I know you,” said Calvin. “You’re that old Taleswapper fellow.”

  “So I am,” said the old man. “And you’re Calvin, old Miller’s youngest boy.”

  Calvin waited.

  And here it came: “Alvin’s little brother.”

  Calvin folded himself sitting down and then unfolded himself standing. He liked how tall he was. He liked looking down at the old man’s bald head. “You know, old man, if we had another just like you, we could put your smooth pink heads together and you’d look like a baby’s butt.”

  “Don’t like being called Alvin’s little brother, eh?” asked Taleswapper.

  “You know where to go for your free meal,” said Calvin. He started to walk away into the meadow. Having no destination in mind, of course, his walking pretty soon petered out, and he paused a moment, looking around, wishing there was something he wanted to do.

  The old man was right behind him. Damn but the old boy was quiet! Calvin had to remember to keep a watch out for people. Alvin did it without thinking, dammit, and Calvin could do it too if he could just remember to remember.

  “Heard you chuckling,” said Taleswapper. “When I first walked up behind you.”

  “Well, then, I guess you ain’t deaf yet.”

  “Saw you watching the millhouse and heard you chuckling and I thought, What does this boy see so funny in a mill whose wheel don’t turn?”

  Calvin turned to face him. “You were born in England, weren’t you?”

  “I was.”

  “And you lived in Philadelphia awhile, right? Met old Ben Franklin there, right?”

  “What a memory you have.”

  “Then how come you talk like a frontiersman? You know and I know that it’s supposed to be ‘a mill whose wheel doesn’t turn,’ but here you are talking bad grammar as if you never went to school but I know you did. And how come you don’t talk like other Englishmen?”

  “Keen ear, keen eye,” said Taleswapper. “A sharp one for details. Dull on the big picture, but sharp on details. I notice you talk worse than you know how, too.”

  Calvin ignored the insult. He wasn’t going to let this old coot distract him with tricks. “I said how come you talk like a frontiersman?”

  “Spend a lot of time on the frontier.”

  “I spend a lot of time in the chicken coop but that don’t make me cluck.”

  Taleswapper grinned. “What do you think, boy?”

  “I think you try to sound like the people you’re telling your lies to, so they’ll trust you, they’ll think you’re one of them. But you’re not one of us, you’re not one of anybody. You’re a spy, stealing the hopes and dreams and wishes and memories and imaginings of everybody and leaving them nothing but lies in exchange.”

  Taleswapper seemed amused. “If I’m such a criminal, why ain’t I rich?”

  “Not a criminal,” said Calvin.

  “I’m relieved to be acquitted.”

  “Just a hypocrite.”

  Taleswapper’s eyes narrowed.

  “A hypocrite,” Calvin said again. “Pretending to be what you’re not. So other people will trust you, but they’re trusting in a bunch of pretenses.”

  “That’s an interesting idea, there, Calvin,” said Taleswapper. “Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn’t quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?”

  “Listen to the frontiersman now,” said Calvin scornfully. “I knew you could shed that folksy talk the minute you wanted to.”

  “Yes, I can do that,” said Taleswapper. “Just as I can speak French to a Frenchman and Spanish to a Spaniard and four kinds of Red talk depending on which tribe I’m with. But you, Calvin, do you speak Scorn and Mockery to everyone? Or just to your betters?”

  It took Calvin a moment to realize that he had been put down, hard and low. “I could kill you without using my hands,” he said.

  “Harder than you think,” said Taleswapper. “Killing a man, that is. Why not ask your brother Alvin about it? He’s done it the once, for just cause, whereas you think of killing a man because he tweaks your nose. And then you wonder why I call myself your better.”

  “You just want to put me down because I named you for what you are. Hypocrite. Like all the others.”

  “All the others?”

  Calvin nodded grimly.

  “Everyone is a hypocrite except Calvin Miller?”

  “Calvin Maker” said Calvin. Even as he said it, he knew it was a mistake; he had never told anyone the name by which he thought of himself, and now he had blurted it out, a boast, a brag, a demand, to this most unsympathetic of listeners. This man who was most likely, of all men, to repeat Calvin’s secret dream to others.

  “Well, now it seems to be unanimous,” said Taleswapper. “We’re all pretending to be something that we’re not.”

  “I am a Maker!” Calvin insisted, raising his voice, even though he knew he was making himself seem even weaker and more vulnerable. He just couldn’t stop himself from talking to this slimy old man. “I’ve got all the knack for it that Alvin ever had, if anyone would bother to notice!”

  “Made any millstones lately, without tools?” asked Taleswapper.

  “I can make stones in a fence fit together like as if they growed that
way out of the ground!”

  “Healed any wounds?”

  “I killed a bug crawling on my leg just a moment ago without so much as laying a hand on it.”

  “Interesting. I ask of healing and you answer with killing. Doesn’t sound like a Maker to me.”

  “You said yourself that Alvin killed a man!”

  “With his hands, not with his knack. A man who had just murdered an innocent woman who died to protect her son from captivity. The bug—was it going to harm you or anyone?”

  “Yes, there you are, Alvin is always righteous and wonderful, while Calvin can’t do nothing right! But Alvin hisself told me the story of how he caused a bunch of roaches to get theirselfs kilt when he was a boy and—”

  “And you learned nothing from his story, except that you have the power to torment insects.”

  “He gets to do what he wants and then talks about how he’s learned better now, but if I do the same things then I’m not worthy! I can’t be taught any of his secrets because I’m not ready for them only I am ready for them, I’m just not ready to let Alvin decide how I’ll use the knack I was born with. Who tells him what to do?”

  “The inner light of virtue,” said Taleswapper, “for lack of a clearer name.”

  “Well what about my inner light?”

  “I imagine that your parents ask themselves this very question, and often.”

  “Why can’t I be allowed to figure things out on my own like Alvin did?”

  “But of course you are being allowed to do exactly that,” said Taleswapper.

  “No I’m not! He sits there trying to explain to those bone-headed no-knack followers of his how to get inside other things and learn what they are and how they’re shaped inside and then ask them to take on new forms, as if that’s a thing that folks can learn—”