Alvin Jorneyman ttoam-4 Page 21

  “So you do believe me,” said the deputy.

  Marty Laws rolled his eyes.

  “I don't believe nobody,” said Sheriff Doggly. “And Alvin ain't taking no jaunts, are you, Alvin?”

  “No sir,” said Alvin. “I have not stirred from this cell.”

  None of them bothered to pretend that Alvin couldn't have escaped whenever he wanted.

  “You calling me a liar?” asked Billy.

  “I'm calling you mistaken,” said Alvin. “I'm thinking maybe somebody fooled you into thinking what you thought and seeing what you saw.”

  “Somebody's fooling somebody,” said Billy Hunter.

  They left. Alvin sat on the cot and watched as an ant canvassed the floor of the jail, looking for something to eat. There's a pie right there, just a little that way… and sure enough, the ant turned, heeding Alvin's advice though of course the words themselves were just too hard a thing to fit into an ant's tiny mind. No, the ant just got the message of food and a direction, and in a minute or two it was up the pie dish and walking around on the crust. Then it headed out to find its friends and bring them for lunch. Might as well somebody get some good out of that pie.

  Vilate's hexes were for concealment, all right, and they were aimed at the door. She had got him to stand close so that he'd be included in her strong overlook-me, so Billy Hunter had looked and couldn't see that anybody was there.

  But why? What possible good could she accomplish from such a bit of tomfoolery as that?

  Underneath all his puzzlement, though, Alvin was mad. Not so much at Vilate as he was mad at himself for being such a plain fool. Getting all moony-eyed about a woman with false teeth and vanity hexes, for pete's sake! Liking her even when he knew she was a plain gossip and suspected that half the tales she told him weren't true.

  And the worst thing was, when he saw Peggy again– if he saw Peggy again– she'd know just how stupid he was, failing for a woman that he knew was all tricks and lies.

  Well, Peggy, when I fell in love with you you were all tricks and lies, too, you know. Remember that when you're thinking I'm the biggest fool as ever lived.

  The door opened and Billy Hunter came back in, stalked over to the cell door, and picked up the pie. “No sense this going to waste even if you are a liar,” said Billy.

  “As I said, Billy, you're welcome to it. Though I sort of half-promised it to an ant a minute ago.”

  Billy glared at him, no doubt thinking that Alvin was making fun of him instead of telling the plain truth. Well, Alvin was, kind of. Making fun out of the situation, anyway. He'd have to talk this over with Arthur Stuart when the boy came back, see if he had any idea what Vilate might have meant by this charade.

  The ant came back, leading a line of her sisters. All they found was a couple of crumbs of crust. But those were something, weren't they? Alvin watched as they struggled to maneuver the big chunks of pastry. To help them out, he sent his doodlebug to break the pieces into smaller loads. The ants made short work of them then, carrying out the crumbs in a line. A feast in the anthill tonight, no doubt.

  His stomach growled. Truth to tell, he could have used that pie, and might not have left much behind, neither. But he wasn't eating nothing that came from Vilate Franker, never again. That woman wasn't to be trusted.

  Dropped her teeth at me, he thought. Hates me. Why?

  * * *

  There was no way around it. Even with the best possible luck in choosing a jury, even with this new English fellow as Alvin's lawyer, Little Peggy saw no better than a three-in-four chance of him being acquitted, and that wasn't good enough odds. She would have to go to him. She would have to be available to testify. Even with all the newcomers in Hatrack, one thing was certain: If Peggy the torch said a thing was true, she would be believed. The people of Hatrack knew that she saw the truth, and they also knew– sometimes to their discomfiture– that she never said what wasn't true, though they were grateful enough that she didn't tell every truth she knew.

  Only Peggy herself could count how many terrible or shameful or mournful secrets she had left unmentioned. But that was neither here nor there. She was used to carrying other people's secrets around inside her, used to it from the earliest time of her life, when she had to face her father's dark secret of adultery.

  Since then she had learned not to judge. She had even come to love Mistress Modesty, the woman with whom her father, old Horace Guester, had been unfaithful. Mistress Modesty was like another mother to her, giving her, not the life of the body, but the life of the mind, the life of mannered society, the life of grace and beauty that Peggy valued perhaps too highly.

  Perhaps too highly, because there wasn't going to be too much of grace and beauty in Alvin's future, and like it or not, Peggy was tied to that future.

  What a lie I tell myself, she thought. “Like it or not” indeed. If I chose to, I could walk away from Alvin and not care whether he stayed in jail or got himself drowned in the Hio or whatnot. I'm tied to Alvin Smith because I love him, and I love what he can be, and I want to be part of all that he will do. Even the hard parts. Even the ungraceful, unmannered, stupid parts of it.

  So she headed for Hatrack River, one stage at a time.

  On a certain day she passed through the town of Wheelwright in northern Appalachee. It was on the Hio, not far upriver from where the Hatrack flowed into it. Close enough to home that she might have hired a wagon and taken the last ferry, trusting that the moonlight and her ability as a torch would get her home safely. Might have, except that she stopped for dinner at a restaurant she had visited before, where the food was fresh, the flavors good, and the company reputable– a welcome change in all three categories, after long days on the road.

  While she was eating, she heard some kind of tumult outside– a band playing, rather badly but with considerable enthusiasm; people shouting and cheering. “A parade?” she asked her waiter.

  “You know the presidential election's only a few weeks off,” said the waiter.

  She knew, but had scarcely paid attention. Somebody was running against somebody else for some office or other in every town she passed through, but it hardly mattered, compared to the matter of stopping slavery, not to mention her concerns about Alvin. It made no difference to her, up to now, who won these elections. In Appalachee, as in the other slave states, there wasn't a soul dared to run openly as an anti-slavery candidate– that would be a ticket for a free suit of tar and feathers and a rail ride out of town, if not worse, for those as loved slavery were violent at heart, and those as hated it were mostly timid, and wouldn't stand together. Yet.

  “Some sort of stump speech?” she asked.

  “I reckon it's old Tippy-Canoe,” said the waiter.

  She blanched, knowing at once whom the man referred to. “Harrison?”

  “Reckon he'll carry Wheelwright. But not farther south, where the Cberriky tribe is right numerous. They figure him to be the man to try to take away their rights. Won't amount to much in Irrakwa, neither, that being Red country. But, see, White folks isn't too happy about how the Irrakwa control the railroads and the Cherriky got them toll roads through the mountains.”

  “They'd vote for a murderer, out of nothing more than envy?”

  The waiter smiled thinly. “There's them as says just because a Red witch feller put a spell on Tippy-Canoe don't mean he did nothing wrong. Reds get mad over any old thing.”

  “Slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children– silly of them to take offense.”

  The waiter shrugged. “I can't afford to have strong opinions on politics, ma'am.”

  But she saw that he did have strong opinions, and they were not the same as hers.

  Paying for the meal– and leaving two bits on the table for the waiter, for she saw no reason to punish a man in his livelihood because of his political views– she made haste outside to see the fuss. A few rods up the street, a wagon had been made over into a sort of temporary rostrum, decked out with the red, white, and
blue bunting of the flag of the United States. Not a trace of the red and green colors of the old flag of independent Appalachee, before it joined the Union. Of course not. Those had been the Cherriky colors– red for the Red people, green for the forest. Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefierson had adopted them as the colors of a free Appalachee; it was for that flag that George Washington died. But now, though other politicians still invoked the old loyalties, Harrison could hardly want to bring to mind the alliance between Red and White that won freedom for Appalachee from the King at Camelot. Not with those bloody hands.

  Hands that even now dripped blood as they gripped the podium. Peggy, standing on the wooden sidewalk across the street, looked over the heads of the cheering crowd to watch William Henry Hanison's face. She looked in his eyes first, as any woman might study any man, to see his character. Quickly enough, though, she looked deeper, into the heartfire, seeing the futures that stretched out before him. He had no secrets from her.

  She saw that every path led to victory in the election. And not just a slight victory. His leading opponent, a hapless lawyer named Andrew Jackson from Tennizy, would be crushed and humiliated– and then suffer in the ignominious position of vice-president into which the leading loser in each election was always forced. A cruel system, Peggy had always thought, the political equivalent of putting a man in the stocks for four years. It was significant that both candidates were from the new states in the west; even more significant that both were from territories that permitted slavery. Things were taking a dark turn indeed. And darker yet were the things she saw in Harrison's mind, the plans he and his political cronies meant to carry out.

  Their most extravagant ideas had little hope of success– only a few paths in Harrison's heartfire led to the union with the Crown Lands that he hoped for; he would never be a duke; what a pathetic dream, she thought. But he would certainly succeed in the political destruction of the Reds in Irrakwa and Cherriky, because the Whites, especially in the west, were ready for it, ready to break the power of a people that Harrison dared to speak of as savages. “God didn't bring the Christian race to this land in order to share it with heathens and barbarians!” cried Tippy-Canoe, and the people cheered.

  Harrison would also succeed in spreading slavery beyond its present locale, permitting slave owners to bring slaves to property in the free states and continue to own them and force them to serve on such property– as long as the slave owner continued to own any amount of land in a slave state and cast his vote there. It was precisely to achieve this end that most of Harrison's backers were behind him. It was the matter of Reds that would sweep Tippy-Canoe into office, but once there, it was the matter of slavery that would give him his power base in Congress.

  This was unbearable. Yet she bore it, watching on into the afternoon as he ranted and exhorted, periodically lifting his bloody hands skyward to remind the crowd. “I have tasted the treacherous wrath of the secret powers of the Red man, and I'll tell you, if this is all they can do, well, that's good, because it ain't much! Sure, I can't keep a shirt clean” –and they laughed at that, over and over, each variation on the tedious details of life with bloody hands– “and ain't a soul willing to lend me a hankie” –laughter again– “but they can't stop me from telling you the plain truth, and they can't stop a Christian people from electing the one man proven to be willing to stand up against the Red traitors, the barbarians who dress like White men but secretly plan to own everything the way they own the railroads and the mountain toll roads and…”

  And on and on. Confounded nonsense, all of it, but the crowd only grew as the afternoon passed, and by dark, when Harrison finally climbed down from his pulpit, he was carried away on the shoulders of his supporters to be watered with beer and stuffed with some sort of rough food, whatever would make the crowd think of him as one of them, while Peggy Larner stood gripping the rail on the sidewalk, seeing down every path that this man was the undoing of all her work, that this man would be the cause of the death and suffering of countless more Reds than had already died or suffered at his hands.

  If she had had a musket in her hands at that moment, she might have gone after him and put a ball through his heart.

  But the murderous rage passed quickly and shamefully. I am not a one who kills, she thought. I am one who frees the slave if I can, not one who murders the master.

  There had to be a way to stop him.

  Alvin would know. She had to get to Hatrack River all the more urgently, not just to help with Alvin's trial, but to get his help in stopping Harrison. Perhaps if he went to Becca's house and used the doorways in her ancient cabin to let him visit with Tenskwa-Tawa– surely the Red Prophet would do something to make his curse against White Murdfrer Harrison more effective. Though she didn't see such an outcome down any of the paths in Alvin's heartfire, she never knew when some act of hers or of someone else's might open up new paths that led to better hopes.

  It was too late that day, though. She would have to spend the night in Wheelwright and finish her journey to Hatrack River the next day.

  * * *

  “I come to you, sir, with the good wishes of your family,” said the stranger.

  “I confess I didn't catch your name,”. said Alvin, unfolding himself from his cot. “It's pretty late in the evening.”

  “Verily Cooper,” said the stranger. “Forgive my late arrival. I thought it better that we speak tonight, since the first matter of your defense before the court is in the morning.”

  “I know the judge is finally going to start choosing him a jury.”

  “Yes, that's important, of course. But under the, advice of an outside lawyer, a Mr. Daniel Webster, the county attorney has introduced some unpleasant motions. As, for instance, a motion requiring that the contested property be placed under the control of the court.”

  “The judge won't go for that,” said Alvin. “He knows that the second this plow is out of my hands, some rough boys from the river, not to mention a few greedier souls from town, will move heaven and earth to get their hands on it. The thing's made of gold– that's all they know and care about it. But who are you, Mr. Cooper, and what does all this have to do with you?”

  “I'm your attorney, Mr. Smith, if you'll have me.” He handed Alvin a letter.

  Alvin recognized Armor-of-God's handwriting at once, and the signatures of his parents and his brothers and sisters. They all signed, affirming that they found Mr. Cooper to be a man of good character and assuring him that someone was paying a high-powered lawyer from New England named Daniel Webster to sneak around and collect lies from anyone as had a grievance against him in Vigor Church. “But I've done no harm to anyone there,” said Alvin, “and why would they lie?”

  “Mr. Smith, I have to–”

  “Call me Alvin, would you? 'Mr. Smith' always sounds to me like my old master Makepeace, the fellow whose lies got me into this fix.”

  "Alvin, said Cooper again. "And you must call me Verily."

  “Whatever.”

  “Alvin, it has been my experience that the better a man you are, the more folks there are who resent you for it, and find occasion to get angry at you no matter how kindly meant your deeds may be.”

  “Well then, I'm safe enough, not being such a remarkable good man.”

  Cooper smiled. “I know your brother Calvin,” he said.

  Alvin raised an eyebrow. “I'd like to say that any friend of Calvin's is a friend of mine, but I can't.”

  “Calvin's hatred of you is, I believe, one of the best recommendations of your character that I could think of. It's because of his account of you that I came to meet you. I met him in London, you see, and determined then and there to close my legal practice and come to America and see the man who can teach me who and what I am, and what it's for.”

  With that, Cooper bent down and took up Alvin's Testament, the book that lay open on the floor beside his cot. He closed it, then handed it back to Alvin.

  Alvin tried to thumb it open, but the pages
were fused shut as tight as if the book were one solid block of wood with a leather cover.

  Verily took it back from him for only a moment, then returned it yet again. This time the book fell open to the exact page that Alvin had been reading. “I could have died for that in England,” said Verily. “It was the wisdom of my parents and my own ability to learn to hide these powers that kept me alive all these years. But I have to know what it is. I have to know why God lets some folks have such powers. And what to do with them. And who you are.”

  Alvin ray back on his cot. “Don't this beat all,” he said. “You crossed an ocean to meet me?”

  “I had no idea at the time that I might be of service to you. In fact, I must say that it occurs to me that perhaps some providential hand led me to the study of law instead of following my father's trade as a cooper. Perhaps it was known that one day you would face. the silver tongue of Daniel Webster.”

  “You got you a tongue of gold, then, Verily?” asked Alvin.

  “I hold things together,” said Verily. “It's my… knack, as you Americans call it. That is what the law does. I use the law to hold things together. I see how things fit.”

  “This Webster fellow– he's going to use the law to try to tear things apart.”

  “Like you and the plow.”

  “And me and my neighbors,” said Alvin.

  “Then you understand the dilemma,” said Verily. “Up till now you've been known as a man of generosity and kindness to all. But you have a plow made of gold that you won't let anyone see. You have fantastic wealth which you share with no one. This is a wedge that Webster will attempt to use to split you from your community like a rail from a log.”

  “When gold comes into it,” said Alvin, “folks start to finding out just how much love and loyalty is worth to them, in cash money.”

  “And it's rather shameful, don't you think, how cheap the price can be sometimes.” Verily smiled ruefully.

  “What's your price?”