ALVIN JOURNEYMAN Read online

  As she had feared, the boy hadn’t done well under the girls’ blows. His nose was bleeding, and he got up only slowly; when the girl Peggy was holding lunged at him, he scurried on all fours to evade her.

  “Shame on you,” said Peggy. “Whatever he did, it wasn’t worth this!”

  “He killed my squirrel!” cried the girl she held.

  “But how can you have had a squirrel?” asked Peggy. “It would be cruel of you to pen one up.”

  “She was never penned,” said the girl. “She was my friend. I fed her and these others saw it—she came to me and I kept her alive through the hard winter. He knew it! He was jealous that the squirrel came to me, and so he killed it.”

  “It was a squirrel!” the boy shouted hoarsely and rather weakly, but it was clear he meant it to be a shout. “How should I know it was yours?”

  “Then you shouldn’t have killed any,” said another of the girls. “Not till you were sure.”

  “Whatever he did to the squirrels,” said Peggy, “even if he was malicious, it was wrong of you and unchristian to knock him down and hurt him so.”

  The boy looked at her now. “Are you the judge?” he asked.

  “Judge? I think not!” said Peggy with a laugh.

  “But you can’t be the Maker, that one’s a boy. I think you’re a judge.” The boy looked even more certain. “Aunt Becca said the judge was coming, and then the Maker, so you can’t be the Maker because the judge ain’t come yet, but you could be the judge because the judge comes first.”

  Peggy knew that other folks often took the words of children to be nonsense, if they didn’t understand them immediately. But Peggy knew that the words of children were always related to their view of the world, and made their own sense if you only knew how to hear them. Someone had told them—Aunt Becca, it was—that a judge and a Maker were coming. There was only one Maker that Peggy knew of. Was Alvin coming here? What was this place, that the children knew of Makers, and had no heartfires?

  “I thought your house was standing empty,” said Peggy, “but I see that it is not.”

  For indeed there now stood a woman in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, watching them placidly as she slowly stirred a bowl with a wooden spoon.

  “Mama!” cried the girl that Peggy still held. “She has me and won’t let go!”

  “It’s true!” cried Peggy at once. “And I still won’t let go, till I’m sure she won’t murder the boy here!”

  “He killed my squirrel, Mama!” cried the girl.

  The woman said nothing, just stirred.

  “Perhaps, children,” said Peggy, “we should go talk to this lady in the doorway, instead of shouting like river rats.”

  “Mother doesn’t like you,” said one of the girls. “I can tell.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Peggy. “Because I like her.”

  “Do not,” said the girl. “You don’t know her, and if you did you still wouldn’t like her because nobody does.”

  “What a terrible thing to say about your mother,” said Peggy.

  “I don’t have to like her,” said the girl. “I love her.”

  “Then take me to this woman that you love but don’t like,” said Peggy, “and let me reach my own conclusions about her.”

  As they approached the door, Peggy began to think that the girls might be right. The woman certainly didn’t look welcoming. But for that matter, she didn’t look hostile, either. Her face was empty of emotion. She just stirred the bowl.

  “My name is Peggy Larner.” The woman ignored her outstretched hand. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have intervened, but as you can see the boy was taking some serious injury.”

  “Just my nose is bloody, is all,” said the boy. But his limp suggested other less visible pains.

  “Come inside,” said the woman.

  Peggy had no idea whether the woman was speaking just to the children, or was including her in the invitation. If it could be called an invitation, so blandly she spoke it, not looking up from the bowl she stirred. The woman turned away, disappearing inside the house. The children followed. So, finally, did Peggy. No one stopped her or seemed to think her action strange. It was this that first made her wonder if perhaps she had fallen asleep in the carriage and this was some strange dream, in which unaccountable unnatural things happen which nevertheless excite no comment in the land of dreams, where there is no custom to be violated. Where I am now is not real. Outside waits the carriage and the team of four horses, not to mention the driver, as real and mundane a fellow as ever belched in the coachman’s seat. But in here, I have stepped into a place beyond nature. There are no heartfires here.

  The children disappeared, stomping somewhere through the wood-floored house, and at least one of them went up or down a flight of stairs; it had to be a child, there was so much vigor in the step. But there were no sounds that told Peggy where to go, or what purpose was being served by her coming here. Was there no order here? Nothing that her presence disrupted? Would no one but the children ever notice her at all?

  She wanted to go back outside, return to the carriage, but now, as she turned around, she couldn’t remember what door she had come through, or even which way was north. The windows were curtained, and whatever door she had come through, she couldn’t see it now.

  It was an odd place, for there was cloth everywhere, folded neatly and stacked on all the furniture, on the floors, on the stairs, as if someone had just bought enough to make a thousand dresses with and the tailors and seamstresses were yet to arrive. Then she realized that the piles were of one continuous cloth, flowing off the top of one stack into the bottom of the next. How could there be a cloth so long? Why would anyone make it, instead of cutting it and sending it out to get something made from it?

  Why indeed. How foolish of her not to realize it at once. She knew this place. She hadn’t visited it herself, but she had seen it through Alvin’s heartfire years ago.

  He was still in Ta-Kumsaw’s thrall in those days. The Red warrior took Alvin with him and brought him into his legend, so that those who now spoke of Alvin Smith the Finder-killer, or Alvin Smith and the golden plow, had once spoken of the same boy, little knowing it, when they spoke of the evil “Boy Renegado,” the white boy who went with Ta-Kumsaw in all his travels in the last year before his defeat at Fort Detroit. It was in that guise that Alvin came here, and walked down this hall, yes, turning right here, yes, tracking the folded cloth into the oldest part of the house, the original cabin, into the slanting light that seems to have no source, as if it merely seeped in through the chinks between the logs. And here, if I open this door, I will find the woman with the loom. This is the place of weaving.

  Aunt Becca. Of course she knew the name. Becca, the weaver who held the threads of all the lives in the White man’s lands in North America.

  The woman at the loom looked up. “I didn’t want you here,” she said softly.

  “Nor did I plan to come,” said Peggy. “The truth is, I had forgotten you. You slipped my mind.”

  “I’m supposed to slip your mind. I slip all minds.”

  “Except one or two?”

  ~”My husband remembers me.”

  “Ta-Kumsaw? He isn’t dead, then?”

  Becca snorted. “My husband’s name is Isaac.”

  That was Ta-Kumsaw’s White name. “Don’t quibble with me,” said Peggy. “Something called me here. If it wasn’t you, who was it?”

  “My untalented sister. The one who breaks threads whenever she touches the loom.”

  Aunt Becca, the children had called the weaver. “Is your sister the mother of the children I met?”

  “The murderous little boy who kills squirrels for sport? His brutal sisters? I think of them as the four horses of the apocalypse. The boy is war. The sisters are still sorting themselves out among the other forces of destruction.”

  “You speak metaphorically, I hope,” said Peggy.

  “I hope not,” said Becca. “Metaphors have a way
of holding the most truth in the least space.” .

  “Why would your sister have brought me here? She didn’t seem to know me at the door.”

  “You’re the judge,” said Becca. “I found a purple thread of justice in the loom, and it was you. I didn’t want you here, but I knew that you’d come, because I knew my sister would have you here.”

  “Why? I’m no judge. I’m guilty myself.”

  “You see? Your judgment includes everyone. Even those who are invisible to you.”

  “Invisible?” But she knew before asking what it was that Becca meant.

  “Your vision, your torching, as you quaintly call it—you see where people are in the many paths of their lives. But I am not on the path of time. Nor is my sister. We don’t belong anywhere in your prophecies or in the memories of those who know us. Only in the present moment are we here.”

  “Yet I remember your first word long enough to make sense of the whole sentence,” said Peggy.

  “Ah,” said Becca. “The judge insists on correctness of speech. Boundaries are not so clear, Margaret Larner. You remember perfectly now; but what will you remember in a week from now? What you forget of me, you’ll forget so completely that you won’t remember that you once knew it. Then my statement will be true, but you’ll forget that I said it.”

  “I think not.”

  Becca smiled.

  “Show me the thread,” said Peggy.

  “We don’t do that.”

  “What harm can it do? I’ve already seen all the possible paths of my life.”

  “But you haven’t seen which one you’ll choose,” said Becca.

  “And you have?”

  “At this moment, no,” said Becca. “But in the moment that contains all moments, yes. I’ve seen the course of your life. That isn’t why you came, though. Not to find out something as stupid as whether you’ll marry the boy you’ve nurtured all these years. You will or you won’t. What is that to me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peggy. “I wonder why you exist at all. You change nothing. You merely see. You weave, but the threads are out of your control. You are meaningless.”

  “So you say,” said Becca.

  “And yet you have a life, or had one. You loved Ta-Kumsaw—or Isaac, whatever name you use. So loving some boy, marrying him, that didn’t always seem stupid to you.”

  “So you say,” said Becca.

  “Or do you include yourself in that? Do you call yourself stupid in having loved and married? You can’t pretend to be inhuman when you loved and lost a man.”

  “Lost?” she asked. “I see him every day.”

  “He comes here? To Appalachee?”

  Becca hooted. “I think not!”

  “How many threads broke under your hand with that pass of the shuttlecock?” asked Peggy.

  “Too many,” said Becca. “And not enough.”

  “Did you break them? Or did they simply happen to break?”

  “The thread grew thin. The life wore out. Or it was cut. It isn’t the thread that cuts the life, it’s the death that cuts the thread.”

  “So you keep a record, is that it? The weaving causes nothing, but simply records it all.”

  Becca smiled thinly. “Passive, useless creatures that we are, but we must weave.”

  Peggy didn’t believe her, but there was no use in arguing. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “I told you. I didn’t.”

  “Why did she bring me here?”

  “To judge.”

  “What is it that I’m supposed to judge?”

  Becca passed the shuttlecock from her right hand to her left. The loom slammed forward, then dropped back. She passed the shuttlecock from her left hand to her right. Again, the frame slammed forward, weaving the threads tight.

  This is a dream, thought Peggy. And not a very pleasant one. Why can’t I ever wake up to escape from some foolish useless dream?

  “Personally,” said Becca, “I think you’ve already made your judgment. It’s only my sister thinks that you deserve a second chance. She’s very romantic. She thinks that you deserve some happiness. My own feeling is that human happiness is a very random thing, and bestows itself willy-nilly, and there’s not much deserving about the matter.”

  “So it’s myself that I’m supposed to judge?”

  Becca laughed.

  One of the girls stuck her head into the room. “Mother says it’s nasty and uncompassionate when you laugh during the weaving,” she said.

  “Nanner nanner,” said Becca.

  The girl laughed lightly, and Becca did too.

  “Mother mixed up something really vile for your supper. With dumplings.”

  “Vileness with dumplings,” said Becca. “Do sup with me.”

  “Let the judge do that,” said the girl. “She really is a bossy one. Telling us about right and wrong.” With that the girl disappeared.

  Becca clucked for a moment. “The children are so full of themselves. Still very impressed with the idea that they aren’t part of the normal world. You must forgive them for being arrogant and cruel. They couldn’t have hurt their brother much, because they haven’t the strength to strike a blow that will really harm him.”

  “He bled,” said Peggy. “He limped.”

  “But the squirrel died,” said Becca.

  “You keep no threads for squirrels.”

  “I keep no threads for them. But that doesn’t mean their threads aren’t woven.”

  “Oh, tell me flat out. Don’t waste my time with mysteries.”

  “I haven’t been,” said Becca. “No mysteries. I’ve told you everything that’s useful. Anything else I told you might affect your judgment, and so I won’t do it. I let my sister have her way, bringing you here, but I’m certainly not going to bend your life any more than that. You can leave whenever you want—that’s a choice, and a judgment, and I’ll be content with it.”

  “Will I?”

  “Come back in thirty years and tell me.”

  “Will I be—“

  “If you’re still alive then.” Becca grinned. “Do you think I’m so clumsy as to let slip your real span of years? I don’t even know it. I haven’t cared enough to look.”

  Two girls came in with a plate and a bowl and a cup on a tray. They set it on a small table near the loom. The plate was covered with a strange-smelling food. Peggy recognized nothing about it. Nor was there anything that she might have called a dumpling.

  “I don’t like it when people watch me eat,” said Becca.

  But Peggy was feeling very angry now, with all the elusiveness of Becca’s conversation, and so she did not leave as courtesy demanded.

  “Stay, then,” said Becca.

  The girls began to feed her. Becca did nothing to seek out the food. She kept up the perfect rhythm of her weaving, just as she had done throughout their conversation. The girls deftly maneuvered spoon or fork or cup to find their Aunt Becca’s mouth, and then with a quick slurp or bite or sip she had the food. Not a drop or crumb was spilled on the cloth.

  It could not always be like this, thought Peggy. She married Ta-Kumsaw. She bore a daughter to him, the daughter that went west to weave a loom among the Reds beyond the Mizzipy. Surely those things were not done with the shuttlecock flying back and forth, the loom slamming dowd to tamp the threads. It was deception. Or else it involved things Peggy was not going to understand however she tried.

  She turned and left the room. The hall ended in a narrow stair. Sitting on the top step was, she assumed, the boy—she could see only his bare feet and trouser legs. “How’s the nose?” she asked.

  “Still hurts,” said the boy. He scootched forward and dropped down a couple of steps by bouncing on his bottom.

  “But not too bad,” she said. “Healing fast.”

  “They was only girls,” he said scornfully.

  “You didn’t think such scorn of them when they were pounding on you,” she said.

  “But you didn’t hear me callin�
�� uncle, did you? You didn’t hear no uncle from me.”

  “No,” said Peggy. “No uncle from you.”

  “I got me an uncle, though. Big Red man. Ike.”

  “I know of him.”

  “He comes most every day.”

  Peggy wanted to demand information from him. How does Ta-Kumsaw get here? Doesn’t he live west of the Mizzipy? Or is he dead, and comes only in the spirit?

  “Comes through the west door,” said the boy. “We don’t use that one. Just him. It’s the door to my cousin Wieza’s cabin.”

  “Her father calls her Mana-Tawa, I think.”

  The boy hooted. “Just giving her a Red name don’t mean he can hold on to her. She don’t belong to him.”

  “Whom does she belong to?”

  “To the loom,” he said.

  “And you?” asked Peggy. “Do you belong to the loom?”

  He shook his head. But he looked sad.

  Peggy said it as she realized it: “You want to, don’t you.”

  “She ain’t going to have no more daughters. She don’t stop weaving for him anymore. So she can’t go. She’ll just be there, forever.”

  “And nephews can’t take her place?”

  “Nieces can, but my sisters ain’t worth pigslime, in my opinion, which happens to be correck.”

  “Correct,” said Peggy. “There’s a t on the end.”

  “Correckut,” the boy said. “But what I think is they ought to spell the words the way folks say ‘em, stead of making us say ‘em the way they’re spelt.”

  Peggy had to laugh. “You have a point. But you can’t just start spelling words any which way. Because you don’t say them the same os someone from, say, Boston. And so pretty soon you and he would be spelling things so differently that you couldn’t read each other’s letters or books.”

  “Don’t want to read his damn old books,” said the boy. “I don’t even know no boys in Boston.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Not for you to know,” said the boy. “You think I’m stupid? You’re so thick with hexes you think I’m going to give you power over my name?”