Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I Read online

  “Why do you hate him so!” cried little Peggy.

  “What?” demanded Eleanor.

  “Hush,” said Mama. “Let her see what she sees.”

  Inside the unborn child, the dark blot of water that surrounded his heartfire seemed so terribly strong that little Peggy was afraid he would be swallowed up.

  “Get him out to breathe!” shouted little Peggy.

  Mama reached in, even though it tore the mother something dreadful, and hooked the baby by the neck with strong fingers, drawing him out.

  In that moment, as the dark water retreated inside the child’s mind, and just before the first breath came, little Peggy saw ten million deaths by water disappear. Now, for the first time, there were some paths open, some paths leading to a dazzling future. And all the paths that did not end in early death had one thing in common. On all those paths, little Peggy saw herself doing one simple thing.

  So she did that thing. She took her hands from the slackening belly and ducked under her mother’s arm. The baby’s head had just emerged, and it was still covered with a bloody caul, a scrap of the sac of soft skin in which he had floated in his mother’s womb. His mouth was open, sucking inward on the caul, but it didn’t break, and he couldn’t breathe.

  Little Peggy did what she had seen herself do in the baby’s future. She reached out, took the caul from under the baby’s chin, and pulled it away from his face. It came whole, in one moist piece, and in the moment it came away, the baby’s mouth cleared, he sucked in a great breath, and then gave that mewling cry that birthing mothers hear as the song of life.

  Little Peggy folded the caul, her mind still full of the visions she had seen down the pathways of this baby’s life. She did not know yet what the visions meant, but they made such clear pictures in her mind that she knew she would never forget them. They made her afraid, because so much would depend on her, and how she used the birth caul that was still warm in her hands.

  “A boy,” said Mama.

  “Is he,” whispered the mother. “Seventh son?”

  Mama was tying the cord, so she couldn’t spare a glance at little Peggy. “Look,” she whispered.

  Little Peggy looked for the single heartfire on the distant river. “Yes,” she said, for the heartfire was still burning.

  Even as she watched, it flickered, died.

  “Now he’s gone,” said little Peggy.

  The woman on the bed wept bitterly, her birthwracked body shuddering.

  “Grieving at the baby’s birth,” said Mama. “It’s a dreadful thing.”

  “Hush,” whispered Eleanor to her mother. “Be joyous, or it’ll darken the baby all his life!”

  “Vigor,” murmured the woman.

  “Better nothing at all than tears,” said Mama. She held out the crying baby, and Eleanor took it in competent arms—she had cradled many a babe before, it was plain. Mama went to the table in the corner and took the scarf that had been blacked in the wool, so it was night-colored clear through. She dragged it slowly across the weeping woman’s face, saying, “Sleep, Mother, sleep.”

  When the cloth came away, the weeping was done, and the woman slept, her strength spent.

  “Take the baby from the room,” said Mama.

  “Don’t he need to start his sucking?” asked Eleanor.

  “She’ll never nurse this babe,” said Mama. “Not unless you want him to suck hate.”

  “She can’t hate him,” said Eleanor. “It ain’t his fault.”

  “I reckon her milk don’t know that,” said Mama. “That right, little Peggy? What teat does the baby suck?”

  “His mama’s,” said little Peggy.

  Mama looked sharp at her. “You sure of that?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, then, we’ll bring the baby in when she wakes up. He doesn’t need to eat anything for the first night, anyway.” So Eleanor carried the baby out into the great room, where the fire burned to dry the men, who stopped trading stories about rains and floods worse than this one long enough to look at the baby and admire.

  Inside the room, though, Mama took little Peggy by the chin and stared hard into her eyes. “You tell me the truth, Margaret. It’s a serious thing, for a baby to suck on its mama and drink up hate.”

  “She won’t hate him, Mama,” said little Peggy.

  “What did you see?”

  Little Peggy would have answered, but she didn’t know words to tell most of the things she saw. So she looked at the floor. She could tell from Mama’s quick draw of breath that she was ripe for a tongue-lashing. But Mama waited, and then her hand came soft, stroking across little Peggy’s cheek. “Ah, child, what a day you’ve had. The baby might have died, except you told me to pull it out. You even reached in and opened up its mouth—that’s what you did, isn’t it?”

  Little Peggy nodded.

  “Enough for a little girl, enough for one day.” Mama turned to the other girls, the ones in wet dresses, leaning against the wall. “And you, too, you’ve had enough of a day. Come out of here, let your mama sleep, come out and get dry by the fire. I’ll start a supper for you, I will.”

  But Oldpappy was already in the kitchen, fussing around, and refused to hear of Mama doing a thing. Soon enough she was out with the baby, shooing the men away so she could rock it to sleep, letting it suck her finger.

  Little Peggy figured after a while that she wouldn’t be missed, so she snuck up the stairs to the attic ladder and up the ladder into the lightless, musty space. The spiders didn’t bother her much, and the cats mostly kept the mice away, so she wasn’t afraid. She crawled right to her secret hiding place and took out the carven box that Oldpappy gave her, the one he said his own papa brought from Ulster when he came to the colonies. It was full of the precious scraps of childhood—stones, strings, buttons—but now she knew that these were nothing compared to the work before her all the rest of her life. She dumped them right out, and blew into the box to clear away the dust. Then she laid the folded caul inside and closed the lid.

  She knew that in the future she would open that box a dozen dozen times. That it would call to her, wake her from her sleep, tear her from her friends, and steal from her all her dreams. All because a baby boy downstairs had no future at all but death from the dark water, excepting if she used that caul to keep him safe, the way it once protected him in the womb.

  For a moment she was angry, to have her own life so changed. Worse than the blacksmith coming, it was, worse than Papa and the hazel wand he whupped her with, worse than Mama when her eyes were angry. Everything would be different forever and it wasn’t fair. Just for a baby she never invited, never asked to come here, what did she care about any old baby?

  She reached out and opened the box, planning to take the caul and cast it into a dark corner of the attic. But even in the darkness, she could see a place where it was darker still: near her heartfire, where the emptiness of the deep black river was all set to make a murderer out of her.

  Not me, she said to the water. You ain’t part of me.

  Yes I am, whispered the water. I’m all through you, and you’d dry up and die without me.

  You ain’t the boss of me, anyway, she retorted.

  She closed the lid on the box and skidded her way down the ladder. Papa always said that she’d get splinters in her butt doing that. This time he was right. It stung something fierce, so she walked kind of sideways into the kitchen where Oldpappy was. Sure enough, he stopped his cooking long enough to pry the splinters out.

  “My eyes ain’t sharp enough for this, Maggie,” he complained.

  “You got the eyes of an eagle. Papa says so.”

  Oldpappy chuckled. “Does he now.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Oh, you’ll like this dinner, Maggie.”

  Little Peggy wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like chicken.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t like chicken soup.”

  “Not just soup, Maggie. This one’s a-
roasting, except the neck and wings.”

  “I hate roast chicken, too.”

  “Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner that’ll make you glad. Can’t you think of any way that a partickler chicken dinner could make you glad?”

  Little Peggy thought and thought, and then she smiled. “Bloody Mary?”

  Oldpappy winked. “I always said that was a hen born to make gravy.”

  Little Peggy hugged him so tight that he made choking sounds, and then they laughed and laughed.

  Later that night, long after little Peggy was in bed, they brought Vigor’s body home, and Papa and Makepeace set to making a box for him. Alvin Miller hardly looked alive, even when Eleanor showed him the baby. Until she said, “That torch girl. She says that this baby is the seventh son of a seventh son.”

  Alvin looked around for someone to tell him if it was true.

  “Oh, you can trust her,” said Mama.

  Tears came fresh to Alvin’s eyes. “That boy hung on,” he said. “There in the water, he hung on long enough.”

  “He knowed what store you set by that,” said Eleanor.

  Then Alvin reached for the baby, held him tight, looked down into his eyes. “Nobody named him yet, did they?” he asked.

  “Course not,” said Eleanor. “Mama named all the other boys, but you always said the seventh son’d have—”

  “My own name. Alvin. Seventh son of a seventh son, with the same name as his father. Alvin Junior.” He looked around him, then turned to face toward the river, way off in the nighttime forest. “Hear that, you Hatrack River? His name is Alvin, and you didn’t kill him after all.”

  Soon they brought in the box and laid out Vigor’s body with candles, to stand for the fire of life that had left him. Alvin held up the baby, over the coffin. “Look on your brother,” he whispered to the infant.

  “That baby can’t see nothing yet, Papa,” said David.

  “That ain’t so, David,” said Alvin. “He don’t know what he’s seeing, but his eyes can see. And when he gets old enough to hear the story of his birth, I’m going to tell him that his own eyes saw his brother Vigor, who gave his life for this baby’s sake.”

  It was two weeks before Faith was well enough to travel. But Alvin saw to it that he and his boys worked hard for their keep. They cleared a good spot of land, chopped the winter’s firewood, set some charcoal heaps for Makepeace Smith, and widened the road. They also felled four big trees and made a strong bridge across the Hatrack River, a covered bridge so that even in a rainstorm people could cross that river without a drop of water touching them.

  Vigor’s grave was the third one there, beside little Peggy’s two dead sisters. The family paid respects and prayed there on the morning that they left. Then they got in their wagon and rode off westward. “But we leave a part of ourselves here always,” said Faith, and Alvin nodded.

  Little Peggy watched them go, then ran up into the attic, opened the box, and held little Alvin’s caul in her hand. No danger—for now, at least. Safe for now. She put the caul away and closed the lid. You better be something, baby Alvin, she said, or else you caused a powerful lot of trouble for nothing.

  6

  Ridgebeam

  AXES RANG, STRONG MEN sang hymns at their labor, and Reverend Philadelphia Thrower’s new church building rose tall over the meadow commons of Vigor Township. It was all happening so much faster than Reverend Thrower ever expected. The first wall of the meetinghouse had hardly been erected a day or so ago, when that drunken one-eyed Red wandered in and was baptized, as if the mere sight of the churchhouse had been the fulcrum on which he could be levered upward to civilization and Christianity. If a Red as benighted as Lolla-Wossiky could come unto Jesus, what other miracles of conversion might not be wrought in this wilderness when his meetinghouse was finished and his ministry firmly under way?

  Reverend Thrower was not altogether happy, however, for there were enemies of civilization far stronger than the barbarity of the heathen Reds, and the signs were not all so hopeful as when Lolla-Wossiky donned White man’s clothing for the first time. In particular what somewhat darkened this bright day was the fact that Alvin Miller was not among the workers. And his wife’s excuses for him had run out. The trip to find a proper millstone quarry had ended, he had rested for a day, and by rights he should be here.

  “What, is he ill?” asked Thrower.

  Faith tightened her lips. “When I say he won’t come, Reverend Thrower, it’s not to say he can’t come.”

  It confirmed Thrower’s gathering suspicions. “Have I offended him somewise?”

  Faith sighed and looked away from him, toward the posts and beams of the meetinghouse. “Not you yourself, sir, not the way a man treads on another, as they say.” Abruptly she became alert. “Now what is that?”

  Right up against the building, most of the men were tying ropes to the north half of the ridgebeam, so they could lift it into place. It was a tricky job, and all the harder because of the little boys wrestling each other in the dust and getting underfoot. It was the wrestlers that had caught her eye. “All” cried Faith. “Alvin Junior, you let him up this minute!” She took two strides toward the cloud of dust that marked the heroic struggles of the six-year-olds.

  Reverend Thrower was not inclined to let her end the conversation so easily. “Mistress Faith,” said Reverend Thrower sharply. “Alvin Miller is the first settler in these parts, and people hold him in high regard. If he’s against me for some reason, it will greatly harm my ministry. At least you can tell me what I did to give offense.”

  Faith looked him in the eye, as if to calculate whether he could stand to hear the truth. “It was your foolish sermon, sir,” she said.

  “Foolish?”

  “You couldn’t know any better, being from England, and—”

  “From Scotland, Mistress Faith.”

  “And being how you’re educated in schools where they don’t know much about—”

  “The University of Edinburgh! Don’t know much indeed, I—”

  “About hexes and doodles and charms and beseechings and suchlike.”

  “I know that claiming to use such dark and invisible powers is a burning offense in the lands that obey the Lord Protector, Mistress Faith, though in his mercy he merely banishes those who—”

  “Well looky there, that’s my point,” she said triumphantly. “They’re not likely to teach you about that in university, now, are they? But it’s the way we live here, and calling it a superstition—”

  “I called it hysteria—”

  “That don’t change the fact that it works.”

  “I understand that you believe that it works,” said Thrower patiently. “But everything in the world is either science or miracles. Miracles came from God in ancient times, but those times are over. Today if we wish to change the world, it is not magic but science that will give us our tools.”

  From the set of her face, Thrower could see that he wasn’t making much impression on her.

  “Science,” she said. “Like feeling head bumps?”

  He doubted she had tried very hard to hide her scorn. “Phrenology is an infant science,” he said coldly, “and there are many flaws, but I am seeking to discover—”

  She laughed—a girlish laugh, that made her seem much younger than a woman who had borne fourteen children. “Sorry, Reverend Thrower, but I just remembered how Measure called it ‘dowsing for brains,’ and he allowed as how you’d have slim luck in these parts.”

  True words, thought Reverend Thrower, but he was wise enough not to say so. “Mistress Faith, I spoke as I did to let people understand that there are superior ways of thought in the world today, and we need no longer be bound by the delusions of—”

  It was no use. Her patience had quite run out. “My boy looks about to get himself smacked with a spare joist if he don’t let up on them other boys, Revere
nd, so you’ll just have to excuse me.” And off she went, to fall on six-year-old Alvin and three-year-old Calvin like the vengeance of the Lord. She was a champion tongue-lasher. He could hear the scolding from where he stood, and that with the breeze blowing the other way, too.

  Such ignorance, said Thrower to himself. I am needed here, not only as a man of God among near heathens, but also as a man of science among superstitious fools. Somebody whispers a curse and then, six months later, something bad happens to the person cursed—it always does, something bad happens to everybody at least twice a year—and it makes them quite certain that their curse had malefic effect. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

  In Britain, students learned to discard such elementary logic errors while yet studying the trivium. Here it was a way of life. The Lord Protector was quite right to punish practitioners of magic arts in Britain, though Thrower would prefer that he do it on grounds of stupidity rather than heresy. Treating it as heresy gave it too much dignity, as if it were something to be feared rather than despised.

  Three years ago, right after he earned his Doctor of Divinity degree, it had dawned on Thrower what harm the Lord Protector was actually doing. He remembered it as the turning point of his life; wasn’t it also the first time the Visitor had come to him? It was in his small room in the rectory of St. James Church in Belfast, where he was junior assistant pastor, his first assignment after ordination. He was looking at a map of the world when his eye strayed to America, to where Pennsylvania was clearly marked, stretching from the Dutch and Swedish colonies westward until the lines faded in the obscure country beyond the Mizzipy. It was as if the map then came alive, and he saw the flood of people arriving in the New World. Good Puritans, loyal churchmen, and sound businessmen all went to New England; Papists, Royalists, and scoundrels all went to the rebellious slave country of Virginia, Carolina, and Jacobia, the so-called Crown Colonies. The sort of people who, once they found their place, stayed in it forever.

  But it was another kind of people went to Pennsylvania. Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, and Huguenots fled their countries and turned Pennsylvania Colony into a slop pot, filled with the worst human rubbish of the continent. Worse yet, they would not stay put. These dimwitted country people would debark in Philadelphia, discover that the settled—Thrower did not call them “civilized”—portions of Pennsylvania were too crowded for them, and immediately head westward into the Red country to hew out a farm among the trees. Never mind that the Lord Protector specifically forbade them to settle there. What did such pagans care for law? Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire.