Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV Read online

  “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 down 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 as 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?”

  “The hexes are to hide me from others.”

  “What do you have to hide for? Ain’t nobody looking for you.”

  The words struck her hard. Nobody looking for her. Well, there it was. Once she had hidden so she could return to her own house without her family knowing her. Whom was she hiding from now?

  “Perhaps I’m hiding from myself. Perhaps I don’t want to be what I’m supposed to be. Or perhaps I don’t want to keep living the life I already started to live.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know squat about it,” he said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh, don’t be so mysterious, you silly old lady.”

  Silly she might accept, but old? “I’m not that many years older than you.”

  “When people say perhaps it’s cause they’re lying. Either they don’t believe the thing they’re saying, or they do believe it only they don’t want to admit they do.”

  “You’re a very wise young man.”

  “And the real liars change the subject the minute the truth comes up.”

  Peggy regarded him steadily. “You were waiting for me, weren’t you?”

  “I knew what Aunt Becca would do. She don’t tell nobody nothin’.”

  “And you’re going to tell me?”

  “Not me! That’s trouble too deep for me to get into.” He smiled. “But you did stop the three witches from making soup of me. So I got you thinking in the right direction, if you’ve got the brains to see it.” With that he jumped up and she listened as his feet slapped up the stairs and he was gone.

  The choice was for Peggy to be happy. Becca said that, or said that her sister said it—though it was hard to imagine that blank-faced woman caring a whit whether anybody was happy or not. And now the boy got her talking about why she was hiding behind hexes, and said that he had guided her. The choice she was being offered was obvious enough now. She had buried herself in her father’s work of breaking the back of slavery, and had stopped looking out for Alvin. They wanted her to look back again. They wanted her to reach out for him.

  She stormed back into the cabin. “I won’t do it,” she said. “Caring for that boy is what killed my mother.”

  “Excuse me but I think a shotgun is what did for her,” said Becca.

  “A shotgun I could have prevented.”

  “So you say,” said Becca.

  “Yes, I say so.”

  “Your mother’s thread broke when she decided to pick up a shotgun and do some killing of her own rather than trust to Alvin. Her boy Arthur was safe. She didn’t need to kill, but when she chose to do that, she chose to die. Do you think you could have changed her mind about that?”

  “Don’t expect me to accept easy answers.”

  “No, I expect you to make all the answers as hard as possible. But sometimes it’s the easy answers that are true.”

  “So it’s back to the old days? Watching Alvin? Am I supposed to fall in love with him? Marry him? Watch him die?”

  “I don’t much care either way. My sister thinks you’ll be happier with him than without him, and he’s dead either way, in the long run, but then aren’t we all? Most women that aren’t killed by having babies live to be widows. What of that?”

  What of that? Just because she could foresee so many ways for Alvin to die didn’t mean that she should avoid loving him. She knew that, rationally. But fear wasn’t rational.

  “You spend your whole life grieving for those that haven’t died yet,” said Becca. “What a waste of an interesting knack.”

  “Interesting?”

  “You could have had the knack of making shoe leather supple. Just see how happy that would’ve made you.”

  Peggy tried to imagine herself as a cobbler and had to laugh. “I suppose that I’d rather know than not know, mostly.”

  “Exactly. Knowing hurts sometimes, especially when you can’t do anything to change it.”

  But there was something furtive in her, the way she said that. “Can’t do anything to change it my left eye!” said Peggy.

  “Don’t use curses you don’t understand,” said Becca.

  “You do make changes. You don’t think the loom is immutable, not one bit.”

  “It’s dangerous to change. The consequences are unpredictable.”

  “You saw Ta-Kumsaw dead at Detroit. So you picked up Alvin’s thread and you—”

  “What do you know about the loom!” cried Becca. “What do you know about watching the threads flow under your hands and seeing all the grief and pain and suffering and thinking! It doesn’t matter, they’re God’s cattle and he can herd them how he likes, only then you find the one you love more than life and God has him slaughtered by the treachery of the French and the hatred of the English and for nothing, his whole life meaningless and lost and nothing changed by it except a few legends and songs, and here I am, still loving him, a widow forever because he’s gone! So yes, I found the one who could save him. I knew if they met, they’d love each other and save each other.”

  “But what you did caused the massacre at Tippy-Canoe,” said Peggy. “The people of Vigor Church thought Alvin had been kidnapped and tortured to death, so they slaughtered Tenskwa-Tawa’s people in vengeance. Now they have a curse on them, all because you—”

  “Because Harrison took advantage of their rage. Do you think there wouldn’t have been a massacre anyway?”

  “But the blood wouldn’t have been on the same hands, would it?”

  Becca wept, and her tears fell onto the cloth.

  “Shouldn’t you dry those tears?” asked Peggy.

  “If tears could mar this cloth, there’d be no cloth left.”

  “So you of all people know the cost of meddling with the course of others’ lives.”

  “And you of all people know the cost of failing to meddle when the time was right.” Becca raised her head and continued her work. “I saved him, and that was my goal. Those who died would have died anyway.”

  “Yet here I am because your sister wants me to look after Alvin.”

  “Here you are because we only see the threads and then half-guess as to what they mean and who they are. We know the young Maker’s thread—there’s no way to miss it in this cloth. Besides, I moved it once, I twined it with my Isaac’s thread. Do you think I could lose track of it after that? I’ll show you, if you promise not to look beyond the inch of cloth I show.”

  “I promise not to look. But I can’t help what I
chance to see.”

  “Chance to see this, then.”

  Peggy looked at the cloth, knowing that the sight of it was rarely given to those not of the loom. Alvin’s thread was obvious, shimmering light, with all colors in it; but it was no thicker than any other, and it looked frail, easily snapped by careless handling. “You dared to move this one?”

  “It returned of itself to its own place,” said Becca. “I only borrowed it for a while. And he saved his brother Measure. Eight-face mound opened up for him. I tell you there are forces at work in his life far stronger than my power to move the threads.”

  “More powerful than me, too.”

  “You are one of the forces. Not all of them, not the greatest of them, but you are one. Look. See how the threads cross him. His brothers and sisters, I think. He is closely entwined with his family. And see how these threads are brightening, taking on more hues. He’s teaching them to be Makers.”

  Peggy hadn’t known that. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “He can’t do his work alone,” said Becca. “So he teaches others to help him in it. He’s more successful at it than he knows.”

  “This one,” said Peggy, pointing to the brightest of the other threads. It veered off widely, wandering through the cloth far from the rest of the family.

  “His brother. Also a seventh son of a seventh son,” said Becca. “Though the eighth, if you count the one who died.”

  “But the seventh of those alive when he was born,” said Peggy. “Yes, there’s power in him.”

  “Look,” said Becca. “See how he was at the beginning. Every bit as bright as Alvin’s. There was near as much in him then as in Alvin. And no more forces working against him than Alvin overcame. Fewer, really, because by the time he came into his own you and Alvin between you had the Unmaker at bay. At least, all the killing tricks. But the Unmaker found another way to undo the boy. Hate and envy. If you love Alvin, Peggy, find his younger brother’s heartfire. Somehow he must be brought back before it’s too late.”

  “Why? I don’t know anything about Calvin, except his name and Alvin’s hopes for him.”

  “Because the way the threads are going now, when his rejoins Alvin’s, Alvin’s comes to an end.”

  “He kills him?”