ALVIN JOURNEYMAN Read online

  Amid all the teaching and all the persuasion, she did find time, a scrap of an hour to herself, sitting at the writing desk in one old plantation widow’s home. It was the very desk where, moments before, the woman had manumitted all her slaves and hired them on as free workingmen and workingwomen. Peggy saw in her heartfire when the choice was made that she would end up with her barns burnt and her fields spoiled. But she would lead these newfreed Blacks northward, despite all harassment and danger. Her courage would become legendary, a spark that would inspire other brave hearts. Peggy knew that in the end, the woman would not miss her fine house and lovely lands. And someday twenty thousand Black daughters would be given the woman’s name. Why am I named Jane? they would ask their mothers. And the answer would come: Because once there was a woman by that name who freed her slaves and protected them all the way north, and then hired and looked after them until they learned the ways of free men and women and could stand on their own. It is a name of great honor. No one would know of the schoolteacher who came one day and gave open words to the secret longings of Jane’s heart.

  At that writing desk, Peggy took the time to write a letter and address it. Vigor Church, in the state of Wobbish. It would get to him, of course. As she sealed it, as she handed it over to the postal rider, she looked at long last toward the heartfire that she knew best, knew even better than her own. In it she saw the familiar possibilities, the dire consequences. But they were different now, because of the letter. Different... but better? She couldn’t guess. She wasn’t judge enough to know. Right and wrong were easy for her. But good and bad, better and worse, those were still too tricky. They kept sliding past each other strangely and changing before her eyes. Perhaps there was no judge who could know that; or if there was, he wasn’t talking much about it.

  The messenger took the letter and carried it north, where in another town he handed it to a rider who paid him what he thought the letter might be worth on delivery, minus half. The second rider took it on north, in his meandering route, and finally he stood in a store in the town of Vigor Church, where he asked about a man named Alvin Smith.

  “I’m his brother-in-law,” said the storekeeper. “Armor-of-God Weaver. I’ll pay you for the letter. You don’t want to go any farther into the town, or up there, either. You don’t want to listen to the tale those people have to tell.”

  The tone of his voice convinced the rider. “Five dollars, then,” he said.

  “I’ll wager you only paid the rider who gave it to you a single dollar, thinking the most you could get from me was two. But I’ll pay you the five, if you still ask for it, because I’m willing to be cheated by a man who can live with himself after doing it. It’s you that’ll pay most, in the end.”

  “Two dollars, then,” said the rider. “You didn’t have to get personal about it.”

  Armor-of-God took out three silver dollars and laid them in the man’s hand. “Thank you for honest riding, friend,” he said. “You’re always welcome here. Stay for dinner with us.”

  “No,” the man said. “I’ll be on my way.”

  As soon as he was gone, Armor-of-God laughed and told his wife, “He only paid fifty cents for that letter, I’ll wager. So he still thinks he cheated me.”

  “You need to be more careful with our money, Armor,” she answered.

  “Two dollars to cause a man a little spiritual torment that perhaps could change his life for the better? Cheap enough bargain, I’d say. What is a soul worth to God? Two dollars, do you think?”

  “I shudder to think what some men’s souls will be marked down to when God decides to close the shop,” said his wife. “I’ll take the letter up to Mother’s house. I’m going there today anyway.”

  “Measure’s boy Simon comes down for the mail,” said Armor-of-God.

  She glared at him. “I wasn’t going to read it.”

  “I didn’t say you were.” But still he didn’t hand her the letter. Instead he laid it on the counter, waiting for Measure’s oldest boy to come and fetch it up the hill to the house where Alvin was teaching people to be Makers. Armor-of-God still wasn’t happy about it. It seemed unreligious to him, improper, against the Bible. And yet he knew Alvin was a good boy, grown to be a good man, and whatever powers of witchery he had, he didn’t use them to do harm. Could it be truly against God and religion for him to have such powers, if he used them in a Christian way? After all, God created the world and all things in it. If God didn’t want there to be Makers, he didn’t have to create any of them. So what Alvin was doing must be in line with the will of God.

  Sometimes Armor-of-God felt perfectly at peace with Alvin’s doings. And sometimes he th ought that only a devil-blinded fool would think even for a moment that God was happy with any sort of witchery. But those were all just thoughts. When it came to action, Armor-of-God had made his decision. He was with Alvin, and against whoever opposed him. If he was damned for it, so be it. Sometimes you just had to follow your heart. And sometimes you just had to make up your mind and stick with it, come hell or high water.

  And nobody was going to mess with Alvin’s letter from Peggy Larner. Especially not Armor-of-God’s wife, who was a good deal too clever with hexery herself.

  Far away in another place, Peggy saw the changes in the heartfires and knew the letter was now in Alvin’s family. It would do its work. The world would change. The threads in Becca’s loom would move. It is unbearable to watch without meddling, thought Peggy. And then it is unbearable to watch what my meddling causes.

  Chapter 4 -- Quest

  Even before Miss Larner’s letter came, Alvin was feeling antsy. Things just wasn’t going the way he planned. After months of trying to turn his family and neighbors into Makers, it was looking like a job for six lifetimes, and try as he might, Alvin couldn’t figure out how he was going to have more than one lifetime to work with.

  Not that the teaching was a failure—he couldn’t call it an outright bust, not yet, considering that some of them really were learning how to do some small Makings. It’s just that Making wasn’t their knack. Alvin had figured out that there wasn’t no knack that another person couldn’t learn, given time and training and wit enough and plain old stick-to-it-iveness. But what he hadn’t taken into account was that Making was like a whole bunch of knacks, and while some of them could grasp this or that little bit of it, there was hardly any who seemed to show a sign of grasping the whole of it. Measure sometimes showed a glimmer. More than a glimmer, really. He could probably be a Maker himself if only he didn’t keep getting distracted. But the others—there was no way they were going to be anything like what Alvin was. So if there was no hope of success, what was the point of trying?

  Whenever he got to feeling discouraged like that, though, he’d just tell himself to shut his mouth and stick to his work. You don’t get to be a Maker by changing your plan every few minutes. Who can follow you then? You stick to it. Even when Calvin, the only natural born Maker among them, even when he refused to learn anything and finally took himself off to do who knows what sort of mischief in the wide world, even then you don’t give up and go off in search of him because, as Measure pointed out to the men who wanted to get up a search party, “You can’t force a man to be a Maker, because forcing folks to do things is to Unmake them.”

  Even when Alvin’s own father said, “Al, I marvel at what you can do, but it’s enough for me that you can do it. My part was done when you were born, it seems to me. Ain’t no man alive but what he isn’t proud to have his son pass him up, which you done handily, and I don’t aim to get back into the race.” Even then, Alvin determined grimly to go on teaching, while his father went back to the mill and began to clean it up and get it ready to grind again.

  “I can’t figure out,” said Father, “if my milling is Making or Unmaking. The stones grind the grain and break it apart into dust, so that’s Unmaking. But the dust is flour, and you can use it to make bread and cake that the maize or wheat can’t be made into, so milling might b
e just a step along the road to Making. Can you answer me that, Alvin? Is grinding flour Making or Unmaking?”

  Well, Alvin could answer it glib enough, that it was Making for sure, but it kept nagging at him, that question. I set out to make Makers out of these people, my family, my neighbors. But am I really just grinding them up and Unmaking them? Before I started trying to teach them, they were all content with their own knacks or even their own lack of a knack, when you come down to it. Now they’re frustrated and they feel like failures and why? Is it Making to turn people into something that they weren’t born to be? To be a Maker is good—I know it, because I am one. But does that mean it’s the only good thing to be?

  He asked Taleswapper about it, of course. After all, Taleswapper didn’t show up for no reason, even if the old coot had no notion what the reason was himself. Maybe he was there to give Alvin some answers. So one day when the two of them were chopping wood out back, he asked, and Taleswapper answered like he always did, with a story.

  “I heard a tale once about how a man who was building a wall as fast as he could, but somebody else was tearing it down faster than he could build it up. And he wondered how he could keep the wall from being torn down completely, let alone ever finish it. And the answer was easy: You can’t build it alone.”

  “I remember that tale,” said Alvin. “That tale is why I’m here, trying to teach these folks Making.”

  “I just wonder,” said Taleswapper, “if you might be able to stretch that story, or maybe twist it a little and wring a bit more useful truth out of it.”

  “Wring away,” said Alvin. “We’ll find out whether the story is a wet cloth or a chicken’s neck when you’re done wringing.”

  “Well maybe what you need isn’t a bunch of other stonemasons, cutting the stone and mixing the mortar and plumbing the wall and all those jobs. Maybe what you need is just a lot of cutters, and a lot of mortar mixers, and a lot of surveyors, and so on. Not everybody has to be a Maker. In fact, maybe all you need is just the one Maker.”

  The truth of what Taleswapper was saying was obvious; it had already occurred to Alvin many times, in other guises. What took him by surprise was how tears suddenly came to his own eyes, and he said softly, “Why does that make me so desperate sad, my friend?”

  “Because you’re a good man,” said Taleswapper. “An evil man would delight to find out that he was the only one who could rule over a great many people working in a common cause.”

  “More than anything I don’t want to be alone anymore,” said Alvin. “I’ve been alone. Almost my whole time as a prentice in Hatrack River, I felt like there was nobody to take my part.”

  “But you were never alone the whole time,” said Taleswapper.

  “If you mean Miss Larner looking out for me—“

  “Peggy is who I meant. I can’t see why you still call her by that false name.”

  “That’s the name of the woman I fell in love with,” said Alvin. “But she knows my heart. She knows I killed that man and I didn’t have to.”

  “The man who murdered her mother? I don’t think she holds it against you.”

  “She knows what kind of man I am and she doesn’t love me, that’s what,” said Alvin. “So I am alone, the minute I leave this place. And besides, leaving here is like lining up all these people and slapping their faces and saying, You failed so I’m gone.”

  At that Taleswapper just laughed. “That is plain foolishness and you know it. Truth is you’ve already taught them everything, and now it’s just a matter of practice. They don’t need you here anymore.”

  “But nobody needs me anywhere else,” said Alvin.

  Taleswapper laughed again.

  “Stop laughing and tell me what’s funny.”

  “A joke you have to explain isn’t going to be funny anyway,” said Taleswapper, “so there ain’t no point in explaining it.”

  “You’re no help,” said Alvin, burying the head of his axe in the chopping stump.

  “I’m a great help,” said Taleswapper. “You just don’t want to be helped yet.”

  “Yes I do! I just don’t need riddles, I need answers!”

  “You need somebody to tell you what to do? That’s a surprise. Still an apprentice then, after all? Want to turn your life over to somebody else? For how long, another seven years?”

  “I may not be a prentice anymore,” said Alvin, “but that don’t mean I’m a master. I’m just a journeyman.”

  “Then hire on somewhere,” said Taleswapper. “You’ve still got things to learn.”

  “I know,” said Alvin, “But I don’t know where to go to learn it. There’s that crystal city I saw in the twister with Tenskwa Tawa. I don’t know how to build it. I don’t know where to build it. I don’t even know why to build it, except that it ought to exist and I ought to make it exist.”

  “There you are,” said Taleswapper. “Like I said, you’ve already taught everybody here everything you know, twice over. All you’re doing now is helping them practice—and cheating now and then by helping them, don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

  “When I use my knack to help them, I tell them I helped,” said Alvin, blushing.

  “And then they feel like failures anyway, figuring that your help was all that made anything happen, and nothing of their own doing. Alvin, I think I am giving you your answer. You’ve done what you can here. Leave Measure to help them, and the others who’ve learned a bit of it here and there. Let them work things out on their own, the way you did. Then you go out into the world and learn more of the things you need to know.”

  Alvin nodded, but in his heart he still refused to believe it. “I just can’t see what good it is to go out to try to learn when you know as well as I do there’s not another Maker in the world right now, unless you count Calvin which I don’t. Who am I going to learn from? Where am I going to go?”

  “So you’re saying that there’s no use in just wandering around, seeing what happens and learning as you can?”

  Taleswapper’s face was so wry as he said this that Alvin knew at once there was a double meaning. “Just because you learn that way doesn’t mean I can. You’re just collecting stories, and there’s stories everywhere.”

  “There’s Making almost everywhere, too,” said Taleswapper. “And where there isn’t Making, there’s still old made things being torn down, and you can learn from them, too.”

  “I can’t go,” said Alvin. “I can’t go.”

  “Which is to say, you’re afraid.”

  Alvin nodded.

  “You’re afraid you’ll kill again.”

  “I don’t think so. I know I won’t. Probably.”

  “You’re afraid you’ll fall in love again.”

  Alvin hooted derisively.

  “You’re afraid you’ll be alone out there.”

  “How could I be alone?” he asked. “I’d have my golden plow with me.”

  “That’s another thing,” said Taleswapper. “That living plow. What did you make it for, if you keep it in darkness all the time and never use it?”

  “It’s gold,” said Alvin. “People want to steal it. Many a man would kill for that much gold.”

  “Many a man would kill for that much tin, for that matter,” said Taleswapper. “But you remember what happened to the man who was given a talent of gold, and buried it in the earth.”

  “Taleswapper, you’re plumb full of wisdom today.”

  “Brimming over,” said Taleswapper. “It’s my worst fault, splashing wisdom all over other people. But most of the time it dries up real fast and doesn’t leave a stain.”

  Alvin grimaced at him. “Taleswapper, I’m not ready to leave home yet.”

  “Maybe folks have to leave home before they’re ready, or they never get ready at all.”

  “Was that a paradox, Taleswapper? Miss Larner taught me about paradox.”

  “She’s a fine teacher and she knows all about it.”

  “All I know about paradox is that if you d
on’t shovel it out of the stable, the barn gets to stinking real bad and fills up with flies.”

  Taleswapper laughed at that, and Alvin joined in laughing, and that was the end of the serious part of the conversation.

  Only it clung to Alvin, the whole thing, knowing that Taleswapper thought he should leave home, and him not having a clue where he would go if he did leave, and not being willing to admit failure, either. All kinds of reasons for staying. Most important reason of all was simply being home. He’d spent half his childhood away from his family, and it was good to sit down at his mother’s table every day. Good to see his father standing at the mill. Hear his father’s voice, his brothers’ voices, his sisters’ voices laughing and quarreling and telling and asking, his mother’s voice, his mother’s sharp sweet voice, all of them covering his days and nights like a blanket, keeping him warm, all of them saying to him, You’re safe here, you’re known here, we’re your people, we won’t turn on you. Alvin had never heard him a symphony in his life, or even more than two fiddles and a banjo at the same time, but he knew that no orchestra could ever make a music more beautiful than the voices of his family moving in and out of their houses and barns and the millhouse and the shops in town, threads of music binding him to this place so that even though he knew Taleswapper was right and he ought to leave, he couldn’t bring himself to go.

  How did Calvin ever do it? How did Calvin leave this music behind him?

  Then Miss Larner’s letter came.

  Measure’s boy Simon brought it, him being five now and old enough to run down to Armor-of-God’s store to pick up the post. He could do his letters now, too, so he didn’t just give the letter over to his grandma or grandpa, he took it right to Alvin himself and announced at the top of his lungs, “It’s from a woman! She’s called Miss Larner and she makes real purty letters!”

  “Pretty letters,” Alvin corrected him.

  Simon wasn’t to be fooled. “Oh, Uncle Al, you’re the only person around here as says it like that! I’d be plumb silly to fall for a joke like that!”