ALVIN JOURNEYMAN Read online

  “You’re telling it all wrong,” said Calvin.

  Harrison looked at him angrily. “You think after all these years I don’t know how to tell the tale? If I tell it any other way, I get blood on my hands and believe me, it looks bad. People throw up when they see me. Looks like I stuck my hands in a corpse up to my elbows.”

  “Telling it your way has you living in an alley, eating from charity and drinking leftover wine,” said Calvin.

  Harrison squinted at him. “Who are you?”

  “The boy you tried to kill is my brother Measure. The other boy you had them kidnap is my brother Alvin.”

  “And you came to gloat?”

  “Do I look like I’m gloating? No, I left home because I got sick of their righteousness, knowing everything and not having respect for nobody else.”

  Harrison winked. “I never liked people like that.”

  “You want to hear how you ought to tell your tale?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The Reds were at war with the Whites. They weren’t using the land but they didn’t want White farmers to use it, either. They just couldn’t share even though there was plenty of room. Tenskwa-Tawa claimed to he peaceful, but you knew that he was gathering all those thousands of Reds together in order to be Ta-Kumsaw’s army. You had to do something to rile up the Whites there to put a stop to this menace. So yes, you had two boys kidnapped, but you never gave orders for anybody to be killed—“

  “If I say that the blood just leaps onto my hands on the spot—“

  “I’m sure you’ve thought of all the possible lies, but hear me out,” said Calvin.

  “Go on.”

  “You didn’t order anybody killed. That was just lies your enemies told about you. Lies originating with Alvin Miller Junior, now called Alvin Smith. After all, Alvin was the Boy Renegado, the White boy who went everywhere with Ta-Kumsaw for a year. He was Ta-Kumsaw’s friend—we’ll use the word friend because we’re in decent company—so of course he lied about you. It was your battle at Tippy-Canoe that broke the back of Ta-Kumsaw’s plans. If you hadn’t struck then and there, Ta-Kumsaw would have been victorious later at Fort Detroit, and Ta-Kumsaw would have driven all the civilized folks out of the land west of the Appalachees and Red armies would be descending on the cities of the east, raiding out of the mountains and why, thanks to you and your courage at Tippy-Canoe, the Reds have been driven west of the Mizzipy. You opened up all the western lands to safe colonization.”

  “My hands would be dripping before I said all that.”

  “So what? Hold them up and say, ‘Look what the Red Witch Tenskwa-Tawa did to punish me. He covered my hands with blood. But I’m glad to pay that price. The blood on my hands is the reason why White men are building civilization right to the shores of the Mizzipy. The blood on my hands is the reason why people in the east can sleep easy at night, without so much as a thought about Reds coming and raping and killing the way those savages always did.’”

  Harrison chuckled. “Every word you’ve said is the profoundest bull hockey, my boy, I hope you know that.”

  “You just need to decide whether you’re going to let Tenskwa-Tawa have the final victory over you.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What’s in it for you?”

  “I don’t know. I came looking for you thinking you might know something of power, but when I heard you tell that weaselly weakling tale I knew that you didn’t know nothing that a man could use. In fact, I knew more than you. So, seeing how I was going to ask you to share, it seemed only fair to share right back.”

  “How kind of you.” His sarcasm was inescapable.

  “I don’t think so. I just picture the look on my brother Alvin’s face when you tell everbody he was the Boy Renegado. You say that, and nobody’ll believe him if he testifies against you. In fact, he’ll have to hide himself, when you think of all the terrible things folks believe about the Boy Renegado. How he was the cruelest Red of them all, killing and torturing so even the Shaw-Nee puked.”

  “I remember those tales.”

  “You hold up those bloody hands, my friend, and then make them mean what you want them to mean.”

  Harrison shook his head. “I can’t live with the blood.”

  “So you have a conscience, eh?”

  Harrison laughed. “The blood gets in my food. It stains my clothes. It makes people sick.”

  “If I were you, I’d eat with gloves on and I’d wear dark clothes.”

  Harrison was through eating. So was Calvin.

  “So you want me to do this to hurt your brother.”

  “Not hurt him. Just keep him silent and out of sight. You’ve spent, what, eight years living like a dog. Now it’s his turn.”

  “There’s no going back,” said Harrison. “Once I tell lies, I’ll have bloody hands till the day I die.”

  Calvin shrugged. “Harrison, you’re a liar and a murderer, but you love power more than life. Unfortunately you’re piss-poor at getting it and keeping it. Ta-Kumsaw and Alvin and Tenskwa-Tawa played you for a sucker. I’m telling you how to undo what they done to you. How to set yourself free. I don’t give a rat’s front teeth whether you do what I said or not.” He got up to go.

  Harrison half-rose and clutched at Calvin’s pantlegs. “Someone told me that Alvin, he’s a Maker. That he has real power.”

  “No he doesn’t,” said Calvin. “Not for you to worry about. Because, you see, my friend, he can only use his power for good, never to harm nobody.”

  “Not even me?”

  “Maybe he’ll make an exception for you.” Calvin grinned wickedly. “I know I would.”

  Harrison withdrew his hands from Calvin’s clothing. “Don’t look at me like that, you little weasel.”

  “Like what?” asked Calvin.

  “Like I’m scum. Don’t you judge me.”

  “Can you tell me a single good reason why not?”

  “Because whatever else I did, boy, I never betrayed my own brother.”

  Now it was Calvin’s turn to look into the face of contempt. He spat on the ground near Harnison’s knees. “Eat pus and die,” he said.

  “Was that a curse?” asked Harrison jeeringly as Calvin walked away. “Or merely a friendly warning?”

  Calvin didn’t answer him. He was already thinking of other things. How to raise the money to get passage east, for one thing. First class. He was going to go first class. Maybe what he needed to do was see if his knack extended to causing money to fall out of some shopkeeper’s moneybag as he carried his earnings to the bank. If he did it right, no one would see. He wouldn’t get caught. And even if someone saw the money fall out and him pick it up, they could only accuse him of finding dropped money, since he never laid a hand on the bag. That would work. It would be easy enough. So easy that it was stupid that Alvin had never done it before. The family could have used the money. There were some hard years. But Alvin was too selfish ever to think of anybody but himself, or anything but his stupid plan of trying to teach Making to people with no knack for it.

  First-class passage to England, and from there across the channel to France. New clothes. It wouldn’t take much to get that kind of money. A lot of money changed hands in New Amsterdam, and there was nothing to stop some of it from falling onto the street at Calvin’s feet. God had given him the power, and that meant that it must be the will of God for him to do it.

  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Harrison actually took Calvin’s advice?

  Chapter 6 -- True Love

  Amy Sump didn’t care what her friends or anybody said. What she felt for Alvin Maker was love. Real love. True, deep, abiding love that would withstand the test of time.

  If only he would pay any attention to her openly, so others could see it. Instead all he ever did was give her those glances that made her heart flutter so within her. She worried sometimes that maybe it was just his Makerness, his knack or whatever it was. Worried that he was somehow reaching inside her chest and making her hear
t turn over and her whole body quiver. But no, that wasn’t the sort of thing that Makers did. In fact maybe he didn’t even know about her love for him. Maybe his glances were really searching looks, hoping to see in her face some sign of her love. That was why she no longer tried to hide her maidenly blushes when her heart beat so fast and her face felt all hot and tingly. Let him see how his gaze transforms me into a quivering mass of devoted worshipfulness.

  How Amy longed to go to the teaching sessions where Alvin worked with a dozen or so grownups at once, telling them how a Maker had to see the world. How she would love to hear his voice for hours on end. Then she would discover the true knack within her, and both she and her beloved Alvin would rejoice to discover that she was secretly a Maker herself, so that the two of them together would be able to remake the world and fight off the evil nasty Unmaker together. Then they would have a dozen babies, all of them Makers twice over, and the love of Alvin and Amy Maker would be sung for a thousand generations throughout the whole world, or at least America, which was pretty much the same thing as far as Amy cared.

  But Amy’s parents wouldn’t let her go. “How could Alvin possibly concentrate on teaching anybody anything with you making cow-eyes at him the whole time?” her mother said, the heartless old hag. Not as cruel as her father, though, telling her, “Get some control over yourself, girl! Or I’m going to have to get you some love diapers to keep you from embarrassing yourself in public. Love diapers, do you understand me?” Oh, she understood him, the nasty man. Him of the cranks and pulleys, pipes and cables. Him of pumps and engines and machinery, who had no understanding of the human heart. “The heart’s just a pump itself, my girl,” he said, which showed him to be a deeply totally impossibly eternally abysmally ignorant machine of a man his own self but said nothing about the truth of the universe. It was her beloved Alvin who understood that all things were alive and had feelings—all things except her father’s hideous dead machines, chugging away like walking corpses. A steam-powered lumbermill! Using fire and water to cut wood! What an abomination before the Lord! When she and Alvin were married, she’d get Alvin to stop her father from making any more machines that roared and hissed and chugged and gave off the heat of hell. Alvin would keep her in a sylvan wonderland where the birds were friends and the bugs didn’t bite and they could swim naked together in clear pools of water and he would swim to her in real life instead of just in her dreams and he would reach out and embrace her and their naked bodies would touch undefthe water and their flesh would meet and join and...

  “No such thing,” said her friend Ramona.

  Amy felt herself grow hot with anger. Who was Ramona to decide what was real and what wasn’t? Couldn’t Amy tell her dreams to somebody without having to keep saying it was just a dream instead of pretending that it was real, that his arms had been around her? Didn’t she remember it as clearly—no, far more clearly—than anything that had ever happened to her in real life?

  “Did so happen. In the moonlight.”

  “When!” said Ramona, her voice dripping with contempt.

  “Three nights ago. When Alvin said he was going out into the woods to be alone. He was really going to be with me.”

  “Well where is there a pool of clear water like that? Nothing like that around here, just rivers and streams, and you know Alvin never goes into the Hatrack to swim or nothing.”

  “Don’t you know anything?” said Amy, trying to match her best friend’s disdain. “Haven’t you heard of the greensong? How Alvin learned from them old Reds how to run through the forest like the wind, silent and not even so much as bending a branch? He can run a hundred miles in an hour, faster than any railroad train. It wasn’t any kind of pool around here, it was so far away that it would take anybody from Vigor Church three days to get there on a good horse!”

  “Now I know you’re just lying,” said Ramona.

  “He can do that any day,” insisted Amy hotly.

  “He can, but you can’t. You screech when you brush up into a spiderweb, you dunce.”

  “I’m not a dunce I’m the best student in the school you’re the dunce,” said Amy all in a breath—it was an epigram she had often used before. “I held Alvin’s hand is what, and he carried me along, and then when I got tired he picked me up in those blacksmith’s arms of his and carried me.”

  “And then I’m sure he really took off all his clothes and you took off all of yours, like you was a couple of weasels or something.”

  “Muskrats. Otters. Creatures of water. It wasn’t nakedness, it was naturalness, the freeness of two kindred souls who have no secrets from each other.”

  “Well, what a bunch of beautifulness,” said Ramona. “Only I think if it really happened it would be disgustingness and revoltingness, him coming up and hugging you in your complete and utter starkersness.”

  Amy knew that Ramona was making fun of her but she wasn’t sure why making up words like disgustingness made the idiotic girl laugh and almost fall off the tree branch where they were sitting.

  “You have no appreciation of beauty.”

  “You have no appreciation of truth,” said Ramona. “Or should I say, of ‘truthfulness.’”

  “You calling me a liar?” said Amy, giving her a little push.

  “Hey!” cried Ramona. “No fair! I’m farther out on the branch so there’s nothing for me to grab onto.”

  Amy pushed her again, harder, and Ramona wobbled, her eyes growing wide as she clutched at the branch.

  “Stop it you little liar!” cried Ramona. “I’ll tell what lies you’ve been saying.”

  “They aren’t lies,” said Amy. “I remember it as clearly as... as clearly as the sunlight over the fields of green corn.”

  “As clearly as the grunting of the hogs in my father’s sty,” said Ramona, in a voice that matched Amy’s for dreaminess.

  “Of course true love would be beyond your ability to imagine.”

  “Yes, my imaginingness is the epitaph of feebleness.”

  “Epitome, not epitaph,” Amy said.

  “Oh, if only I could have your sublimeness of correctness, your wiseness.”

  “Stop nessing all the time.”

  “You stop.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Do so.”

  “Do not.”

  “Eat worms,” said Ramona.

  “On brain salad,” said Amy. And now that they were back to familiar playful argument, they both broke into laughter and talked about other things for a while.

  And if things had stayed that way, maybe nothing would have happened. But on the way back home in the gathering dusk, Ramona asked one last time, “Amy, telling truth, cross your heart, friend to friend, swear to heaven, remember forever, tell me that you didn’t really actually with your own flesh and blood go swimming naked with Alvin Smith—“

  “Alvin Maker.”

  “Tell me it was a dream.”

  Almost Amy laughed and said, Of course it was a dream, you silly girl.

  But in Ramona’s eyes she saw something: wide-eyed wonder at the idea that such things were possible, and that someone Ramona actually knew might have done something so wicked and wonderful. Amy didn’t want to see that look of awe change to a look of knowing triumph. And so she said what she knew she shouldn’t say. “I wish it was a dream, I honestly do, Ramona. Because when I think back on it I long for him all the more and I wonder when he’ll dare to speak to my father and tell him that he wants me for his wife. A man who’s done a thing like that with a girl—he’s got to marry her, doesn’t he?”

  There. She had said it. The most secret wonderful dream of her heart. Said it right out.

  “You’ve got to tell your papa,” said Ramona. “He’ll see to it Alvin marries you.”

  “I don’t want him to be forced,” said Amy. “That’s silly. A man like Alvin can only be enticed into marriage, not pushed into it.”

  “Everybody thinks you’re all goo-goo over Alvin and he doesn’t even see you
,” said Ramona. “But if he’s going off with you a swimming starkers in some faraway pond that only he can get to, well, I don’t think that’s right. I honestly don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t care what you think,” said Amy. “It is right and if you tell I’ll cut off all your hair and tat it into a doily and burn it.”

  Ramona burst out laughing. “Tat it into a doily? What kind of power does that have?”

  “A six-sided doily,” said Amy portentously.

  “Oh, I’m trembling. Made out of my own hair, too. Silly, you can’t do things like that, that’s what Black witches do, make things out of hair and burn them or whatever.”

  As if that was an argument. Alvin did Red magic; why couldn’t Amy learn to do Black magic, when her Makering knack was finally unlocked? But there was no use arguing about that sort of thing with Ramona. Ramona thought she knew better than anybody. It was a marvel that Amy even bothered to keep her as a best friend.

  “I’m going to tell,” said Ramona. “Unless you tell me right now that it’s all a lie.”

  “If you tell I’ll kill you,” said Amy.

  “Tell me it’s a lie, then.”

  Tears sprang unbidden to Amy’s eyes. It was not a lie. It was a dream. A true dream, of true love, a dream that came from the paths of secretness within her own and Alvin’s hearts. He dreamed the same dream at the same time, she knew it, and he felt her flesh against his as surely as she felt his against hers. That made it true, didn’t it? If a man and a woman both remembered the realness of each other’s bodies pressing against each other, then how was that anything but a true experience? “I love Alvin too much to lie about such a thing. Cut my tongue out if any part of it is false!”