Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV Page 9

  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 under the 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 raising 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!”

  Ramona gasped. “I never believed you till now.”

  “But you tell no one,” said Amy. Her heart swelled with satisfaction over her victory. Ramona finally believed her. “Swear.”

  “I swear,” said Ramona.

  “Show me your fingers!” cried Amy.

  Ramona brought her hands out from behind her. The fingers weren’t crossed, but that didn’t prove they weren’t crossed a few moments ago.

  “Swear again now,” said Amy. “When I can see your hands.”

  “I swear,” said Ramona, rolling her eyes.

  “It’s our beautiful secret,” said Amy, turning and walking away.

  “Ours and Alvin’s,” said Ramona, uncrossing her ankles and following her.

  7

  Booking Passage

  It didn’t take Calvin too long to figure out that it was going to take a powerful long time to earn enough money to buy passage to Europe as a gentleman. A long time and a lot of work. Neither idea sounded attractive.

  He couldn’t turn iron into gold, but there was plenty of things he could do, and he thought about them long and hard. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t reckon them banks could keep him out of their vaults for long if he got to working on what all was holding them together. Still, there was a chance of being caught, and that would be the ruination of all his dreams. He thought of putting out his shingle as a Maker, but that would bring a kind of fame and attention that wouldn’t stand in his favor later, not to mention all the accusations of charlatanry that would be bound to come. He was already hearing rumors of Alvin—or rather, of some prentice smith out west who turned an iron plow into gold. Half those who told the tale did it with rolled eyes, as if to say, I’m sure some western farmboy has a Maker’s knack, that’s likely, yes!

  Sometimes Calvin wished it was a different knack he had. For instance, he could do with a torch’s knack about now. Seeing the future—why, he could see which property to buy, or which ship to invest in! But even then he’d have to have a partner to put up the money, since he had nothing now. And hanging around New Amsterdam getting rich wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to learn Makering, or whatever it was that Napoleon could teach him. Having set his sights so high, the petty businessmen of Manhattan were hardly the partners he wanted.

  There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying went. If he couldn’t easily get the money for his first-class voyage, why not go direct to the source of all voyages? So it was that he found himself walking the wharfs of Manhattan, along the Hudson and the East River. It was entertaining in its own right, the long, sleek sailing ships, the clunky, smoky steamers, the stevedores shouting and grunting and sweating, the cranes swinging, the ropes and pulleys and nets, the stink of fish and the bawling of the gulls. Who would have guessed, when he was a boy rowdying in a millhouse in Vigor Church, that one day he would be here on the edge of the land, drinking in the liquorous scents and sounds and sights of the life of the sea.

  Calvin wasn’t one to get lost in reverie and contemplation, though. He had his eye out for the right ship, and from time to time stopped to ask a stevedore of a loading ship what the destination might be. Those as were bound for Africa or Haiti or the Orient were no use to him, but them with European destinations got a thorough looking-over. Until at last he found the right one, a bright and tall-masted English ship with a captain of some breeding who didn’t seem to raise his voice at all, though all the men did his will, working hard and working smart under his eye. Everything was clean, and the cargo included trunks and parcels carefully loaded up the ramp instead of being tossed around carelesslike.

  Naturally, the captain wouldn’t think of talking to a boy Calvin’s age, wearing Calvin’s clothes. But it wasn’t hard for Calvin to think of a plan to get the captain’s attention.

  He walked up to one of the stevedores and said, “Scuse me, sir, but there’s a shaip leak a-going near the back of the boat, on the further side.”

  The stevedore looked at him oddly. “I’m not a sailor.”

  “Neither am I, but I think the captain’ll thank them as warns him of the problem.”

  “How can you see it, if it’s under the water?”

  “Got a knack for leaks,” said Calvin. “I’d hurry and tell him, if I were you.”

  Saying it was a knack was enough for the stevedore, him being an American, even if he was a Dutchman by his accent. The captain, of course, wouldn’t care diddly about knacks, being an Englishman, which under the Protectorate had a law against knacks. Not against having them, just against believing they existed or attempting to use them. But the captain was no fool, and he’d send somebody to check, knack or no knack.

  Which is how it happened. The stevedore talking to his foreman; the foreman to some ship’s officer; each time there was a lot of pointing at Calvin and staring at him as he nonchalantly whistled and looked down at the waterline of the ship. To Calvin’s disappointment, the officer didn’t go to the captain, but instead sent a sailor downstairs into the dark cellar of the ship. Calvin had to provide something for him to see, so now he sent out his doodlebug and got into the wood, right where he’d said the leak was. It was a simple thing to let the planks get just a little loose and out of position under the waterline, which sent a goodly stream of water spurting into the cellar of the ship. Just for the fun of it, when he figured the sailor must be down there looking at it, Calvin opened and closed the gap, so the leak was sometimes a fine spray, sometimes a gush of water, and sometimes just a trickle. Like blood seeping from a wound with an intermittent tourniquet. Bet he never saw no leak like that before, thought Calvin.

  Sure enough, in a few minutes the sailor was back, acting all agitated, and now the officer barked orders to several seamen, then went straight to the captain. This time, though, there wasn’t no finger-pointing. The officer wasn’t going to give Calvin none of the credit for finding the leak. That really got Calvin’s goat, and for a minute he thought of sinking the boat then and there. But that wouldn’t do him no good. Time enough to put that greedy ambitious officer in his place.

  When the captain went below, Calvin put on a fine show for him. Instead of causing one leak to spurt and pulse, Calvin shifted the leak from one place to another—a gush here, a gush there. By now it had to be obvious that there wasn’t nothing natural about that leak. There was a good deal of stirring on the deck, and a lot of sailors started rushing below. Then, to Calvin’s delight, a fair number started rushing back onto the deck and onto the gangplank, heading for dry land where there wasn’t no strange powers causing leaks in the boat.

  Finally the captain came on deck, and this time the officer wasn’t taking all the credit for himself. He pointed to
the foreman, who pointed to the stevedore, and pretty soon they were all pointing at Calvin.

  Now, of course, Calvin could stop fiddling with the leak. He stopped it cold. But he wasn’t done. As the captain headed for the gangplank, Calvin sent his bug to seek out all the nearby rats that he could sense lurking under the wharf and among the crates and barrels and on the other ships. By the time the captain got halfway down the gangplank, a couple of dozen rats were racing up the very same bridge, heading for the ship. The captain tried in vain to shoo them back, but Calvin had filled them with courage and grim determination to reach the deck—food, food, Calvin was promising them—and they merely dodged and went on. Dozens more were streaming across the planking of the pier, and the captain was fairly dancing to avoid tripping on rats and falling on his face. On deck, sailors with mops and bowling pins were striking at the rats, trying to knock or sweep them off into the sea.

  Then, as suddenly as he had launched the rats, Calvin sent them a new message: Get off this ship. Fire, fire. Leaks. Drowning. Fear.

  Squealing and scurrying, all the rats that he had sent aboard came rushing back down the gangplank and all the lines and cables connecting the ship to the shore. And all the rats that had already been aboard, lurking in the cargo hold and in the dark wet cellar and in the hidden caves in the joints and beams of the ship, they also gushed up out of the hatches and portholes like water bubbling out of a new spring. The captain stopped cold to watch them leave. Finally, when all the rat traffic had disappeared into their hiding places on the wharf and the other ships, the captain turned toward Calvin and strode to him. Through it all the man had never lost his dignity—even while dancing to avoid the rats. My kind of man, thought Calvin. I must watch him to learn how gentlemen behave.