HATRACK RIVER

The Tales of Alvin Maker: Part One

					BY Orson Scott Card

Synopsis:

This is a three part tale of a family moving west from New england and
their trials and tribulations as homesteaders.  The characters include a
"torch" someone who can see into the future; a "nack" someone who has a
nack for fixin' things; a "spark" someone who can start a fire with his
mind; and other memorable characters including indians who become part
of the land; a seventh son of a seventh son who is undescribable in his
gifts.
Part history; part romance; intrigue and just a plain good read.

In memory of my grandfather, Orson Rega Card (1891-1984), whose life was
saved by Indians of the Blood tribe when he was a child on the Canadian
frontier

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This story takes place in an America whose history is often similar to,
but often quite different from our own.  You should not assume that the
portrayal in this book of a person who shares a name with a figure from
American history is an accurate portrayal of that historical figure.  In
particular, you should be aware that William Henry Harrison, famed in
our own history for having the briefest presidency and for his
unforgettable election slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," was a somewhat
nicer person than his counterpart in this book.

My thanks to Carol Breakstone for American Indian lore; to Beth Meacham
for Octagon Mound and Flint Ridge; to Wayne Williams for heroic
patience; and to my great-great-grandfather Joseph for the stories
behind the story in this book.

As always with my work, Kristine A.  Card has influenced and improved
every page in this book.

HATRACK RIVER

Little Peggy was very careful with the eggs.  She rooted her hand
through the straw till her fingers bumped something hard and heavy.

She gave no never mind to the chicken drips.  After all, when folk with
babies stayed at the roadhouse, Mama never even crinkled her face at
their most spetackler diapers.  Even when the chicken drips were wet and
stringy and made her fingers stick together, little Peggy gave no never
mind.  She just pushed the straw apart, wrapped her hand around the egg,
and lifted it out of the brood box.  All this while standing tiptoe on a
wobbly stool, reaching high above her head.

Mama said she was too young for egging, but little Peggy showed her.

Every day she felt in every brood box and brought in every egg, every
single one, that's what she did.

Every one, she said in her mind, over and over.  I got to reach into
every one.

Then little Peggy looked back into the northeast corner, the darkest
place in the whole coop, and there sat Bloody Mary in her brood box,
looking like the devil's own bad dream, hatefulness shining out of her
nasty eyes, saying Come here little girl and give me nips.  I want nips
of finger and nips of thumb and if you come real close and try to take
my egg I'll get a nip of eye from you.

Most animals didn't have much heartfire, but Bloody Mary's was strong
and made a poison smoke.  Nobody else could see it, but little Peggy
could.  Bloody Mary dreamed of death for all folks, but most specially
for a certain little girl five years old, and little Peggy had the marks
on her fingers to prove it.  At least one mark, anyway, and even if Papa
said he couldn't see it, little Peggy remembered how she got it and
nobody could blame her none if she sometimes forgot to reach under
Bloody Mary who sat there like a bushwhacker waiting to kill the first
folks that just tried to come by.  Nobody'd get mad if she just
sometimes forgot to look there.

I forgot.  I looked in every brood box, every one, and if one got missed
then I forgot forgot forgot.

Everybody knew Bloody Mary was a lowdown chicken and too mean to give
any eggs that wasn't rotten anyway.

I forgot.

She got the egg basket inside before Mama even had the fire bet, and
Mama was so pleased she let little Peggy put the eggs one by one into
the cold water.  Then Mama put the pot on the hook and swung it right on
over the fire.  Boiling eggs you didn't have to wait for the fire to
slack, you could do it smoke and all.

"Peg," said Papa.

That was Mama's name, but Papa didn't say it in his Mama voice.

He said it in his little-Peggy-you're-in-dutch voice, and little Peggy
knew she was completely found out, and so she turned right around and
yelled what she'd been planning to say all along.

"I forgot, Papa!"

Mama turned and looked at little Peggy in surprise.  Papa wasn't
surprised though.  He just raised an eyebrow.  He was holding his hand
behind his back.  Little Peggy knew there was an egg in that hand.

Bloody Mary's nasty egg.

"What did you forget, little Peggy?" asked Papa.

Right that minute little Peggy reckoned she was the stupidest girl ever
born on the face of the earth.  Here she was denying before anybody
accused her of anything.

But she wasn't going to give up, not right off like that.  She couldn't
stand to have them mad at her and she just wanted them to let her go
away and live in England.  So she put on her innocent face and said, 'I
don't know, Papa."

She figgered England was the best place to go live, cause England had a
Lord Protector.  From the look in Papa's eye, a Lord Protector was
Pretty much what she needed just now.

"What did You forget?" Papa asked again.

"Just say it and be done, Horace," said Mama.  "If she's done wrong then
she's done wrong."

"I forgot one time, Papa," said little Peggy.  "She's a mean old chicken
and she hates me."

Papa answered soft and slow.  "One time," he said.

Then he took his hand from behind him.  Only it wasn't no single egg he
held, it was a whole basket.  And that basket was filled with a Clot Of
straw-most likely all the straw from Bloody Mary's box and that straw
was mashed together and glued tight with dried-up raw egg and shell
bits, mixed up with about three or four chewed-up baby chicken bodies.

"Did you have to bring that in the house before breakfast, Horace?" said
Mama.

"I don't know what makes me madder," said Horace.  "What she done wrong
or her studying'up to lie about it."

"I didn't study and I didn't lie!" shouted little Peggy.  Or anyways she
meant to shout.  What came out sounded suspiciously like crying even
though little Peggy had decided only yesterday that she was done with
crying for the rest of her life.

"See?" said Mama.  "She already feels bad."

"She feels bad being caught," said Horace.  "You're too slack on her,
Peg.  She's got a lying spirit.  I don't want my daughter growing up
wicked.  I'd rather see her dead like her baby sisters before I see her
grow up wicked."

Little Peggy saw Mama's heartfire flare up with memory, and in front of
her eyes she could see a baby laid out pretty in a little box, and then
another one only not so pretty cause it was the second baby Missy, the
one what died of pox so nobody'd touch her but her own mama, who was
still so feeble from the pox herself that she couldn't do much.

Little Peggy saw that scene, and she knew Papa had made a mistake to say
what he said cause Mama's face went cold even though her heartfire was
hot.

"That's the wickedest thing anybody ever said in my presence," said
Mama.  Then she took up the basket of corruption from the table and
carried it outside.

"Bloody Mary bites my hand," said little Peggy.

"We'll see what bites," said Papa.  "For leaving the eggs I give you one
whack, because I reckon that lunatic hen looks fearsome to a frog-size
girl like you.  But for telling lies I give you ten whacks."

Little Peggy cried in earnest at that news.  Papa gave an honest count
and full measure in everything, but most especially in whacks.

Papa took the hazel rod off the high shelf.  He kept it up there ever
since little Peggy put the old one in the fire and burnt it right up.

"I'd rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths from you, Daughter,
than one soft and easy lie," said he, and then he bent over and laid on
with the rod across her thighs.  Whick whick whick, she counted every
one, they stung her to the heart, each one of them, they were so full of
anger.  Worst of all she knew it was all unfair because his heartfire
raged for a different cause altogether, and it always did.

Papa's hate for wickedness always came from his most secret memory.
Little Peggy didn't understand it all, because it was twisted up and
confused and Papa didn't remember it right well himself All little Peggy
ever saw plain was that it was a lady and it wasn't Mama.

Papa thought of that lady whenever something went wrong.  When baby
Missy died of nothing at all, and then the next baby also named Missy
died of pox, and then the barn burnt down once, and a cow died,
everything that went wrong made him think of that lady and he began to
talk about how much he hated wickedness and at those times the hazel rod
flew hard and sharp.

I'd rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths, that's what he said,
but little Peggy knew that there was one truth he didn't ever want to
hear, and so she kept it to herself.  She'd never shout it at him, even
if it made him break the hazel rod, cause whenever she thought of saying
aught about that lady, she kept picturing her father dead, and that was
a thing she never hoped to see for real.  Besides, the lady that haunted
his heartfire, she didn't have no clothes on, and little Peggy knew that
she'd be whipped for sure if she talked about people being naked.

So she took the whacks and cried till she could taste that her nose was
running.  Papa left the room right away, and Mama came back to fix up
breakfast for the blacksmith and the visitors and the hands, but neither
one said boo to her, just as if they didn't even notice.  She cried even
harder and louder for a minute, but it didn't help.  Finally she picked
up her Bugy from the sewing basket and walked all stiff-legged out to
Oldpappy's cabin and woke him right up.

He listened to her story like he always did.

"I know about Bloody Mary," he said, "and I told your papa fifty times
if I told him once, wring that chicken's neck and be done.  She's a
crazy bird.  Every week or so she gets crazy and breaks all her own
eggs, even the ones ready to hatch.  Kills her own chicks.  it's a
lunatic what kills its own."

"Papa like to killed me, " said little Peggy.

:,I reckon if you can walk somewhat it ain't so bad altogether."

,:I can't walk much."

No, I can see you're nigh crippled forever," said Oldpappy.  "But I tell
you what, the way I see it your mama and your papa's mostly mad at each
other.  So why don't you just disappear for a couple of hours?"

"I wish I could turn into a bird and fly."

"Next best thing, though," said Pappy, "is to have a secret place where
nobody knows to look for you.  Do you have a place like that?

No, don't tell me-it wrecks it if you tell even a single other person.

You just go to that place for a while.  As long as it's a safe place,
not out in the woods where a Red might take your pretty hair, and not a
high place where you might fall off, and not a tiny place where you
might get stuck."

"It's big and it's low and it ain't in the woods," said little Peggy.

"Then you go there, Maggie."

Little Peggy made the face she always made when Oldpappy called her
that.  And she held up Bugy and in Bugy's squeaky high voice she said,
"Her name is Peggy."

"You go there, Piggy, if you like that better-" Little Peggy slapped
Bugy right across Oldpappy's knee.

"Someday Bugy'll do that once too often and have a rupture and die,"
said Oldpappy.

But Bugy just danced right in his face and insisted, "Not piggy, Peggy!
"

"That's right, Puggy, you go to that secret place and if anybody says,
We got to go find that girl, I'll say, I know where she is and she'll
come back when she's good and ready."

Little Peggy ran for the cabin door and then stopped and turned.

"Oldpappy, you're the nicest grown-up in the whole world."

"Your papa has a different view of me, but that's all tied up with
another hazel rod that I laid hand on much too often.  Now run along."

She stopped again right before she closed the door.  "You're the only
nice grown-up!" She shouted it real loud, halfway hoping that they could
hear it clear inside the house.  Then she was gone, right across the
garden, out past the cow pasture, up the hill into the woods, and along
the path to the spring house.

Wagon People

They had one good wagon, these folks did, and two good horses Pulling
it.  One might even suppose they was prosperous, considering they had
six big boys, from mansize on down to twins that had wrestled each other
into being a good deal stronger than their dozen years.

Not to mention one big daughter and a whole passel of little girls.  A
big family.  Right prosperous if you didn't know that not even a year
ago they had owned a mill and lived in a big house on a streambank in
west New Hampshire.  Come down far in the world, they had, and this
wagon was all they had left of everything.  But they were hopeful,
trekking west along the roads that crossed the Ohio, heading for open
land that was free for the taking.  If you were a family with plenty of
strong backs and clever hands, it'd be good land, too, as long as the
weather was with them and the Reds didn't raid them and all the lawyers
and bankers stayed in New England.

The father was a big man, a little run to fat, which was no surprise
since millers mostly stood around all day.  That softness in the belly
wouldn't last a year on a deepwoods homestead.  He didn't care much
about that, anyway-he had no fear of hard work.  What worried him today
was his wife, Faith.  It was her time -for that baby, he knew it. Not
that she'd ever talk about it direct.  Women just don't speak about
things like that with men.  But he knew how big she was and how many
months it had been.  Besides, at the noon stop she murmured to him,
"Alvin Miller, if there's a road house along this way, or even a little
broken-down cabin, I reckon I could use a bit of rest." A man didn't
have to be a philosopher to understand her.  And after six sons and six
daughters, he'd have to have the brains of a brick not to get the drift
of how things stood with her.

So he sent off the oldest boy, Vigor, to run ahead on the road and see
the lay of the land.

You could tell they were from New England, cause the boy didn't own a
gun.  If there'd been a bushwhacker the young man never would've made it
back, and the fact he came back with all his hair no Red had spotted
him-the French up Detroit way was paying for English scalps with liquor
and if a Red saw a White man alone in the woods with no musket he'd own
that White man's scalp.

So maybe a man could think that luck was with the family at last.

But since these Yankees had no notion that the road wasn't safe, Alvin
Miller didn't think for a minute of his good luck.

Vigor's word was of a road house three miles on.  That was good news,
except that between them and that road house was a river. Kind of a
scrawny river, and the ford was shallow, but Alvin Miller had learned
never to trust water.  No matter how peaceful it looks, it'll reach and
try to take you.  He was halfway minded to tell Faith that they'd spend
the night this side of the river, but she gave just the tiniest groan
and at that moment he knew that there was no chance of that.  Faith had
borne him a dozen living children, but it was four years since the last
one and a lot of women took it bad, having a baby so late.  A lot of
women died.  A good road house meant women to help with the birthing, so
they'd have to chance the river.

And Vigor did say the river wasn't much.

SPRING House

The air in the spring house was cool and heavy, dark and wet.

Sometimes when little Peggy caught a nap here, she woke up gasping like
as if the whole place was under water.  She had dreams of water even
when she wasn't here-that was one of the things that made some folks say
she was a seeper instead of a torch.  But when she dreamed outside, she
always knew she was dreaming.  Here the water was real.

Real in the drips that formed like sweat on the milk ars setting in the
stream.  Real in the cold damp clay of the spring house floor. Real in
the swallowing sound of the stream as it hurried through the middle of
the house.

Keeping it cool all summer long, cold water spilling right out of the
hill and into this place, shaded all the way by trees so old the moon
made a point of passing through their branches just to hear some good
old tales.  That was what little Peggy always came here for, even when
Papa didn't hate her.  Not the wetness of the air, she could do just
fine without that.  It was the way the fire went right out of her and
she didn't have to be a torch.  Didn't have to see into all the dark
places where folks hid theirselfs.

From her they hid theirselfs as if it would do some good.

Whatever they didn't like most about theirself they tried to tuck away
in some dark corner but they didn't know how all them dark places burned
in little Peggy's eyes.  Even when she was so little that she spit out
her corn mash cause she was still hoping for a suck, she knew all the
stories that the folks around her kept all hid.  She saw the bits of
their past that they most wished they could bury, and she saw the bits
of their future that they most feared.

And that was why she took to coming up here to the spring house.

Here she didn't have to see those things.  Not even the lady in Papa's
memory.  There was nothing here but the heavy wet dark cool air to
quench the fire and dim the light so she could be-just for a few minutes
in the day-a little five-year-old girl with a straw puppet named Bugy
and not even have to think about any of them grown-up secrets.

I'm not wicked, she told herself.  Again and again, but it didn't work
because she knew she was.

All right then, she said to herself, I am wicked.  But I won't be wicked
anymore.  I'll tell the truth like Papa says, or I'll say nothing at
all.

Even at five years old, little Peggy knew that if she kept that vow,
she'd be better off saying nothing.

So she said nothing, not even to herself, just lay there on a mossy damp
table with Bugy clenched tight enough to strangle in her fist.

Ching ching ching.

Little Peggy woke up and got mad for just a minute.

Ching ching ching.

Made her mad because nobody said to her, Little Peggy, you don't mind if
we talk this young blacksmith teller into settling down here, do you?

Not at all, Papa, she would've said if they'd asked.  She knew what it
meant to have a smithy.  It meant your village would thrive, and folks
from other places would come, and when they came there'd be trade, and
where there was trade then her father's big house could be a forest inn,
and where there was a forest inn then all the roads would kind of bend a
little just to pass the place, if it wasn't too far out of the
way-little Peggy knew all that, as sure as the children of farmers knew
the rhythms of the farm.  A road house by a smithy was a road house that
would prosper.  So she would've said, Sure enough, let him stay, deed
him land, brick his chimney, feed him free, let him have my bed so I
have to double up with Cousin Peter who keeps trying to peek under my
nightgown, I'll put up with all that-just as long as you don't put him
near the spring house so that all the time, even when I want to be alone
with the water, there's that whack thump hiss roar, noise all the time,
and a fire burning up the sky to turn it black, and the smell of
charcoal burning.  It was enough to make a body wish to follow the
stream right back into the mountain just to get some peace.

Of Course the stream was the smart place to put the blacksmith.

Except for water, he could've put his smithy anywheres at all.

The iron came to him in the shipper's wagon clear from New Netherland,
and the charcoal-well, there was plenty of farmers willing to trade
charcoal for a good shoe.  But water, that's what the smith needed that
nobody'd bring him, so of course they put him right down the hill from
the spring house where his ching ching ching could wake her up and put
the tree back into her in the one place where she had used to be able to
let it burn low and go almost to cold wet ash.

A roar of thunder.

She was at the door in a second.  Had to see the lightning.

Caught just the last shadow of the light but she knew that there'd be
more.  It wasn't much after noon, surely, or had she slept all day?

What with all these blackbelly clouds she couldn't tell-it might as well
be the last minutes of dusk.  The air was all a-prickle with lightning
just waiting to flash.  She knew that feeling, knew that it meant the
lightning'd hit close.

She looked down to see if the blacksmith's stable was still full of
horses.  It was.  The shoeing wasn't done, the road would turn to muck,
and so the farmer with his two sons from out West Fork way was stuck
here.  Not a chance they'd head home in this, with lightning ready to
put a fire in the woods, or knock a tree down on them, or maybe just
smack them a good one and lay them all out dead in a circle like them
five Quakers they still was talking about and here it happened back in
'90 when the first white folks came to settle here.

People talked still about the Circle of Five and all that, some people
wondering if God up and smashed them flat so as to shut the Quakers UP,
seeing how nothing else ever could, while other people was wondering if
God took them up into heaven like the first Lord Protector Oliver
Cromwell who was smote by lightning at the age of ninety-seven and just
disappeared.

No, that farmer and his big old boys'd stay another night.  Little Peggy
was an innkeeper's daughter, wasn't she?  Papooses learnt to hunt,
pickaninnies learnt to tote, farmer children learnt the weather, and an
innkeeper's daughter learnt which folks would stay the night, even
before they knew it right theirselfs.

Their horses were chomping in the stable, snorting and warning each
other about the storm.  In every group of horses, little Peggy figgered,
there must be one that's remarkable dumb, so all the others have to tell
him what all's going on.  Bad storm, they were saying.

We're going to get a soaking, if the lightning don't smack us first. And
the dumb one kept nickering and saying, What's that noise, what's that
noise?

Then the sky just opened right up and dumped water on the earth.
Stripped leaves right off the trees, it came down so hard.  Came down so
thick, too, that little Peggy couldn't even see the smithy for a minute
and she thought maybe it got washed right away into the stream. Oldpappy
told her how that stream led right down to the Hatrack River, and the
Hatrack poured right into the Ohio, and the Ohio shoved itself on
through the woods to the Mizzipy, which went on down into the sea, and
Olapappy said how the sea drank so much water that it got indigestion
and gave off the biggest old belches You ever heard, and what came up
was clouds. Belches from the sea, and now the smithy would float all
that way, get swallered up and belched out, and someday she'd just be
minding her own business and that smithy down as neat as you cloud would
break up and plo

please, old Makepeace Smith still ching ching chinging away.

Then the rain slacked off a mite and she looked down to see the smithy
still there.  But that wasn't what she saw at all.  No, what she was
sparks of fire way off in the forest, downstream toward the saw Hatrack,
down where the ford was, only there wasn't a chance of taking the ford
today, with this rain.  sparks, lots of sparks, and she knew every one
of them was folks.  She didn't hardly think of doing it anymore, she
only had to see their heartfires and she was looking close.  Maybe
future, maybe past, all the visions lived together in the heartfire.

What she saw right now was the same in all their hearts.  A wagon in the
middle of the Hatrack, with the water rising and everything they owned
in all the world in that wagon.

Little Peggy didn't talk much, but everybody knew she was a torch, so
they listened whenever she spoke up about trouble.  Specially this kind
of trouble.  Sure the settlements in these Parts were Pretty Old now, a
fair bit older than little Peggy herself, but they hadn't forgotten yet
that anybody's wagon caught in a flood is everybody's loss.

She fairly flew down that grassy hill, jumping gopher holes and sliding
the steep places, so it wasn't twenty seconds from seeing those far-off
heartfires till she was speaking right up in the smithy's shop.

That farmer from West Fork at first wanted to make her wait till he was
done with telling stories about worse storms he'd seen.  But Makepeace
knew all about little Peggy.  He just listened right up and then told
those boys to saddle them horses, shoes or no shoes, there time for
foolin' was gone, folks were caught in the Hatrack. Little Peggy didn't
even get a chance to see them go-Makepeace already sent her off to the
big house to fetch her father and all the hands and visitors there.
Wasn't a one of them who hadn't once put all they owned in the world
into a wagon and dragged it west across the mountain roads and down into
this forest.  Wasn't a one of them who hadn't felt a river sucking at
that wagon, wanting to steal it away.  They all got right to it.  That's
the way it was then, you see.

Folks noticed other people's trouble every bit as quick as if it was
their own.

Vigor led the boys in trying to push the wagon, while Eleanor hawed the
horses.  Alvin Miller spent his time carrying the little girls one by
one to safety on the far shore.  The current was a devil clawing at him,
whispering, I'll have your babies, I'll have them all, but Alvin said
no, with every muscle in his body as he strained shoreward he said no to
that whisper, till his girls stood all bedraggled on the bank with rain
streaming down their faces like the tears from all the grief in the
world.

He would have carried Faith, too, baby in her belly and all, but she
wouldn't budge.  Just sat inside that wagon, bracing herself against the
trunks and furniture as the wagon tipped and rocked.

Lightning crashed and branches broke; one of them tore the canvas and
the water poured into the wagon but Faith held on with white knuckles
and her eyes staring out.  Alvin knew from her eyes there wasn't a thing
he could say to make her let go.  There was only one way to get Faith
and her unborn baby out of that river, and that was to get the wagon
out.

"Horses can't get no purchase, Papa," Vigor shouted.  "They're just
stumbling and bound to break a leg."

"Well we can't pull out without the horses!"

"The horses are something, Papa.  We leave 'em in here and we'll lose
wagon and horses too!"

"Your mama won't leave that wagon."

He saw understanding in Vigor's eyes.  The things in the wagon weren't
worth a risk of death to save them.  But Mama was.

"Still," Vigor said.  "On shore the team could pull strong.  Here in the
water they can't do a thing."

"Set the boys to unhitching them.  But first tie a line to a tree to
hold that wagon!"

It wasn't two minutes before the twins Wastenot and Wantnot were on the
shore making the rope fast to a stout tree.  David and Measure made
another line fast to the rig that held the horses, while Calm cut the
strands that held them to the wagon.  Good boys, doing their work just
right, Vigor shouting directions while Alvin could only watch, helpless
at the back of the wagon, looking now at Faith who was trying not to
have the baby, now at the Hatrack River that was trying to push them all
down to hell.

Not much of a river, Vigor had said, but then the clouds came up and the
rain came down and the Hatrack became something after all.

Even so it looked passable when they got to it.  The horses strode in
strong, and Alvin was just saying to Calm, who had the reins, "Well, we
made it not a minute to spare," when the river went insane.  It doubled
in speed and strength all in a moment, and the horses got panicky and
lost direction and started pulling against each other.  The boys all
hopped into the river and tried to lead them to shore but by then the
wagon's momentum had been lost and the wheels were mired up and stuck
fast.  Almost as if the river knew they were coming and saved up its
worst fury till they were already in it and couldn't get away.

"Look out!  Look out!" screamed Measure from the shore.

Alvin looked upstream to see what devilment the river had in mind, and
there was a whole tree floating down the river, endwise like a battering
ram, the root end pointed at the center of the wagon, straight at the
place where Faith was sitting, her baby on the verge of birth.  Alvin
couldn't think of anything to do, couldn't think at all, just screamed
his wife's name with all his strength.  Maybe in his heart he thought
that by holding her name on his lips he could keep her alive, but there
was no hope of that, no hope at all.

Except that Vigor didn't know there was no hope.  Vigor leapt out when
the tree was no more than a rod away, his body falling against it just
above the root.  The momentum of his leap turned it a little, then
rolled it over, rolled it and turned it away from the wagon.  Of course
Vigor rolled with it, pulled right under the water-but it worked, the
root end of the tree missed the wagon entirely, and the shaft of the
trunk struck it a sidewise blow.

The tree bounded across the stream and smashed up against a boulder on
the bank.  Alvin was five rods off, but in his memory from then on, he
always saw it like as if he'd been right there.  The tree crashing into
the boulder, and Vigor between them.  Just a split second that lasted a
lifetime, Vigor's eyes wide with surprise, blood already leaping out of
his mouth, spattering out onto the tree that killed him.

Then the Hatrack River swept the tree out into the current.

Vigor slipped under the water, all except his arm, all tangled in the
roots, which stuck up into the air for all the world like a neighbor
waving good-bye after a visit.

Alvin was so intent on watching his dying son that he didn't even notice
what was happening to his own self.  The blow from the tree was enough
to dislodge the mired wheels, and the current picked up the wagon,
carried it downstream, Alvin clinging to the tailgate, Faith weeping
inside, Eleanor screaming her lungs out from the driver's seat, and the
boys on the bank shouting something.  Shouting, "Hold!

Hold!  Hold!"

The rope held, one end tied to a strong tree, the other end tied to the
wagon, it held.  The river couldn't tumble the wagon downstream; instead
it swung the wagon in to shore the way a boy swings a rock on a string,
and when it came to a shuddering stop it was right against the bank, the
front end facing upstream.

"It held!" cried the boys.

"Thank God!" shouted Eleanor.

"The baby's coming," whispered Faith.

But Alvin, all he could hear was the single faint cry that had been the
last sound from the throat of his firstborn son, all he could see was
the way his boy clung to the tree as it rolled and rolled in the water,
and all he could say was a single word, a single command.

"Live," he murmured.  Vigor had always obeyed him before.  Hard worker,
willing companion, more a friend or brother than a son.  But this time
he knew his son would disobey.  Still he whispered it.

"Live."

"Are we safe?" said Faith, her voice trembling.

Alvin turned to face her, tried to strike the grief from his face.

No sense her knowing the price that Vigor paid to save her and the baby.

Time enough to learn of that after the baby was born.  "Can you climb
out of the wagon?"

"What's wrong." asked Faith, looking at his face.

"I took a fright.  Tree could have killed us.  Can you climb out, now
that we're up against the bank?"

Eleanor leaned in from the front of the wagon.  "David and Calm are on
the bank, they can help you up.  The rope's holding, Mama, but who can
say how long if we know you're safe on shore."

"The baby's coming," said Faith.

"Better on shore than here," said Alvin sharply.

Faith stood up, clambered awkwardly to the front.  Alvin climbed through
the wagon behind her, to help her if she should stumble.

Even he could see how her belly had dropped.  The baby must be grabbing
for air already.

On the bank it wasn't just David and Calm, now.  There were strangers,
big men, and several horses.  Even one small wagon, and that was a
welcome sight.  Alvin had no notion who these men were, or how they knew
to come and help, but there wasn't a moment to waste on introductions.

"You men!  Is there a midwife in the road house?"

"Goody Guester does with birthing," said a man.  A big man, with arms
like oxlegs.  A blacksmith, surely.

"Can you take my wife in that wagon?  There's not a Moment to spare."
Alvin knew it was a shameful thing, for men to speak so openly of
birthing, right in front of the woman who was set to bear.

But Faith was no fool she knew what mattered most, and getting her to a
bed and a competent midwife was more important than Pussyfooting around
about it.

David and Calm were careful as they helped their mother outa the waiting
wagon.  Faith was staggering with pain.  Women in labor or dying
Shouldn't have to step from a wagon seat up onto a riverbank, that was
sure.  Eleanor was right behind her, taking charge as if she wasn't
younger than all the boys except the twins.  "Measure!  Get the girls
together.  They're riding in the wagon with us.  You too, Wastenot and
WantnOt!  I know You can help the big boys but I need You to watch the
girls while I'm with Mother." Eleanor was never one to be trifled with,
and the gravity of the situation was such that they didn't even call her
Eleanor of Aquitaine as they obeyed.  Even the little girls mostly gave
over their squabbling and got right on.

Eleanor paused a moment on the bank and looked back to where her father
stood on the wagon seat.  She glanced downstream, then looked back at
him.  Alvin understood the question, and he shook his head no.

Faith was not to know of Vigor's sacrifice.  Tears came unwelcome to
Alvin's eyes, but not to Eleanor's.  Eleanor was only fourteen, but when
she didn't want to cry, she didn't cry.

Wastenot hawed the horse and the little wagon lurched forward, "Go on,
Mother, just a step," said Alvin.  "We'll do better with the

"Go now."

Faith wincing as the girls patted her and the rain poured.

Faith's gaze was somber as a cow's, and as mindless, looking back at her
husband, back at the river.  At times like birthing, Alvin thought, a
woman mesa beast, slack-minded as her body takes over and does its beco
work.  How else could she bear the pain?  As if the soul of the earth
possessed her the way it owns the souls of animals, making her part of
the life of the whole world, unhitching her from family, from husband,
from all the reins of the human race, leading her into the valley of
ripeness and harvest and reaping and bloody death.

"She'll be safe now," the blacksmith said.  "And we have horses here to
pull your wagon out."

"It's slacking off," said Measure.  "The rain is less, and the current's
not so strong."

"As soon as your wife stepped ashore, it eased up," said the
farmerlooking teller.  "The rain's dying, that's sure."

"You took the worst of it in the water," said the blacksmith.

"But you're all right now.  Get hold of yourself, man, there's work to
do."

Only then did Alvin come to himself enough to realize that he was
crying.  Work to do, that's right, get hold of yourself, Alvin Miller.

You're no weakling, to bawl like a baby.  Other men have lost a dozen
children and still live their lives.  You've had twelve, and Vigor lived
to be a man, though he never did get to marry and have children of his
own.  Maybe Alvin had to weep because Vigor died so nobly; maybe he
cried because it was so sudden.

David touched the blacksmith's arm.  "Leave him be for a minute," he
said'softly.  "Our oldest brother was carried off not ten minutes back.
He got tangled in a tree floating down."

"It wasn't no tangle, " Alvin said sharply.  "He jumped that tree and
saved our wagon, and your mother inside it!  That river paid him back,
that's what it did, it punished him."

Calm spoke quietly to the local men.  "It run him up against that
boulder there." They all looked.  There wasn't even a smear of blood on
the rock, it seemed so innocent.

"The Hatrack has a mean streak in it," said the blacksmith, "but I never
seen this river so riled up before.  I'm sorry about your boy.

There's a slow, flat place downstream where he's bound to fetch up.

Everything the river catches ends up there.  When the storm lets up, we
can go down and bring him back.

Alvin wiped his eyes on his sleeve, but since his sleeve was soaking wet
it didn't do much good.  "Give me a minute more and I can pull my
weight," said Alvin.

They hitched two more horses and the four beasts had no trouble pulling
the wagon out against the much weakened current.  By the time the wagon
was set to rights again on the road, the sun was even breaking through.

"Wouldn't you know," said the blacksmith.  "If you ever don't like the
weather hereabouts, you just set a spell, cause it'll change."

"Not this one," said Alvin.  "This storm was laid in wait for us.

The blacksmith put his arm across Alvin's shoulder and spoke real
gentle.  "No offense, mister, but that's crazy talk."

Alvin shrugged him off.  "That storm and that river wanted us.

"Papa," said David, "you're tired and grieving.  Best be still till we
get to the road house and see how Mama is."

"My baby is a boy," said Papa.  "You'll see.  He would have been the
seventh son of a seventh son."

That got their attention, right enough, that blacksmith and the other
men as well.  Everybody knew a seventh son had certain gifts, but the
seventh son of a seventh son was about as powerful a birth as you could
have.

"That makes a difference," said the blacksmith.  "He'd have been a born
dowser, sure, and water hates that." The others nodded sagely.

"The water had its way," said Alvin.  "Had its way, and all done.

It would've killed Faith and the baby, if it could.  But since it
couldn't, why, it killed my boy Vigor.  And now when the baby comes,
he'll be the sixth son, cause I'll only have five living."

"Some says it makes no difference if the first six be alive or not,"
said a farmer.

Alvin said nothing, but he knew it made all the difference.  He had
thought this baby would be a miracle child, but the river had taken care
of that.  If water don't stop you one way, it stops you another.

He shouldn't have hoped for a miracle child.  The cost was too high.

All his eyes could see, all the way home, was Vigor dangling in the
grasp of the roots, tumbling through the current like a leaf caught up
in a dust devil, with the blood seeping from his mouth to slake the
Hatrack's murderous thirst.

Little Peggy stood in the window, looking on and could see all those
heartfires, especially one, one so bright it was like the sun when she
looked at it.  But there was a blackness all around them.  No, not even
black-a nothingness, like a part of the universe God hadn't finished
making, and it swept around those lights as if to tear them from each
other, sweep them away, swallow them up.

Little Peggy knew what that nothingness was.  Those times when her eyes
saw the hot yellow heartfires, there were three other colors, too.

The rich dark orange of the earth.  The thin grey color of the air. And
the deep black emptiness of water.  It was the water that tore at them
now.  The river, only she had never seen it so black, so strong, SO
terrible.  The heartfires were so tiny in the night.

"What do you see, child?" asked Old pappy.

"The river's going to carry them away,"

"I hope not."

Little Peggy began to cry.

"There, child," said Oldpappy.  "It ain't always such a grand thing to
see afar off like that, is it."

She shook her head.

"But maybe it won't happen as bad as you think."

Just at that moment, she saw one of the heartfires break away and tumble
off into the dark.  "Oh!" she cried out, reaching as if her hand could
snatch the light and put it back.  But of course she couldn't.  Her
vision was long and clear, but her reach was short.

"Are they lost?" asked Oldpappy.

"One," whispered little Peggy.

"Haven't Makepeace and the others got there yet?"

"Just now," she said.  "The rope held.  They're safe now."

Oldpappy didn't ask her how she knew, or what she saw.  Just patted her
shoulder.  "Because you told them.  Remember that, HATRACK RIVER almost
got another.  But if you hadn't seen and sent help, they might all have
died."

She shook her head.  "I should've seen them sooner, Oldpappy, but I fell
asleep."

"And you blame yourself?" asked Oldpappy.

"I should've let Bloody Mary nip me, and then Father wouldn't have been
mad, and then I wouldn't have been in the spring house, and then I
wouldn't have been asleep, and then I would've sent help in time-"

"We can all make daisy chains of blame like that, Maggie.  It don't mean
a thing."

But she knew it meant something.  You don't blame blind people cause
they don't warn You you're about to step on a snake-but you sure blame
somebody with eyes who doesn't say a word about it.  She knew her duty
ever since she first realized that other folks couldn't see all that she
could see.  God gave her special eyes, so she'd better see and give
warning, or the devil would take her soul.  The devil or the deep black
sea.

"Don't mean a thing," Oldpappy murmured.  Then, like he just been poked
in the behind with a ramrod, he went all straight and said, "Spring
house!  Spring house, of course." He pulled her close.

"Listen to me, little Peggy.  It wasn't none of your fault, and that's
the truth.

The same water that runs in the Hatrack flows in the spring house brook,
it's all the same water, all through the world.  The same water that
wanted them dead, it knew you could give warning and send help.

So it sang to you and sent you off to sleep.  It made a kind of sense to
her, it sure did.  "How can that be, Oldpappy?"

"Oh, that's just in the nature of it.  The'whole universe is made of
only four kinds of stuff, little Peggy, and each one wants to have its
own way." Peggy thought of the four colors that she saw when the
heartfires glowed, and she knew what all four were even as Oldpappy
named them.  "Fire makes things hot and bright and uses them up.

Air makes things cool and sneaks in everywhere.  Earth makes things
solid and sturdy, so they'll last.  But water, it tears things down, it
falls from the sky and carries off everything it can, carries it off and
down to the sea.  If the water had its way, the whole world would be
smooth, just a big ocean with nothing out of the water's reach.  All
dead and smooth.  That's why you slept.  The water wants to tear down
these strangers, whoever they are, tear them down and kill them.  It's a
miracle you woke up at all."

Seventh Son

"The blacksmith's hammer woke me," said little Peggy.

,That's it, then, you see?  The blacksmith was working with iron, the
hardest earth, and with a fierce blast of air from the bellows, and with
a fire so hot it burns the grass outside the chimney.  The water
couldn't touch him to keep him still."

Little Peggy could hardly believe it, but it must be so.  The blackh had
drawn her from a watery sleep.  The sinit smith had helped her.

Why, it was enough to make you laugh, to know the blacksmith was her
friend this time.

There was shouting on the porch downstairs, and doors opened and closed.
"Some folks is here already," said Oldpappy.

Little Peggy saw the heartfires downstairs, and found the one with the
strongest fear and pain.  "It's their mama," said little Peggy.

"She's got a baby coming."

"Well, if that ain't the luck of it.  Lose one, and here already is a
baby to replace death with life." Oldpappy shambled on out to go
downstairs and help.

Little Peggy, though, she just stood there, looking at what she saw in
the distance.  That lost heartfire wasn't lost at all, and that was
sure.  She could see it burning away far off, despite how the darkness
of the river tried to cover it.  He wasn't dead, just carried off, and
maybe somebody could help him.  She ran out then, passed Oldpappy all in
a rush, clattered down the stairs.

Mama caught her by the arm as she was running into the great room.

"There's a birthing," Mama said, "and we need you."

"But Mama, the one that went down river, he's still alive!"

"Peggy, we got no time for-" Two boys with the same face pushed their
way into the conversation.  "The one down river!" cried one.

"Still alive!" cried the other.

"How do you know!"

"He can't be!"

They spoke so all on top of each other that Mama had to hush them up
just to hear them.  "It was Vigor, our big brother, he got swept away-"

"Well he's alive," said little Peggy, "but the river's got him."

The twins looked to Mama for confirmation.  "She know what she's talking
about, Goody Guester?"

Mama nodded, and the boys raced for the door, shouting, "He's alive!
He's still alive!"

"Are you sure?" asked Mama fiercely.  "It's a cruel thing, to put hope
in their hearts like that, if it ain't so."

Mama's flashing eyes made little Peggy afraid, and she couldn't think
what to say.

By then, though, Oldpappy had come up from behind.  "Now Peg," he said,
"how would she know one was taken by the river, lessun she saw?"

"I know," said Mama.  "But this woman's been holding off birth too long,
and I got a care for the baby, so come on now, little Peggy, I need you
to tell me what you see.  She led little Peggy into the bedroom off the
kitchen, the place where Papa and Mama slept whenever there were
visitors.  The woman lay on the bed, holding tight to the hand of a tall
girl with deep and solemn eyes.  Little Peggy didn't know their faces,
but she recognized their fires, especially the mother's pain and fear.

"Someone was shouting," whispered the mother.

"Hush now," said Mama.

"About him still alive."

The solemn girl raised her eyebrows, looked at Mama.  "Is that so, Goody
Guester?"

"My daughter is a torch.  That's why I brung her here in this room. To
see the baby."

"Did she see my boy?  Is he alive?"

"I thought you didn't tell her, Eleanor," said Mama.

The solemn girl shook her head.

"Saw from the wagon.  Is he alive?"

"Tell her, Margaret," said Mama.

Little Peggy turned and looked for his heartfire.  There were no walls
when it came to this kind of seeing.  His flame was still there though
she knew it was afar off.  This time, though, she drew near 'M' the way
she had, took a close look.  "He's in the water.  He's all tangled in
the roots."

"Vigor!" cried the mother on the bed.

"The river wants him.  The river says, Die, die."

Mama touched the woman's arm.  "The twins have gone off to tell the
others.  There'll be a search party."

"In the dark!" whispered the woman scornfully.

Little Peggy spoke again.  "He's saying a prayer, I think.  He's
sayingeventh son."

"Seventh son," whispered Eleanor.

"What does that mean?" asked Mama.

,if this baby's a boy," said Eleanor, "and he's born while Vigor's still
alive, then he's the seventh son of a seventh son, and all of them
alive- Mama gasped.  "No wonder the river-" she said.  No need to finish
the thought.  Instead she took little Peggy's hands and led her to the
woman on the bed.  "Look at this baby, and see what you see."

Little Peggy had done this before, of course.  It was the chief use they
had for torches, to have them look at an unborn baby just at the
birthing time.  Partly to see how it lay in the womb, but also because
sometimes a torch could see who the baby was, what it would be, could
tell stories of times to come.  Even before she touched the woman's
belly, she could see the baby's heartfire.  It was the one that she had
seen before, that burned so hot and bright that it was like the sun and
the moon, to compare it to the mother's fire.  "It's a boy," she said.

"Then let me bear this baby," said the mother.  "Let him breathe while
Vigor still breathes!"

"How's the baby set?" asked Mama.

"Just right," said little Peggy.

"Head first?  Face down?"

Little Peggy nodded.

"Then why won't it come?" demanded Mama.

"She's been telling him not to," said little Peggy, looking at the
mother.

"In the wagon," the mother said.  "He was coming, and I did a
beseeching."

"Well you should have told me right off," said Mama sharply.

"Speck me to help you and you don't even tell me he's got a beseeching
on him.  You, girl!"

Several young ones were standing near the wall, wide-eyed, and they
didn't know which one she meant.

"Any of you, I need that iron key from the ring on the wall."

The biggest of them took it clumsily from the hook and brought it, ring
and all.

Mama dangled the large ring and the key over the mother's belly,
chanting softly: "Here's the circle, open wide, Here's the key to get
outside, Earth be iron, flame be fair, Fall from water into air."

The mother cried out in sudden agony.  Mama tossed away the key, cast
back the sheet, lifted the woman's knees, and ordered little Pegg
fiercely to see.  y Little Peggy touched the woman's womb.  The boy's
mind was empty, except for a feeling of pressure and gathering cold as
he emerged into the air.  But the very emptiness of his mind let her see
things that would never be plainly visible again.  The billion billion
paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices,
for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million
futures every second.  The future was there in everyone, a flickering
shadow that she could only sometimes see, and never clearly, looking
through the thoughts of the present moment; but here, for a few precious
moments, little Peggy could see them sharp.

And what she saw was death down every path.  Drowning, drowning, every
path of his future led this child to a watery death.

"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
reath, 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 Ele or ca ed 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 tonguelashing.  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 babyg 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 lifeShe 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 "I
hate roast chicken, too."

wings."

"Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?"

"Nope."

"Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner
that'U 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.

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 LoRa-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 LoflaWossiky 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 sick?" 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.  "Al!" 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.  "Nstress 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, l' "About hexes
and doodles and charms and besmhings and such"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-"

"They're not likely to teach you about that in university, now, are
"Well looky there, that's my point," she said triumphantly.

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 bumps9" 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, Reverend, 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 cursedit 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 ve 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.

Then Thrower's vision of America turned from bleak to black indeed.  He
saw that war was coming to America with the new century.

In his vision, he foresaw that the King of France would send that
obnoxious Corsican colonel, Bonaparte, to Canada, and his people would
stir up the Reds from the French fortress town in Detroit.  The Reds
would fall upon the settlers and destroy them; scum they might be, but
they were mostly English scum, and the vision of the Reds' savagery made
Thrower's skin crawl.

Yet even if the English won, the overall result would be the same.

America west of the Appalachees would never be a Christian land.

Either the damned Papist French and Spanish would have it, or the
equally damned heathen Reds would keep it, or else the most depraved
sort of Englishmen would thrive and thumb their noses at Christ and the
Lord Protector alike.  Another whole continent would be lost to the
knowledge of the Lord Jesus.  It was such a fearsome vision that Thrower
cried out, thinking none would hear him in the confines of his little
room.

But someone did hear him.  "There's a LIFE's work for a man of God,"
said someone behind him.  Thrower turned at once, startled; but the
voice was gentle and warm, the face old and kindly, and Thrower was not
afraid for more than a moment, despite the fact that the door and window
were both locked tight, and no natural man could have come inside his
little room.

Thinking that this man was surely a part of the manifestation he had
just seen, Thrower addressed him reverently.  "Sir, whoever you are, I
have seen the future of North America, and it looks like the victory of
the devil to me."

"The devil takes his victories," the man replied, "wherever men of God
lose heart, and leave the field to him."

Then the man simply was not there.

Thrower had known in that moment what the work of his life would be.  To
come to the wilds of America, build a country church, and fight the
devil in his own country.  It had taken him three years to get the money
and the permission of his superiors in the Scottish Church, but now he
was here, the posts and beams of his church were rising, their white and
naked wood a bright rebuke to the dark forest of barbarism from which
they had been hewn.

Of course, with such a magnificent work under way, the devil was bound
to take notice.  And it was obvious that the devil's chief disciple in
Vigor Township was Alvin Miller.  Even though all his sons were here,
helping to build the churchhouse, Thrower knew that this was Faith's
doing.  The woman had even allowed as how she was probably Church of
Scotland in her heart, even though she was born in Massachusetts; her
membership would mean that Thrower could look forward to having a
congregation-provided Alvin Miller could be kept from wrecking
everything.

And wreck it he would.  It was one thing if Alvin had been offended by
something Thrower had inadvertently said and done.  But to have the
quarrel be about belief in sorcery, right from the start-well, there was
no hiding from this conflict.  The battle lines were laid.

Thrower stood on the side of science and Christianity, and on the other
side stood all the powers of darkness and superstition; the bestial,
carnal nature of man was on the other side, with Alvin Miller as its
champion.  I am only at the beginning of my tournament for the Lord,
thought Thrower.  If I can't vanquish this first opponent, then no
victory will ever be possible for me.

"Pastor Thrower!" shouted Alvin's oldest boy, David.  "We're ready to
raise the ridgebeam!"

Thrower started toward them at a trot, then remembered his dignity and
walked the rest of the way.  There was nothing in the gospels to
indicate that the Lord ever ran-only walked, as befitted his high
station.

Of course, Paul had his comments about running a good race, but that was
allegory.  A minister was supposed to be a shadow Of Jesus Christ,
walking in His way and representing Him to the people.

It was the closest these people would ever come to beholding the bell
majesty of God.  It was Reverend Thrower's duty to deny the vitality of
his youth and walk at the reverent pace of an old man, though he was
only twenty-four.

,you mean to bless the ridgebeam, don't you?" asked one of the farmers.
it was Ole, a Swedish fellow from the banks of the Delaware, and so a
Lutheran at heart; but he was willing enough to help build a
Presbyterian Church here in the Wobbish valley, seeing how the nearest
church besides that was the Papist Cathedral in Detroit.

"I do indeed," said Thrower.  He laid his hand on the heavy, axehewn
beam.

"Reverend Thrower." It was a child's voice behind him, piercing and loud
as only a child's voice can be.  "Ain't it a kind of a charm, to give a
blessing to a piece of wood?"

Thrower turned around to see Faith Miller already hushing the boy.

Only six years old, but Alvin Junior was obviously going to grow up to
be just as much trouble as his father.  Maybe more-Alvin Senior had at
least had the good grace to stay away from the churchraising.

"You go on," said Faith.  "Never mind him.  I haven't learned him yet
when to speak and when to keep silence."

Even though his mother's hand was tight-clamped over his mouth, the
boy's eyes were steady, looking right at him.  And when Thrower turned
back around, he found that all the grown men were looking at him
expectantly.  The child's question was a challenge that he had to
answer, or he'd be branded a hypocrite or fool before the very men he
had come to convert.

"I suppose that if you think my blessing actually does something to
change the nature of the ridgebeam," he said, "that might be akin to
ensorcement.  But the truth is that the ridgebeam itself is just the
occasion.  Whom I'm really blessing is the congregation of Christians
who'll gather under this roof.  And there's nothing magic about that.

It's the power and love of God we're asking for, not a cure for warts or
a charm against the evil eye."

"Too bad," murmured a man.  "I could use a cure for warts."

They all laughed, but the danger was over.  When the ridgebeam went UP,
it would be a Christian act to raise it, not a pagan one.

He blessed the ridgebeam, taking care to change the usual prayer to one
that specifically did not confer any special properties upon the
ridgebeam itself.  Then the men tugged on the rope, and Thrower sang out
"O Lord Who on the Mighty Sea" at the top of his magnificent baritone
voice, to give them the rhythm and inspiration for their labors.

All the time, however, he was acutely aware of the boy Alvin Junior.  It
was not just because of the boy's embarrassing challenge a moment ago.
The child was as simple-minded as most childrenThrower doubted he had
any dire purpose in mind.  What drew him to the child was something else
entirely.  Not any property in the boy himself, but rather something
about the people near him.  They always seemed to keep him in attention.
Not that they always looked at him-that would be a full-time occupation,
he ran about so much.  It was as if they were always aware of him, the
way the college cook had always been aware of the dog in the kitchen,
never speaking to it, but stepping over and around it without so much as
pausing in his work.

It wasn't just the boy's family, either, that was so careful of him.

Everyone acted the same way-the Germans, the Scandinavians, the English,
newcomers and old-timers alike.  As if the raising of this boy were a
community project, like the raising of a church or the bridging of a
river.

"Easy, easy, easy!" shouted Wastenot, who was perched near the east
ridgepole to guide the heavy beam into place.  It had to be just so, for
the rafters to lean evenly against it and make a sturdy roof.

"Too far your way!" shouted Measure.  He was standing on scaffolding
above the crossbeam on which rested the short pole that would support
the two ridgebeams where they butted ends in the middle.

This was the most crucial point of the whole roof, and the trickiest to
get right; they had to lay the ends of two heavy beams onto a pole top
that was barely two palms wide.  That was why Measure stood there, for
he had grown into his name, keen-eyed and careful.

"Right!" shouted Measure.  "More!"

"My way again!" shouted Wastenot.

"Steady!" shouted Measure.

"Set!" shouted Wastenot.

Then "Set!" from Measure, too, and the men on the ground relaxed the
tension on the ropes.  As the lines went slack, they let out a cheer,
for the ridgebeam now went half the length of the church.  It was no
cathedral, but it was still a mighty thing to achieve in this benighted
place, the largest structure anyone had dared to think of for a hundred
miles around.  The mere fact of building it was a declaration that the
settlers were here to stay, and not French, not Spanish, not Cavaliers,
not Yankees, not even the savage Reds with their fire arrows, no man
would get these folks to leave this place.

So of course Reverend Thrower went inside, and so did all the others, to
see the sky blocked for the first time by a ridgebeam no less than forty
feet in length-and that only half of what it would finally be.  My
church, thought Thrower, and already finer than most I saw in
Philadelphia itself.

Up on the flimsy scaffolding, Measure was driving a wooden pin through
the notch in the end of the ridgebeam and down into the hole in the top
of the ridgepole.  Wastenot was doing the same at his end, of course.
The pins would hold the beam in place until the rafters could be laid.
When that was done, the ridgebeam would be so strong that they could
almost remove the crossbeam, if it weren't needed for the chandelier
that would light the church at night.  At night, so that the stained
glass would shine out against the darkness.  That's how grandiose a
place Reverend Thrower had in mind.  Let their simple minds stand in awe
when they see this place, and so reflect upon the majesty of God.

Those were his thoughts when, suddenly, Measure let out a shout of fear,
and all saw in horror that the center ridgepole had split and shivered
at the blow of Measure's mallet against the wooden pin, bouncing the
great heavy ridgebeam some six feet into the air.  It pulled the beam
out of Wastenot's hands at the other end, and broke the scaffolding like
tinderwood.  The ridgebeam seemed to hover in the air a moment, level as
you please, then rushed downward as if the Lord's own foot were stomping
it.

And Reverend Thrower knew without looking that there would be someone
directly under that beam, right under the midpoint of it when it landed.
He knew because he was aware of the boy, of how he was running just
exactly the wrong direction, of how his own shout of "Alvin!" brought
the boy to a stop in just exactly the wrong place.

And when he looked, it was exactly as he knew it would be-little Al
standing there, looking up at the shaven tree that would grind him into
the floor of the church.  Nothing else would be damaged-because the beam
was level, its impact would be spread across the whole floor.

The boy was too small even to slow the ridgebeam's fall.  He would be
broken, crushed, his blood spattering the white wood of the church
floor.  I'll never get that stain out, thought Thrower-insanely, but one
could not control one's own thoughts in the moment of death.

Thrower saw the impact as if it were a blinding flash of light.

He heard the crash of wood on wood.  He heard the screams.  Then his
eyes cleared and he saw the ridgebeam lying there, the one end exactly
where it should be, the other too, but in the middle, the beam split in
two parts, and between the two parts little Alvin standing, his face
white with terror.

Untouched.  The boy was untouched.

Thrower didn't understand German or Swedish, but he knew what the
muttering near him meant, well enough.  Let them blasphemer must
understand what has happened here, thought Thrower.  He strode to the
boy, placed his hands on the child's head, searching for injury.  Not a
hair out of place, but the boy's head felt warm, very warm, as if he had
been standing near a fire.  Then Thrower knelt and looked at the wood of
the ridgebeam.  It was cut as smooth as if the wood had grown that way,
just exactly wide enough to miss the boy entirely.

Al's mother was there only a moment later, scooping up her boy sobbing
and babbling with relief.  Little Alvin also cried.  But Thrower had
other things on his mind.  He was a man of science, after all, and what
he had seen was not possible.  He made the men step off the length of
the ridgebeam, measuring it again.  It lay exactly its original length
along the floor-the east end just as far from the west end as it should
be.  The boy-sized chunk in the middle had simply disappeared.  Vanished
in a momentary flash of fire that left Alvin's head and the butt ends of
the wood as hot as coals, yet not marked or seared in any way.

Then Measure began yelling from the crossbeam, where he dangled by his
arms, having caught himself after the collapse of the scaffolding.

Wantnot and Calm climbed up and got him down safely.  Reverend Thrower
had no thought for that.  All he could think about was a six-year-old
boy who could stand under a falling ridgebeam, and the beam would break
and make room for him.  Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, on the right
hand and the left.

"Seventh son," murmured Wastenot.  The boy sat astride the fallen
ridgebeam, just west of the break.

"What?" asked Reverend Thrower.

"Nothing," said the young man.

"You said 'Seventh son,"' said Thrower.  "But it's little Calvin who's
the seventh."

Wastenot shook his head.  "We had another brother.  He died a couple
minutes after Al was born." Wastenot shook his head again.

"Seventh son of a seventh son."

"But that makes him devil's spawn," said Thrower.

Wastenot looked at him with contempt.  "Maybe in England you think so,
but around here we look on such to be a healer, maybe, or a doodlebug,
and a right good one of whatever he is." Then Wastenot thought of
something and grinned.  " 'Devil's spawn,"' he repeated, maliciously
savoring the words.  "Sounds like hysteria to me."

Furious, Thrower stalked out of the church.

He found Mistress Faith sitting on a stool, holding Alvin Junior on her
lap and rocking him as he continued to whimper.  She was scolding him
gently.  "Told you not to run without looking, always underfoot, can't
never hold still, makes a body go plumb lunatic looking after you' Then
she saw Thrower standing before her, and fell silent.

"Don't worry," she said.  "I'll not bring him back here."

"For his safety, I'm glad," said Thrower.  "If I thought my churchhouse
had to be built at the cost of a child's life, I'd sooner preach in the
open air all the days of my life."

She looked close at him and knew that he meant it with his whole heart.
"It's no fault of you're," she said.  "He's always been a clumsy boy.
Seems to live through scrapes that'd kill an ordinary child."

"I'd like-I'd like to understand what happened in there."

"Ridgepole shivered, of course," she said.  "It happens sometimes."

"I mean-how it happened to miss him.  The beam split-before it touched
his head.  I want to feel his head, if I may-"

"Not a mark on him," she said.

"I know.  I want to feel it to see if-" She rolled her eyes upward and
muttered, "Dowsing for brains," but she also moved her hands away so he
could feel the child's head.

Slowly now, and carefully, trying to understand the map of the boy's
skull, to read the ridges and bumps, the troughs and depressions.

He had no need to consult a book.  The books were nonsense, anyway.

He had found that out quite quickly-they all spouted idiotic
generalities, such as, "The Red will always have a bump just over the
ear, indicating savagery and cannibalism," when of course Reds had just
as much variety in their heads as Whites.  No, Thrower had no faith in
those books-but he had learned a few things about people with particular
skills, and head bumps they had in common.  He had developed a knack of
understanding, a map of the shapes of the human skull; he knew as his
hands passed over Al's head what it was he found there.

Nothing remarkable, that's what he found.  No one trait that stood out
above all others.  Average.  As average as can be.  So utterly average
that it could be a virtual textbook example of normality, if only there
were any textbook worth reading.

He lifted his fingers away, and the boy-who had stopped crying under his
hands-twisted on his mother's lap to look at him.  "Reverend Thrower,"
he said, "your hands are so cold I like to froze." Then he squirmed off
his mother's lap and ran off, shouting for one of the German boys, the
one he had been wrestling so savagely before.

Faith laughed ruefully.  "You see how quickly they forget?"

"And you, too," he said.

She shook her head.  "Not me," she said.  "I don't forget a thing."

"You're already smiling."

"I go on, Reverend Thrower.  I just go on.  That's not the same as
forgetting."

He nodded.

"So-tell me what you found," she said.

"Found?"

"Feeling his bumps.  Brain-dowsing.  Does he got any?"

"Normal.  Absolutely normal.  Not a single thing unusual about his
head."

She grunted.  "Nothing unusual?"

"That's right."

"Well, if you ask me, that's pretty unusual right there, if a body was
smart enough to notice it." She picked up the stool and carried it off,
calling to Al and Cally as she went.

After a moment, Reverend Thrower realized she was right.  Nobody was so
perfectly average.  Everybody had some trait that was stronger than the
others.  It wasn't normal for Al to be so well balanced.  To have every
possible skill that could be marked by the skull, and to have it in
exactly even proportions.  Far from being average, the child was
extraordinary, though Thrower had no notion what it would mean in the
child's life.  Jack of all trades and master of none?

Or master of all?

Superstition or not, Thrower found himself wondering.  A seventh son of
a seventh son, a startling shape to the head, and the miraclehe could
think of no other word-of the ridgebeam.  An ordinary child would have
died this day.  Natural law demanded it.  But something was protecting
this child, and natural law had been overruled.

ov once the talk had subsided, the men resumed work on the roof The
original beam was useless, of course, and they carried the two sections
of it outside.  After what had happened, they had no intention of using
the beams for anything at all.  Instead they set to work and completed
another beam by afternoon, rebuilt the scaffolding, and by nightfall the
hole roof ridge was set in place.  No one spoke of the incident with the
ridgebeam, at least not in Thrower's presence.  And when he went to look
for the shivered ridgepole, he couldn't find it anywhere.

Altar

Alvin Junior wasn't scared when he saw the beam falling, and he wasn't
scared when it crashed to the floor on either side.  But when all the
grown-ups started carrying on like the Day of Rapture, a-hugging him and
talking in whispers, then he got scared.  Grown-ups had a way of doing
things for no reason at all.

Like the way Papa was setting on the floor by the fire, just studying
the split pieces of the shivered ridgepole, the piece of wood that
sprung under the weight of the ridge-beam and sent it all crashing down.
N"en Mama was being herself, not Papa or nobody could bring big old
pieces of split and dirty wood into her house.  But today Mama was as
crazy as Papa, and when he showed up toting them big old splinters of
wood, she just bent over, rolled up the rug, and got herself out of
Papa's way.

Well, anybody who didn't know to get out of Papa's way when he had that
look on his face was too dumb to live.  David and Calm was lucky, they
could go off to their own houses on their own cleared land, where their
own wives had their own suppers cooking and they could decide whether to
be crazy or not.  The rest of them weren't so lucky.  With Papa and Mama
being crazy, the rest of them had to be crazy, too.  Not one of the
girls fought with any of the others, and they all helped fix supper and
clean up after without a word of complaint.  Wastenot and Wantnot went
out and chopped wood and did the evening milking without so much as
punching each other in the arm, let alone getting in a wrestling match,
which was right disappointing to Alvin Junior, seeing as how he always
got to wrestle the loser, which was the best wrestling he ever got to
do, them being eighteen years old and a real challenge, not like the
boys he usually hunkered down with.  And Measure, he just sat there by
the fire, whittling out a big old spoon for Mama's cooking pot, never so
much as looking up-but he was waiting, just like the others, for Papa to
come back to his right self and yell at somebody.

The only normal person in the house was Calvin, the three-year-old.

The trouble was that normal for him meant tagging along after Alvin
Junior like a kitten on a mouse's trail.  He never came close enough to
play with Alvin Junior, or to touch him or talk to him or anything
useful.  He was just there, always there at the edge of things, so Alvin
would look up just as Calvin looked away, or catch a glimpse of his
shirt as he ducked behind a door, or sometimes in the dark of night just
hear a faint breathing that was closer than it ought to be, which told
him Calvin wasn't lying on his cot, he was standing right there by
Alvin's bed, watching.  Nobody ever seemed to notice it.

it had been more than a year since Alvin gave up trying to get him to
stop. If Alvin Junior ever said, "Ma, Cally's pestering me," Mama would
just say, "Al Junior, he didn't say a thing, he didn't touch you, and if
you don't like him just standing quiet as a body could ask, well, that's
just too bad for you, because it suits me fine.  I wish certain other of
my children could learn to be as still." Alvin figured that it wasn't
that Calvin was normal today, it's that the rest of the family had just
come up to his regular level of craziness.

Papa just stared and stared at the split wood.  Now and then he'd fit it
together the way it was.  Once he spoke, real quiet.  "Measure, you sure
you got all them pieces?"

Measure said, "Ever single bit, Pa, I couldn't've got more with a broom.
I couldn't've got more if I'd bent down and lapped it up like a dog.  Ma
was listening, of course.  Papa once said that when Ma was paying
attention, she could hear a squirrel fart in the woods a half mile away
in the middle of a storm with the girls rattling dishes and the boys all
chopping wood.  Alvin Junior wondered sometimes if that meant Ma knew
more witchery than she let on, since one time he sat in the woods not
three yards away from a squirrel for more than an hour, and he never
heard it so much as belch.

Anyway, she was right there in the house tonight, so of course she heard
what Papa asked, and she heard what Measure answered, and her being as
crazy as Papa, she lashed out like as if Measure had just taken the name
of the Lord.  "You mind your tongue, young man, because the Lord said
unto Moses on the mount, honor your father and mother that your days may
be long on the land which the Lord Your God has given you, and when you
speak fresh to your father then you are taking days and weeks and even
years off your own life, and your soul is not in such a condition that
you should welcome an early visit to the judgment bar to meet your
Savior and hear him say your eternal fate!"

Measure wasn't half so worried about his eternal fate as he was worried
about Mama being riled at him.  He didn't try to argue that he wasn't
talking smart or being sassy-only a fool would do that when Mama was
already hot.  He just started in looking humble and begging her pardon,
not to mention the forgiveness of Papa and the sweet mercy of the Lord.
By the time she was done with ragging him, poor Measure had already
apologized a half a dozen times, so that she finally just grumped and
went back to her sewing.

Then Measure looked up at Alvin Junior and winked.

"I saw that, said Mama, "and if you don't go to hell, Measure, I'll get
up a petition to Saint Peter to send you there."

"I'd sign that petition myself," said Measure, looking meek as a puppy
dog that just piddled on a big man's boot.

"That's right you would," said Mama, "and you'd sign it in blood, too,
because by the time I'm through with you there'll be enough open wounds
to keep ten clerks in bright red ink for a year."

Alvin Junior couldn't help himself.  Her dire threat just struck him
funny.  And even though he knew he was taking his life in his hands, he
opened up his mouth to laugh.  He knew that if he laughed he'd have
Mama's thimble hard on his head, or maybe her hand clapped hard on his
ear, or even her hard little foot smashed right down on his bare foot,
which she did once to David the time he told her she should have learnt
the word no sometime before she had thirteen mouths to cook for.

This was a matter of life and death.  This was more frightening than the
ridgebeam, which after all never hit him, which was more than he could
say for Mama.  So he caught that laugh before it got loose, and he
turned it into the first thing he could think of to say.

"Mama," he said, "Measure can't sign no petition in blood, cause he'd
already be dead, and dead people don't bleed."

Mama looked him in the eye and spoke slow and careful.  "They do when I
tell them to."

Well, that dit it.  Alvin Junior just laughed out loud.  And that set
half the girls to laughing.  Which made Measure laugh.  And finally Mama
laughed, too.  They all just laughed and laughed till they were mostly
crying and Mama started sending people upstairs to bed, including Alvin
Junior.

All the excitement had Alvin Junior feeling pretty spunky, and he hadn't
figured out yet that sometimes he ought to keep all that jumpiness
locked up tight.  It happened that Matilda, who was sixteen and fancied
herself a lady, was walking up the stairs right in front of him.

Everybody hated walking anywhere behind Matilda, she took such delicate,
ladylike steps.  Measure always said he'd rather walk in line behind the
moon, cause it moved faster.  Now Matilda's backside was . in Al
Junior's face, swaying back and forth, and he thou thought about what
Measure said about the moon, and reckoned how Matilda's backside was
just about as round as the moon, and then he got to wondering what it
would be like to touch the moon, and whether it would be hard like a
beetle's back or squishy as a slug.  And when a boy six years old who's
already feeling spunky gets a thought like that in his head, it's not
even half a second till his finger is two inches deep in delicate flesh.

Matilda was a real good screamer.

Al might have got slapped right then, except Wastenot and Wantnot were
right behind him, saw the whole thing, and laughed so hard at Matilda
that she started crying and fled on up the stairs two steps at a time,
not ladylike at all.  Wastenot and Wantnot carried Alvin up the stairs
between them, so high up he got a little dizzy, singing that old song
about St.  George killing the dragon, only they sang it about St. Alvin,
and where the song usually said something about poking the old dragon a
thousand times and his sword didn't melt in the fire, they changed sword
to finger and made even Measure laugh.

"That's a filthy filthy song!" shouted ten-year-old Mary, who stood
guard outside the big girls' door.

"Better stop singing that song," said Measure, "before Mama hears YOU."

Alvin Junior could never understand why Mama didn't like that song, but
it was true that the boys never sang it where she could hear.

The twins stopped singing and clambered up the ladder to the loft.

At that moment the door to the big girls' room was flung open and
Matilda, her eyes all red from crying, stuck her head out and shouted,
"You'll be sorry!"

"Ooh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Wantnot said in a squeaky voice.

Only then did Alvin remember that when the girls set out to get even, he
would be the main victim.  Calvin was still considered the baby, so he
was safe enough, and the twins were older and bigger and there was
always two of them.  So when the girls got riled, Alvin was first in
line for their deadly wrath.  Matilda was sixteen, Beatrice was fifteen,
Elizabeth was fourteen, Anne was twelve, Mary was ten, and they all
preferred picking on Alvin to practically any other recreation that the
Bible would permit.  One time when Alvin was tormented past endurance
and only Measure's strong arms held him back from hot-blooded murder
with a hayfork, Measure allowed as how the punishments of hell would
most likely consist of living in the same house with five women who were
all about twice a man's size.  Ever since then, Alvin wondered what sin
he committed before he was born to make him deserve to grow up
half-damned to start with.

Alvin went into the little room he shared with Calvin and just set
there, waiting for Matilda to come and kill him.  But she didn't come
and didn't come, and he realized that she was probably waiting till
after the candles were all out, so that no one would know which of his
sisters snuck in and snuffed him out.  Heaven knew he'd given them all
ample reason to want him dead in the last two months alone.  He was
trying to guess whether they'd stifle him with Matilda's goosedown
pillow-which would be the first time he was ever allowed to touch it-or
if he'd die with Beatrice's precious sewing scissors in his heart, when
all of a sudden he realized that if he didn't get outside to the privy
in about twenty-five seconds he'd embarrass himself right in his
trousers.

Somebody was in the privy, of course, and Alvin stood outside jumping
and yelling for three minutes and still they wouldn't come out.

It occurred to him that it was probably one of the girls, in which case
this was the most devilish plan they'd ever come up with, keeping him
out of the privy when they knew he was scared to go into the woods after
dark.  It was a terrible vengeance.  If he messed himself he'd be so
ashamed he'd probably have to change his name and run away, and that was
a whole lot worse than a poke in the behind.  it made him mad as a
constipated buffalo, it was so unfair.

Finally he was mad enough to make the ultimate threat.  "If you don't
come out I'll do it right in front of the door so you'll step in it when
you come out!"

He waited, but whoever was in there didn't say, "If you do I'll make you
lick it off my shoe," and since that was the customary response, Al
realized for the first time that the person inside the privy migh not be
one of his sisters after all.  It was certainly not one of the boys,
Which left only two possibilities, each one worse than the other.

Al was so mad at himself he smacked his own head with his fist, but it
didn't make him feel no better.  Papa would probably give him a lick,
but even worse would be Mama.  She might give him a tongue-lashing,
which was bad enough, but if she was in a real vile temper, she'd get
that cold look on her face and say real soft, "Alvin Junior, I used to
hope that at least one of my boys would be a born gentleman, but now I
see my life was wasted," which always made him feel about as low as he
knew how to feel without dying.

o he was almost relieved when the door opened and Papa stood there,
still buttoning his trousers and looking none too happy.  "Is it safe
for me to step out this door?" he asked coldly.

"Yup," said Alvin Junior.

"What?"

"Yes sir."

"Are you sure?  There's some wild animals around here that think it's
smart to leave their do on the ground outside privy doors.  I tell you
that if there's any such animal I'll lay a trap and catch it by the back
end one of these nights.  And when I find it in the morning, I'll stitch
up its bung hole and turn it loose to bloat up and die in the woods."

"Sorry, Papa."

Papa shook his head and started walking toward the house.  "I don't know
what's wrong with your bowel, boy.  One minute you don't need to go and
the next minute you're about to die."

"Well if you'd just build another outhouse I'd be fine," Al Junior
muttered.  Papa didn't hear him, though, because Alvin didn't actually
say it till the privy door was closed and Papa'd gone back to the house,
and even then he didn't say it very loud.Alvin rinsed his hands at the
pump a long time, because he feared what was waiting for him back in the
house.  But then, alone outside in the darkness, he began to be afraid
for another reason.  Everybody said that a White man never could hear
when a Red man was walking through the woods, and his big brothers got
some fun out of telling Alvin that whenever he was alone outside,
especially at night, there was Reds in the forest, watching him, playing
with their flint-bladed tommy-hawks and itching to have his scalp.  In
broad daylight, Al didn't believe them, but at night, his hands cold
with the water, a chill ran through him, and he thought he even knew
where the Red was standing.  Just over his shoulder, back over.  near,
the pigsty, MOVing so quiet that the pigs didn't even grunt and the dogs
didn't bark or nothing.  And they'd find Al's body, all hairless and
bloody, and then it'd be too late.  Bad as his sisters were-and they
were bad-Al figured they'd be better than dying from a Red man's flint
in his head.

He fair to flew from the pump to the house, and he didn't look back to
see if the Red was really there.

As soon as the door was closed, he forgot his fears of silent invisible
Reds.  Things were right quiet in the house, which was pretty suspicious
to start with.  The girls were never quiet till Papa shouted at them at
least three times each night.  So Alvin walked up real careful, looking
before every step, checking over his shoulder so often he started
getting a crick in his neck.  By the time he was inside his room with
the door closed he was so jittery that he almost hoped they'd do
whatever they were planning to do and get it over with.

But they didn't do it and they didn't do it.  He looked around the room
by candlelight, turned down his bed, looked into every corner, but there
was nothing there.  Calvin was asleep with his thumb in his mouth, which
meant that if they had prowled around his room, it had been a while ago.
He began to wonder if maybe, just this once, the girls had decided to
leave him be or even do their dirty tricks to the twins.  It would be a
whole new life for him, if the girls started being nice.  Like as if an
angel came down and lifted him right out of hell.

He stripped off his clothes quick as he could, folded them, and put them
on the stool by his bed so they wouldn't be full of roaches in the
morning.  He had kind of an agreement with the roaches.  They could get
into anything they wanted if it was on the floor, but they didn't climb
into Calvin's bed or Alvin's neither, and they didn't climb onto his
stool.  In return, Alvin never stomped them.  As a result Alvin's room
was pretty much the roach sanctuary of the house, but since they kept
the treaty, he and Calvin were the only ones who never woke up screaming
about roaches in the bed.

He took his nightgown off its peg and pulled it on over his head.

Something bit him under the arm.  He cried out from the sharp pain.
Something else bit him on the shoulder.  Whatever it was, it was all
over inside his nightgown, and as he yanked it off, it kept right on
nipping him everywhere.  Finally it was off, and he stood there stark
naked slapping and brushing with his hands to try to get the bugs or
whatever they were off him.

Then he reached down and carefully picked up his nightgown.  He couldn't
see anything scurrying away from it, and even when the bug fell Off.
Something else fell off.  It shook it and shook it, nary a glinted for a
moment in the candlelight and made a tiny twinking sound when it hit the
floor.

Only then did Alvin Junior notice the stirred giggling from the room
next door.  Oh they got him, they got him sure.  He sat on the edge of
his bed, picking pins out of his nightgown and poking them into the
bottom corner of his quilt.  He never thought they'd be so mad they'd
risk losing one of Mama's precious steel pins, just to get even with
him.  But he should have known.  Girls never did have any bounds of fair
Play, the way boys did.  When a boy knocked you down in a wrestling
match, why, he'd either jump on you or wait for you to get back up, and
either way you'd be even-both up or both down.

But Al knew from painful experience.  When the girls gang up on you
whenever they had the chance they fought in order to end the fight as
quick as they could.  Took all the fun out of it.  g her with just like
tonight.  it wasn't a fair punishment, him pokin ouple of his finger,
and them getting him all jabbed up with pins.  A c those places were
bleeding, they stabbed so deep.  And Alvin didn't get much as a bruise,
though he wished she did.

reckon Matilda had so in the edge of Alvin Junior wasn't mean, no sir.
But sitting there on the bed, taking pins out of his nightgown, he
couldn't help but notice business in the cracks of the floor, and the
roaches going about their like if all those roaches didn't help
imagining what it would be like just happened to go a-calling in a
certain room So he knelt down on the floor and set the candle right
there, and he began whispering to the roaches, just the way he did the
day he made telling them all about his treaty with them.  He started
whispering on, telling them about the most smooth sheets and soft
squishy skin they could scam of all about Matilda's satin pillowcase on
her goosedown pillow.  But they didn't seem to care about that.  Hungry,
that's all they are, thought Alvin.

All they care about is food, food and fear.  So he started telling them
about food, the most perfectly delicious food they ever had and came
close to ever ate in their life.  The roaches listen, though nary one of
them climbed on him, which was keeping with the treaty.  All the food
you ever wanted soft pink skin.

And it's safe, too, not a speck of danger, nothing to worry about, you
just go on in there and find the food on that soft pink squishy smooth
skin.

Sure enough, a few of the roaches started skittering under Alvin's door,
and then more and more of them, and finally the whole troop went off in
a single great cavalry charge under the door, through the wall, their
bodies shiny and glowing in the candlelight, guided by their eternal
insatiable hunger, fearless because Al had told them there wasn't
nothing to fear.

It wasn't ten seconds before he heard the first whoop from the room next
door.  And within a minute the whole house was in such an
shouting-uproar you'd've thought it was on fire.  Girls screaming,  and
big old boots stomping as Papa rushed up the stairs and squashed
roaches.  Al was about as happy as a pig in mud.

Finally things started calming down in the next room.  In a minute
they'd come in to check on him and Calvin, so he blew out the candle,
ducked under the covers, and whispered for the roaches to hide.  Sure
enough, here came Mama's footsteps in the hall outside.  Just at the
last moment, Alvin Junior remembered that he wasn't wearing his
nightgown.  He snaked out his hand, snatched the nightgown, and pulled
it under the covers just as the door opened.  Then he concentrated on
breathing easy and regular.

Mama and Papa came in, holding up candles.  He heard them pull down
Calvin's covers to check for roaches, and he feared they might pull down
his as well.  That would be such a shameful thing, to sleep like an
animal without a stitch on.  But the girls, who knew he couldn't
possibly be asleep so soon after getting stuck with so many pins, they
were naturally afraid of what Alvin might tell Mama and Papa, so they
made sure to hustle them out of the room before they could do more than
shine a candle in Alvin's face to make sure he was asleep.  Alvin held
his face absolutely still, not even twitching his eyelids.  The candle
went away, the door softly closed.

Still he waited, and sure enough, the door opened again.  He could hear
the padding of bare feet across the floor.  Then he felt Anne's breath
against his face and heard her whisper in his ear.  "We don't know how
you did it, Alvin Junior, but we know you set those roaches onto us."

Alvin pretended not to hear anything.  He even snored a little.

"You don't fool me, Alvin Junior.  You better not go to sleep tonight,
because if you do, you'll never wake up, you hear me?"

Outside the room, Papa was saying, "Where's Anne got to?"

She's in here, Papa, threatening to kill me, thought Alvin.  But of
course he didn't say it out loud.  Anyway, she was just trying to scare
him.

we'll make it look like an accident," said Anne.  "You always have
accidents, nobody will think it's murder."

Alvin was beginning to believe her, more and more.

,We'll carry your body out and stuff it down the privy hole, and they'll
all think you went to'relieve yourself and fell in."

something so devilish clever, since she was the very best at secretly
That would work, thought Alvin.  Anne was just the one to think of
pinching people and being a good ten feet away before they screamed.

That was why she always kept her fingernails so long and sharp.

Even now, Alvin could feel one of those sharp nails scraping along his
cheek.

The door opened wider.  "Anne," whispered Mama, "you come out of there
this instant."

The fingernail quit scratching.  "I was just making sure little Alvin
-.Was all right." Her bare feet padded back out of the room.

Soon all the doors were closed, and he heard Papa's and Mama's shoes
clattering down the stairs.

He knew that by rights he should still be scared to death by Anne's
threats, but it wasn't so.  He had won the battle.  He pictured the
roaches crawling all over the girls, and he started to laugh.

Well, that )wouldn't do.  He had to stifle that, breathe calm as could
be.  His hole body shook from trying to hold in the laughter.

There was somebody in the room.

He couldn't hear anything, and when he opened his eyes he couldn't see
anybody.  But he knew somebody was there.  Hadn't come in the door, so
they must've come in the open window.  That's plain silly, Alvin told
himself, there isn't a soul in here.  But he lay still, all laughter
gone out of him, because he could feel it, somebody standing there.  No,
it's a nightmare, that's all, I'm still spooked from thinking about Reds
watching me outside, or maybe from Anne's threat, something like that,
if I just lie here with my eyes closed it'll go away.

The blackness inside Al's eyelids turned pink.  There was a light in his
room.  A light as bright as daylight.  There wasn't no candle in the
world, no, not even a lantern that could burn so bright as that.

Al opened his eyes, and all his dread turned into terror, for now he saw
that what he feared was real.

There was a man standing at the foot of his bed, a man shining as if he
was made of sunlight.  The light in the room was coming from his skin,
from his chest where his shirt was tore open, from his face, and from
his hands.  And in one of those hands, a knife, a sharp steel knife.  I
am going to die, thought Al.  Just Like Anne promised me, only there
wasn't no way his sisters could conjure up such an awful apparition as
this one.  This bright Shining Man had come on his own, that was sure,
and planned to kill Alvin Junior for his own sins and not cause somebody
else had set him on.

Then it was like as if the light from the man pushed right through
Alvin's skin and came inside him, and the fear just went right out of
him.  The Shining Man might have him a knife, and he might Ive snuck on
into the room without so much as Opening a door, but he didn't mean no
harm to Alvin.  So Alvin relaxed a little and wriggled up in his bed
till he was mostly sitting, leaning up against the wall, watching the
Shining Man, waiting to see what all he'd do.

The Shining Man took his bright steel knife and brought the blade
against his other palm-and cut.  Alvin saw the gleaming crimson blood
flow from the wound in the Shining Man's hand, stream down his forearm,
and drip from his elbow onto the floor.  He hadn't seen four drops,
though, before he came to see a vision in his mind.  He could see his
sisters, room, he knew the place, but it was different.

The beds were up high, and his sisters were giants, so all he could see
clear was big old feet and legs.  Then he realized he was seeing a
little creature's view of the room.  A roach's view.  In his vision he
was scurrying, filled with hunger, absolutely fearless, knowing that if
he could get up onto those feet, those legs, there'd -be food, all the
food he'd ever want.  So he rushed, he climbed, he scurried, searching.
But there wasn't no food, not a speck of it, and now huge hands reached
and swept him off, and then a great huge shadow loomed over him, and he
felt the hard sharp crushing agony of death.

Not once, but many times, dozens of times, the hope of food, the
confidence that no harm would come; then disappointment-nothing to eat,
nothing at all-and after disappointment, terror and injury and death.

Each small trusting life, betrayed, crushed, battered.

And then in his vision he was one who lived, one who got away from the
looming, stomping boots, under the beds, into the cracks in the walls.
He fled from the room of death, but not into the old place, not into the
safe room, because now that was no longer safe.  That was where the lies
came from.  That was the place of the betrayer, the liar, the killer who
had sent them into this place to die.  There were no words in this
vision, of course.  There could be no words, no clarity of thought in a
roach's brain.  But Al had words and thoughts, and he knew more than any
roach what the roaches had learned.  They had been promised something
about the world, they had been made sure room; but in the other room,
there was worse than death-there the of it, and then it was a lie. Death
was a fearful thing, yes, flee that world had gone crazy, it was a place
where anything could happen, be trusted' where nothing was certain. A
terrible where nothing could place.  The worst place.

Then the vision ended.  Alvin sat there, his hands pressed against his
eyes, sobbing desperately.  They suffered, he cried out silently, they
suffered, and I did it to them, I betrayed them.  That's what the
Shining Man came to show me.  I made the roaches trust me, but then I
cheated them and sent them to die.  I've done murder.

No, not murder!  Who ever heard of roach-killing being murder?

Nobody in the whole world would call it that.

But it didn't matter what other folks thought of it, Al knew that. The
Shining Man had come to show him that murder was murder.

And now the Shining Man was gone.  The light was gone from the room, and
when Al opened his eyes, there was no one in the room but Cally, fast
asleep.  Too late even to beg forgiveness.  In pure misery Al Junior
closed his eyes and cried some more.

How long was it?  A few seconds?  Or did Alvin doze off and not notice
the passage of a much longer time?  Never mind how long-the light came
back.  Once again it came into him, not just through his eyes, but
piercing clear to his heart, whispering to him, calling him.

Again Alvin opened his eyes and looked at the face of the Shining Man,
waiting for him to speak.  When he said nothing, Alvin thought it was
his turn, and so he stammered out the words, so weak compared to the
feelings in his heart.  "I'm sorry, I'll never do it again, I'll-" He
was babbling, he knew it, couldn't even hear himself speak he was so
upset.  But the light grew brighter for a moment, and he felt a question
in his mind.  Not a word was spoke, mind you, but he knew that the
Shining Man wanted him to say what it was he was sorry for.

And when he thought about it, Alvin wasn't altogether sure what all was
wrong.  Sure it wasn't the killing itself-you could starve to death if
you didn't slaughter a pig now and then, and it wasn't hardly murder
when a weasel killed himself a mouse, was it?

Then the light pushed at him again, and he saw another vision.

Not roaches this time.  Now he saw the image of a Red man, kneeling
before a deer, calling it to come and die; the deer came, all trembling
and its eyes wide, the way they are when they're scared.  It knew it was
coming to die.  The Red loosed him an arrow, and there it stood,
quivering in the doe's flank.  Her legs wobbled.  She fell.  And Alvin
knew that in this vision there wasn't no sin at all, because dying and
killing, they were both just a part of life.  The Red was doing right,
and so was the deer, both acting according to their natural law.

So if the evil he done wasn't the death of the roaches, what was it?

The power he had?  His knack for making things go just where he wanted,
making them break just in the right place, understanding how things
ought to be and helping them get that way?  He'd found that right
useful, as he made and fixed the things a boy makes and fixes in a rough
country household.  He could fit the two pieces of a broken hoe handle,
fit them so tight that they joined forever without glue or tack.  Or two
pieces of torn leather, he didn't even have to stitch them; and when he
tied a knot in string or rope, it stayed tied.

It was the same knack he used with the roaches.  Making them understand
how things was supposed to be, and then they did what he wanted.  Was
that his sin, that knack of his?

The Shining Man heard his question before he even found words for it.
Here came the push of light, and another vision.  This time he saw
himself pressing his hands against a stone, and the stone melted like
butter under his hands, came out in just the shape he wanted, smooth and
whole, fell from the side of the mountain and rolled away, a perfect
ball, a perfect sphere, growing and growing until it was a whole world,
shaped just the way his hands had made it, with trees and grass
springing up on its face, and animals running and leaping and flying and
swimming and crawling and burrowing on and above and within the ball of
stone that he had made.  No, it wasn't a terrible power, it was a
glorious one, if he only knew how to use it.

Well if it ain't the dying and it ain't the knack, what did I do wrong?

This time the Shining Man didn't show him a thing.  This time Alvin
didn't see no burst of light, there wasn't a vision at all.

Instead the answer just came, not from the Shining Man but from inside
his own self.  One second he felt too stupid ever to understand his own
wickedness, and then the next second he saw it all as clear as could be.

It wasn't the roaches dying, and it wasn't the fact he made them do it.
It was the fact that he made them do it just to suit his own pleasure.
He told them it was for their own good, but it wasn't so, it was for
Alvin's benefit alone.  Harming his sisters, more than harming the
roaches, and all so Alvin could he in his bed shaking with laughter
because he got evenThe Shining Man heard the thoughts of Alvin's heart,
yes sir, and Al Junior saw a fire leap from his gleaming eye and strike
him in the heart.  He had guessed it.  He was right.

So Alvin made the most solemn promise of his whole life, right then and
there.  He had a knack, and he'd use it, but there was rules in things
like that, rules that he would follow even if it killed him.

"I'll never use it for myself again," said Alvin Junior.  And when he
said the words he felt like his heart was on fire, it burned so hot
inside.

The Shining Man disappeared again.

Alvin lay back, slid down under the blanket, exhausted from weep, weary
with relief.  He'd done a bad thing, that was so.  But as long as he
kept this oath he made, as long as he only used his knack to help other
people and never ever used it to help himself, why then he would be a
good boy and didn't need to be ashamed.  He felt lightheaded the way you
do coming out of a fever, and that was about right, he had been healed
of the wickedness that grew inside him for a spell.  He thought of
himself laughing when he'd just caused death for his own pleasure, and
he was ashamed, but that shame was tempered, it was softened, cause he
knew that it would never happen again.

As he lay there, Alvin once again felt the light grow in the room.

But this time it didn't come from a single source.  Not from the Shining
Man at all.  This time when he opened his eyes he realized the light was
coming from himself.  His own hands were shining, his own face must be
glowing the way the Shining Man had.  He threw off his covers and saw
that his whole body glowed with light so dazzling he couldn't hardly
bear to look at himself, except that he also couldn't bear to look
anywhere else.  Is this me?  he thought.

No, not me.  I'm shining like this because I've also got to do
something.  Just like the Shining Man did something for me, I've got
something to do, too.  But who am I supposed to do it for?

There was the Shining Man, visible again at the foot of his bed, but not
shining no more.  Now Al Junior realized that he knew this man.

It was Lolla-Wossiky, that one-eyed whisky-Red who got himself baptized
a few days ago, still wearing the White man's clothes they gave him when
he turned Christian.  With the light inside him now, Alvin saw clearer
than he ever did before.  He saw that it wasn't likker that poisoned
this poor Red man, and it wasn't losing one eye that crippled him.  It
was something much darker, something growing like a mold inside his
head.

The Red man took three steps and knelt beside the bed, his face only a
little way from Alvin's eyes.  What do you want from me?

What am I supposed to do?

For the first time, the man opened his eyes and spoke.  "Make all things
whole," he said.  A second later, Al Junior realized that the man had
said it in his Red language-ShawNee, he remembered, from what the
grown-ups said when he was baptized.  But Al had understood it plain as
if it was the Lord Protector's own English.

Make all things whole.

Well, that was Al's knack, wasn't it?  Fixing things, making things go
the way they were supposed to.  Trouble was, he didn't even half
understand how he did it, and he surely had no idea how to fix something
that was alive.

Maybe, though, he didn't have to understand.  Maybe he just had to act.
So he lifted his hand, reached out as careful as he could, and touched
Lolla-Wossiky's cheek, under the broken eye.  No, that wasn't right.  He
raised his finger until it touched the slack eyelid where the Red man's
other eye was supposed to be.  Yes, he thought.  Be whole.

The air crackled.  Light sparked.  Al gasped and pulled his hand away.

All the light was gone from the room.  Just the moonlight now coming in
the window.  Not even a glimmer of the brightness was left.

Like as if he just woke up from a dream, the strongest dream he ever had
in his life.

It took a minute for Alvin's eyes to change so he could see.  It wasn't
no dream, that was sure.  Cause there was the Red man, who had once been
the Shining Man.  You ain't dreaming when you got a Red man kneeling by
your bed, tears coming out of his one good eye, and the other eye, where
you just touched himThat eyelid was still loose, hanging over nothing.
The eye wasn't healed.  "It didn't work," whispered Alvin.  "I'm sorry."

It was a shameful thing, that the Shining Man had saved him from awful
wickedness, and he hadn't done a thing for him in return.  But the Red
man said nary a word of reproach.  Instead he reached out and took
Alvin's naked shoulders in both his large strong hands and pulled him
close, kissed him on the forehead, hard and strong, like a father to a
son, like brothers, like true friends the day before they die.

That kiss and all it held-hope, forgiveness, love-let me never forget
that, Alvin said silently.

Lolla-Wossiky sprang to his feet.  Lithe as a boy he was, not staggering
drunk at all.  Changed, he was changed, and it occurred to Alvin that
maybe he had healed something, set something right, something deeper
than his eyes.  Cured him of the whisky-lust, maybe.

But if that was so, Al knew it wasn't himself that done it, it was the
light that was in him for a time.  The fire that had warmed him without
burning.

The Red man rushed to the window, swung over the sill, hung for a moment
by his hands, then disappeared.  Alvin didn't even hear his feet touch
the ground outside, he was that quiet.  Like the cats in the barn.

How long had it been?  Hours and hours?  Would it be daylight soon?  Or
had it taken only a few seconds since Anne had whispered in his ear and
the family had quieted down?

Didn't matter much.  Alvin couldn't sleep, not now, not with all that
had just happened.  Why had this Red man come to him?  What did it all
mean, the light that filled Lolla-Wossiky and then came to fill him?  He
couldn't just lie here in bed, all full of wonder.  So he got up,
slithered into his nightgown as fast as he could, and slipped out of his
door.

Now that he was in the hall, he heard talking from downstairs.

Mama and Papa were still up.  At first he wanted to rush down and tell
them what all happened to him.  But then he heard the tone of their
voices.  Anger, fear, all upset.  Not a good time to come to them with a
tale of a dream.  Even if Alvin knew it wasn't a dream at all, that it
was real, they'd treat it like a dream.  And now that he was thinking
straight, he couldn't tell them at all.  What, that he sent the roaches
into his sisters' room?  The pins, the pokes, the threats?

All of that would come out too, even though it felt like months, years
ago to Alvin.  None of it mattered now, compared to the vow he had taken
and the future he thought might be in store for him-but it would matter
to Mama and Papa.

So he tiptoed down the hall and down the stairs, just close enough to
hear, just far enough to be around the corner and out of sight.

After just a few minutes, he forgot about being out of sight, too.

He crept farther down, until he could see into the big room.  Papa sat
on the floor, surrounded with wood.  It surprised Al Junior that Papa
was still doing that, even after coming upstairs to kill roaches, even
after so much time had passed.  He was bent over now, his face buried in
his hands.  Mama knelt in front of him, the biggest hunks of wood
between them.

"He's alive, Alvin," said Mama.  "All the rest ain't worth never mind."

Papa lifted his head and looked at her.  "It was water that seeped into
the tree and froze and thawed, long before we even cut it down.

And we happened to cut it in just such a way that the flaw never showed
on the surface.  But it was split three ways inside, just waiting for
the weight of the ridgebeam.  It was water done it."

"Water," said Mama, and there was derision in her voice.

"This is fourteen times the water's tried to kill him."

"Children always get in scrapes."

"The time you slipped on a wet floor when you were holding him.

The time David knocked down the boiling cauldron.  Three times when he
was lost and we found him on the bank of the river.  Last winter when
the ice broke on the Tippy-Canoe River-"

"You think he's the first child to fall into the water?"

"The poison water that made him throw up blood.  The mud-covered buffalo
that charged him in that meadow-"

"Mud-covered.  Everybody knows that buffaloes wallow like pigs.  It had
nothing to do with water."

Papa slapped his hand down hard on the floor.  The sound rang like a
gunshot through the house.  It startled Mama, and of course she started
to look toward the stairs to where the children would be sleeping. Alvin
Junior scampered right back up the stairs and waited out of sight for
her to order him back to bed.  But she must not have seen him, cause she
didn't shout anything and nobody came up after him.

When he tiptoed back down, they were still going at it, only a little
quieter.

Papa whispered, but there was fire in his eyes.  "If you think this
doesn't have to do with water, then you're the one that's a lunatic."

Mama was icy now.  Alvin Junior knew that look-it was the maddest Mama
knew how to get.  No slaps then, no tongue-lashings.  Just coldness and
silence, and any child who got that treatment from her began to long for
death and the tortures of hell, because at least it would be warmer.

With Papa she wasn't silent, but her voice was terrible cold.

"The Savior himself drank water from the Samaritan well."

"I don't recollect that Jesus fell down that well, neither," said Papa.

Alvin Junior thought of hanging onto the well bucket, falling down into
the darkness, until the rope bound up on the windlass and the bucket
stopped just above the water, where he would have drowned for certain.
They told him he wasn't yet two years old when that happened, but he
still dreamed sometimes about the stones that lined the inside of the
well, getting darker and darker as he went down.  In forever before his
dreams the well was ten miles deep and he fell waking up.

"Then think of this, Alvin Miller, since you think you know scripture.

Papa started to protest that he didn't think nothing of the kind"The
devil hisself said to the Lord in the desert that the angels would bear
Jesus up lest he dash his foot against a stone."

"I don't know what that has to do with water-"

"It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated."

Papa's face turned red.  "Don't you call me no simpleton, Faith.

I know what I know and-"

"He has a guardian angel, Alvin Miller. He has someone watching out for
him."

"You and your scriptures.  You and your angels."

"You tell me why else he had those fourteen accidents and not one of
them so much as gave him a scrape on his arm.  How many other boys get
to six years old without no injury?"

Papa's face looked strange then, twisted up a little, as if it was hard
for him to speak at all.  "I tell you that there's something wants him
dead.  I know it."

"You don't know any such thing."

Papa spoke even slower, biting out the words as if each one caused him
pain.  "I know.  " He had such a hard time talking that Mama just went
on and talked right over him.  "If there's some devil plot to kill
him-which I ain't saying, Alvin-then there's an even stronger heavenly
plan to preserve him."

Then, suddenly, Papa didn't have no trouble talking at all.  Papa just
gave up saying the hard thing, and Alvin Junior felt let down, like when
somebody said uncle before they even got throwed.  But he knew, the
minute he thought about it, that his papa wouldn't give up like that
lessen it was some terrible force stopping him from speaking up.  Papa
was a strong man, not a bit cowardly.  And seeing Papa beat down like
that, well, it made the boy afraid.  Little Alvin knew that Mama and
Papa were talking about him, and even though he didn't understand half
what they said, he knew that Papa was saying somebody wanted Alvin
Junior dead, and when Papa tried to tell his real proof, the thing that
made him know, something stopped his mouth and kept him still.

Alvin Junior knew without a word being said that whatever it was stopped
Papa's mouth, it was the plain opposite of the shining light that had
filled Alvin and the Shining Man tonight.  There was something that
wanted Alvin to be strong and good.  And there was something else that
wanted Alvin dead.  Whatever the good thing was, it could bring visions,
it could show him his terrible sin and teach him how to be shut of it
forever.  But the bad thing, it had the power to shut Papa's mouth, to
beat down the strongest, best man Al Junior ever knew or heard of.  And
that made Al afraid.

When Papa went on with his arguments, his seventh son knew that he
wasn't using the proof that counted.  "Not devils, not angels," said
Papa, "it's the elements of the universe, don't you see that he's an
offense against nature?  There's power in him like you nor I can't even
guess.  So much power that one part of nature itself can't bear it-so
much power that he protects hisself even when he don't know he's doing
it."

"If there's so much power in being seventh son of a seventh son, then
where's your power, Alvin Miller?  You're a seventh son-that ain't
nothing, supposedly, but I don't see you doodlebugging or-"

"You don't know what I do-"

"I know what you don't do.  I know that you don't believe-"

"I believe in every true thing-"

"I know that every other man is down at the commons building that fine
church, except for you-"

"That preacher is a fool-"

"Don't you ever think that maybe God is using your precious seventh son
to try to wake you up and call you to repentance?"

"Oh, is that the kind of God you believe in?  The kind what tries to
kill little boys so their papas will go to meeting?"

"The Lord has saved your boy, as a sign to you of his loving and
compassionate nature-"

"The love and compassion that let my Vigor die-"

"But someday his patience will run out-"

"And then he'll murder another of my sons."

She slapped his face.  Alvin Junior saw it with his own eyes.  And it
wasn't the offhand kind of cuffing she gave her sons when they lipped or
loafed around.  It was a slap that like to took his face off, and he
fell over to sprawl on the floor.

"I'll tell you this, Alvin Miller." Her voice was so cold it burned.

"if that church is finished, and there's none of your handiwork in it,
then you will cease to be my husband and I will cease to be your wife."

If there were more words, Alvin Junior didn't hear them.  He was up in
his bed a-trembling that such a terrible thought could be thought, not
to mention being spoke out loud.  He had been afraid so many times
tonight, afraid of pain, afraid of dying when Anne whispered murder in
his ear, and most of all afraid when the Shining Man came to him and
named his sin.  But this was something else.  This was the end of the
whole universe, the end of the one sure thing, to hear Mama talk about
not being with Papa anymore.  He lay there in his bed, all kinds of
thoughts dancing in his head so fast he couldn't lay hold of any one of
them, and finally in all that confusion there wasn't nothing for it but
to sleep.

In the morning he thought maybe it was all a dream, it had to be a
dream.  But there were new stains on the floor at the foot of his bed,
where the blood of the Shining Man had dripped, so that wasn't a dream.

And his parents' quarrel, that wasn't no dream neither.  Papa stopped
him after breakfast and told him, "You stay up here with me today, Al.

" The look on Mama's face told him plain as day that what was said last
night was still meant today.

"I want to help on the church," Alvin Junior said.  "I ain't afraid of
no ridgebeams."

"You're going to stay here with me, today.  You're going to help me
build something." Papa swallowed, and stopped himself from looking at
Mama.  "That church is going to need an altar, and I figure we can build
a right nice one that can go inside that church as soon as the roof is
on and the walls are up." Papa looked at Mama and smiled a smile that
sent a shiver up Alvin Junior's back.  "You think that Preacher'll like
it?"

That took Mama back, it was plain.  But she wasn't the kind to back off
from a wrestling match just because the other guy got one throw, Alvin
Junior knew that much.  "What can the boy do?" she asked.

"He ain't no carpenter."

"He's got a good eye," said Papa.  "If he can patch and tool leather, he
can put some crosses onto the altar.  Make it look good."

"Measure's a better whittler," said Mama.

"Then I'll have the boy burn the crosses in." Papa put his hand on Alvin
Junior's head.  "Even if he sits here all day and reads in the Bible,
this boy ain't going down to that church till the last pew is in."

Papa's voice sounded hard enough to carve his words in stone.

Mama looked at Alvin Junior and then at Alvin Senior.  Finally she
turned her back and started filling the basket with dinner for them as
she was going to the church.

Alvin Junior went outside to where Measure was hitching the team and
Wastenot and Wantnot were loading roof shakes onto the wagon for the
church.

"You aim to stand inside the church again?" asked Wantnot.

"We can drop logs down on you, and you can split them into shakes with
your head," said Wastenot.

"Ain't going," said Alvin Junior.

Wastenot and Wantnot exchanged identical knowing looks.

"Well, too bad," said Measure.  "But when Mama and Papa get cold, the
whole Wobbish Valley has a snowstorm." He winked at Alvin Junior, just
the way he had last night, when it got him in so much trouble.

That wink made Alvin figure he could ask Measure a question that he
wouldn't normally speak right out.  He walked over closer, so his voice
wouldn't carry to the others.  Measure caught on to what Alvin wanted,
and he squatted down right there by the wagon wheel, to hear what Alvin
had to say.

"Measure, if Mama believes in God and Papa doesn't, how do I know which
one is right?"

"I think Pa believes in God," said Measure.

"But if he don't.  That's what I'm asking.  How do I know about things
like that, when Mama says one thing and Papa says another?"

Measure started to answer something easy, but he stopped himself -Alvin
could see in his face how he made up his mind to say something serious.
Something true, instead of something easy.  "Al, I got to tell you, I
wisht I knew.  Sometimes I figure ain't nobody knows nothing.  "Papa
says you know what you see with your eyes.  Mama says you know what you
feel in your heart."

"What do you say?"

"How do I know, Measure?  I'm only six."

"I'm twenty-two, Alvin, I'm a growed man, and I still don't know.

I reckon Ma and Pa don't know, neither."

"Well, if they don't know,'how come they get so mad about it?"

"Oh, that's what it means to be married.  You fight all the time, but
you never fight about what you think you're fighting about."

"What are they really fighting about?"

Alvin could see just the opposite thing this time.  Measure thought of
telling the truth, but he changed his mind.  Stood up tall and tousled
Alvin's hair.  That was a sure sign to Alvin Junior that a grownup was
going to lie to him, the way they always lied to children, as if
children weren't reliable enough to be trusted with the truth.

"Oh, I reckon they just quarrel to hear theirselfs talk."

Most times Alvin just listened to grown-ups lie and didn't say nothing
about it, but this time it was Measure, and he especially didn't like
having Measure lie to him.

"How old will .  I have to be before you tell me straight?" asked Alvin.

Measure's eyes flashed with anger for just a second-nobody likes being
called a bar-but then heed, and his eyes were sharp with understanding.
"Old enough that you already guess the answer for yourself," he said,
"but young enough that it'll still do you some good.  "When's that?"
Alvin demanded.  "I want you to tell me the truth now, all the time."

Measure squatted down again.  "I can't always do that, Al, cause
sometimes it'd just be too hard.  Sometimes I'd have to explain things
that I just don't know how to explain.  Sometimes there's things that
You have to figure out by living long enough."

Alvin was mad and he knew his face showed it.

"Don't you be so mad at me, little brother.  I can't tell you some
things because I just don't know myself, and that's not lying.  But you
can count on this.  If I can tell you, I will, and if I can't, I'll just
say nothing, and won't pretend."

That was the most fair thing a grown-up ever said, and it made Alvin's
eyes fill up.  "You keep that promise, Measure."

"I'll keep it or die, you can count on that."

"I won't forget, you know." Alvin remembered the vow he had made to the
Shining Man last night.  "I know how to keep a promise, too."

Measure laughed and pulled Alvin to him, hugged him right against his
shoulder.  "You're as bad as Mama," he said.  "You just don't let up."

"I can't help it," said Alvin.  "If I start believing you, then how'B I
know when to stop?"

"Never stop," said Measure.

Calm rode up on his old mare about then, and Mama came out with the
dinner basket, and everybody that was going, went.  Papa took Alvin
Junior out to the barn and in no time at all Alvin was helping notch the
boards, and his pieces fit together just as good as Papa's.  Truth to
tell they fit even better, cause Al could use his knack for this,
couldn't he?  This altar was for everybody, so he could make the wood
fit so snug that it wouldn't ever come apart, not at the joints or
nowhere.  Alvin even thought of making Papa's joints fit just as tight,
but when he tried, he saw that Papa had something of a knack at this
himself.  The wood didn't join together to make one continuous piece,
like Alvin's did-but it fit good enough, yes sir, so there wasn't no
need to fiddle.

Papa didn't say much.  Didn't have to.  They both knew Alvin Junior had
a knack for making things fit right, just like his Papa did.

By nightfall the whole altar was put together and stained.  They left it
to dry, and as they walked into the house Papa's hand was firm on
Alvin's shoulder.  They walked together just as smooth and easy as if
they were both parts of the same body, as if Papa's hand just growed
there right out of Alvin's neck.  Alvin -could feel the pulse in Papa's
fingers, and it was beating right in time with the blood pounding in his
throat.

Mama was working by the fire when they came in.  She turned and looked
at them.  "How is it?" she asked.

"It's the smoothest box I ever seen," said Alvin Junior.

"There wasn't a single accident at the church today," said Mama.

"Everything went real good here, too," said Papa.

For the LIFE of him Alvin Junior couldn't figure out why Mama's words
sounded like "I ain't going nowhere," and why Papa's words sounded like
"Stay with me forever." But he knew he wasn't crazy to think so, cause
right then Measure looked up from where he lay an sprawled out afore the
fire and winked so only Alvin Junior could see.

visitor

Reverend Thrower allowed himself few vices, but one was to eat Friday
supper with the Weavers.  Friday dinner was more accurate, since the
Weavers were shopkeepers and manufacturers, and didn't stop work for
more than a snack at noon.  It wasn't the quantity so much as the
quality that brought Thrower back every Friday.  It was said that
Eleanor Weaver could take an old tree stump and make it taste like sweet
rabbit stew.  And it wasn't just the food, either, because Armor-of-God
Weaver was a churchgoing man who knew his Bible, and conversation was on
a higher plane.  Not so elevated as conversation with highly educated
churchmen, of course, but the best that could he had in this benighted
wilderness.

They would eat in the room back of the Weavers' store, which was part
kitchen, part workshop, and part library.  Eleanor stirred the pot from
time to time, and the smell of boiled venison and the day's bread baking
mingled with the odors from the soapmaking shed out back and the tallow
they used in candlemaking right here.  "Oh, we're some of everything,"
said Armor, the first time Reverend Thrower visited.

"We do things that every farmer hereabouts can do for himself-but we do
it better, and when they buy it from us it saves them hours of work,
which gives them time to clear and plow and plant more land."

The store itself, out front, was shelved to the ceiling, and the shelves
were filled with dry goods brought in by wagon from points east. Cotton
cloth from the spinning jennies and steam looms of Irrakwa, pewter
dishes and iron pots and stoves from the foundries of Pennsylvania and
Suskwahenny, fine pottery and small cabinets and boxes from the
carpenters of New England, and even a few precious bags of spices
shipped into New Amsterdam from the Orient.  Armor Weaver had confessed
once that it took all his life savings to buy his stock, and it was no
sure bet that he'd prosper out here in this thinly settled land.  But
Reverend Thrower had noticed the steady stream of wagons coming up from
the lower Wobbish and down the TippyCanoe, and even a few from out west
in the Noisy River country.

Now, as they waited for Eleanor to announce that the venison stew was
ready, Reverend Thrower asked him a question that had bothered him for
some time.

"I've seen what they haul away," said Reverend Thrower, "and I can't
begin to guess what they use to pay you.  Nobody makes cash money around
here, and not much they can trade that'll sell back east."

"They pay with lard and charcoal, ash and fine lumber, and of course
food for Eleanor and me and-whoever else might come."

Only a fool wouldn't notice that Eleanor was thickening enough to be
about halfway to a baby.  "But mostly," said Armor, "they pay with
credit."

"Credit!  To farmers whose scalps might well be traded for muskets or
liquor in Fort Detroit next winter?"

"There's a lot more talk of scalping than there is scalping going on,"
said Armor.  "The Reds around here aren't stupid.  They know about the
Irrakwa, and how they have seats in Congress in Philadelphia right along
with White men, and how they have muskets, horses, farms, fields, and
towns just like they do in Pennsylvania or Suskwahenny or New Orange.
They know about the Cheriky people of Appalachee, and how they're
farming and fighting right alongside Tom Jefferson's White rebels to
keep their country independent from the King and the Cavaliers."

"They might also have noticed the steady stream of flatboats coming down
the Ohio and wagons coming west, and the trees falling down and the log
houses going up."

"I reckon you're half right, Reverend," said Armor.  "I reckon the Reds
might go either way.  AEght try to kill us all, or might try to settle
down and live among us.  Living with us wouldn't be exactly easy for
them-they aren't much used to town living, whereas it's the most natural
way for White - folks to live.  But fighting us has got to be worse,
cause if they do that they'll end up dead.  They may think that killing
White folks might scare the others into staying away.  They don't know
how it is in Europe, how the dream of owning land will bring people five
thousand mile to work harder than they ever did in their lives and bury
children who might have lived in the home country and risk having a
tommyhock mashed into their brains cause it's better to be your own man
than to serve any lord.  Except the Lord God."

"And that's how it is with you, too?" asked Thrower.  "Risk everything,
for land?"

Armor looked at his wife Eleanor and smiled.  She didn't smile back,
Thrower noticed, but he also noticed that her eyes were beautiful and
deep, as if she knew 'secrets that made her solemn even though she was
joyful in her heart.

"Not land the way farmers own it, I'm no farmer, I'll tell you that,"
said Armor.  "There's other ways to own land.  You see, Reverend
Thrower, I give them credit now because I believe in this country.

When they come to trade with me, I make them tell me the names of all
their neighbors, and make rough maps of the farms and streams where they
live, and the roads and rivers along their way here.  I make them carry
letters that other folks writ, and I write their letters for them and
ship them on back east to folks they left behind.  I know where
everything and everybody in the whole upper Wobbish and Noisy River
country is and how to get there."

Reverend Thrower squinted and smiled.  "In other words, Brother Armor,
you're the government."

"Let's just say that if there comes a time when a government would come
in handy, I'll be ready to serve," said Armor.  "And in two years, three
years, when more folks come through, and some more start making things,
like bricks and pots and blackware, cabinets and kegs, beer and cheese
and fodder, well, where do you think they'll come to sell it or to buy?
To the store that gave them credit when their wives were longing for the
cloth to make a bright-colored dress, or they needed an iron pot or a
stove to keep out the winter cold."

Philadelphia Thrower chose not to mention that he had somewhat less
confidence in the likelihood of grateful people staying loyal to
Armor-of-God Weaver.  Besides, thought Thrower, I might be wrong.

Didn't the Savior say that we should cast our bread upon the waters?

And even if Armor doesn't achieve all he dreams of, he will have done a
good work, and helped to open this land to civilization.

The food was ready.  Eleanor dished out the stew.  When she set a fine
white bowl in front of him, Reverend Thrower had to smile.  "You must be
right proud of your husband, and all that's he's doing."

Instead of smiling demurely, as Thrower expected that she would, Eleanor
almost laughed aloud.  Armor-of-God wasn't half so delicate.

lie just plain guffawed.  "Reverend Thrower, you're a caution," said
Armor.  "When I'm up to my elbows in candle tallow, Eleanor's up to hers
in soap.  When I'm writing up folks' letters and having them delivered,
Eleanor's drawing up maps and taking down names for our little census
book.  There ain't a thing I do that Eleanor isn't beside me, and not a
thing she does that I'm not beside her.  Except maybe her herb garden,
which she cares for more than me.  And Bible reading, which I care for
more than her."

"Well, it's good she's a righteous helpmate for her husband," said
Reverend Thrower.

"We're helpmates for each other," said Armor-of-God, "and don't you
forget it."

He said it with a smile, and Thrower smiled back, but the minister was a
little disappointed that Armor was so henpecked that he had to admit
right out in the open that he wasn't in charge of his own business or
his own home.  But what could one expect, considering that Eleanor had
grown up in that strange Miller family?  The oldest daughter of Alvin
and Faith Miller could hardly be expected to bend to her husband as the
Lord intended.

The venison, however, was the best that Thrower had ever tasted.

"Not gamy a bit," he said.  "I didn't think wild deer could taste like
this."

"She cuts off the fat," said Armor, "and throws in some chicken."

"Now you mention it," said Thrower, "I can taste it in the broth."

"And the deer fat goes into the soap," said Armor.  "We never throw
anything away, if we can think of any use for it."

"Just as the Lord intended," said Thrower.  Then he fell to eating.

He was well into his second bowl of stew and his third slice of bread
when he made a comment that he thought was a jesting compliment.

"Mrs.  Weaver, your cooking is so good that it almost makes me believe
in sorcery."

Thrower was expecting a chuckle, at the most.  Instead, Eleanor looked
down at the table just as ashamed as if he had accused her of adultery.
And Armor-of-God sat up stiff and straight.  "I'll thank you not to
mention that subject in this house," he said.

Reverend Thrower tried to apologize.  "I wasn't serious about it," he
said.  "Among rational Christians that sort of thing is a joke, isn't
it?  A lot of superstition, and I-" Eleanor got up from the table and
left the room.

"What did I say?" Thrower asked.

Armor sighed.  "Oh, there's no way you could know," he said.

"It's a quarrel that goes back to before we were married, when I first
come out to this land.  I met her when she came with her brothers to
help build my first cabin-the soapmaking shed, now.  She started to
scatter spearmint on my floor and say some kind of rhyme, and I shouted
for her to stop it and get out of my house.  I quoted the Bible, where
it says, You shall not suffer a witch to live.  It made for a right
testy half hour, you may be sure."

"You called her a witch, and she married you?"

"We had a few conversations in between."

"She doesn't believe in that sort of thing anymore, does she?"

Armor knitted his brows.  "It ain't a matter of believing, it's a matter
of doing, Reverend.  She doesn't do it anymore.  Not here, not
'anywhere.  And when you sort of halfway accused her of it, well, it
made her upset.  Because it's a promise to me, you see."

"But when I apologized, why did she-"

"Well, there you are.  You have your way of thinking, but you can't tell
her that come-hithers and herbs and incantations got no power, because
she's seen some things herself that you can't just explain away.

"Surely a man like you, well read in the scripture and acquainted with
the world, surely you can convince your wife to give up the
superstitions of her childhood."

rmor gently laid his hand on Reverend Thrower's wrist.  "Reverend, I got
to tell you something that I didn't think I'd ever have to tell a grown
man.  A good Christian refuses to allow that stuff in his life because
the only proper way to bring the hidden powers into your life is through
prayer and the grace of the Lord Jesus.  It ain't because it doesn't
work, "But it doesn It, said Thrower.  "The powers of heaven are real,
and the visions and visitations of angels, and all the miracles attested
in the scripture.  But the powers of heaven have nothing at all to do
With young couples falling in love, or curing the croup, or getting
chickens to lay, or all the other silly little things that the ignorant
common people do with their so-called hidden wisdom.

There's not a thing that's done by doodlebugging or hexing or whatever
that can't be explained by simple scientific investigation."

Armor didn't answer for the longest while.  The silence made rower quite
uncomfortable, but he had no idea what more he could It hadn't occurred
to him before that Armor could possibly be in such things.

It was a startling perspective.  It was one thing to abstain from
witchery because it was nonsense, and quite another to believe in it and
abstain because it was unrighteous.  It occurred to Thrower that this
latter view was actually more ennobling: for Thrower to disdain witching
was a matter of mere common sense, while for Armor and Eleanor it was
quite a sacrifice.

Before he could find a way to express this thought, however, Armor
leaned back on his chair and changed the subject entirely.

"Reckon your church is just about done."

With relief, Reverend Thrower followed Armor onto safer ground.

"The roof was finished yesterday, and today they were able to clap all
the boards on the walls.  It'll be watertight tomorrow, with shutters on
the windows, and when we get them glazed and the doors hung it'll be
tight as a drum."

"I've got the glass coming by boat," said Armor.  Then he winked.

"I solved the problem of shipping on Lake Erie."

"How did you manage that?  The French are sinking every third boat, even
from Irrakwa."

"Simple.  I ordered the glass from Montreal."

"French glass in the windows of a British church!"

"An American church," said Armor.  "And Montreal's a city in America,
too.  Anyway, the French may be trying to get rid of us, but in the
meantime we're a market for their manufactured goods, so the Governor,
the Marquis de laFayette, he doesn't mind letting his people turn a
profit from our trade as long as we're here.  They're going to ship it
clear around and down into Lake Michigan, and then barge it up the St.
Joseph and down the Tippy-Canoe."

"Will they make it before the bad weather?"

"I reckon so," said Armor, "or they won't get paid."

"You're an amazing man," said Thrower.  "But I wonder that you have so
little loyalty to the British Protectorate."

"Well, you see, that's how it is," said Armor.  "You grew up under the
Protectorate, and so you still think like an Englishman."

"I'm a Scot, sir."

"A Brit, anyway.  In your country, everybody who was even rumored to be
practicing the hidden arts got exiled, right away, hardly even bothered
with a trial, did they?"

"We try to be just-but the ecclesiastical courts are swift, and there is
no appeal."

"Well, now, think about it.  If everybody who had any gift for the arts
got shipped off to the American colonies, how would you ever see a lick
of witchery while you were growing up?"

"I didn't see it because there's no such thing."

"There's no such thing in Britain.  But it's the curse of good
Christians in America, because we're up to our armpits in torches,
doodlebugs, bog-stompers and hexifiers, and a child can't hardly grow to
be four feet tall without bumping headlong into somebody's go-away or
getting caught up in some prankster's speak-all spell, so he says
everything that comes to mind and offends everybody for ten miles
around."

"A speak-all spell!  Now, Brother Armor, surely you can see that a touch
of liquor does as much."

"Not to a twelve-year-old boy who never touched a drop of liquor in his
life."

It was plain that Armor was talking from his own experience, but that
didn't change the facts.  "There is always another explanation."

"There's a powerful lot of explanations you can think up for anything
that happens," said Armor.  "But I tell you this.  You can preach
against conjuring, and you'll still have a congregation.  But if you
keep on saying that conjuring don't work, well, I reckon most folks'll
wonder why they should come all the way to church to hear the preaching
of a plumb fool."

"I have to tell the truth as I see it," said Thrower.

"You may see that a man cheats in his business, but you don't have to
name his name from the pulpit, do you?  No sir, you just keep giving
sermons about honesty and hope it soaks in."

"You're saying that I should use an indirect approach."

"That's a right fine church building, Reverend Thrower, and it ouldn't
be half so fine if it wasn't for your dream of how it ought to e.  But
the folks here figure it's their church.  They cut the wood, they built
it, it's on common land.  And it'd be a crying shame if you were so
stubborn that they up and gave your pulpit to another preacher."

Reverend Thrower looked at the remnants of dinner for a long time.

He thought of the church, not unpainted raw lumber the way it was right
now, but finished, pews in place, the pulpit standing high, and the room
bright with sunlight through clean-glazed windows.  It isn't just the
place, he told himself, but what I can accomplish here.

I'd be failing in my Christian duty if I let this place fall under the
control of superstitious fools like Alvin Miller and, apparently, his
whole family.  If my-mission is to destroy evil and superstition, then I
must dwell among the ignorant and superstitious.  Gradually I will bring
them to knowledge of the truth.  And if I can't convince the parents,
then in time I can convert the children.  It is the work of a lifetime,
my ministry, so why should I throw it away for the sake of speaking the
truth for a few moments only?

"You're a wise man, Brother Armor."

"So are you, Reverend Thrower.  In the long run, even if we disagree
here and there, I think we both want the same thing.  We want this whole
country to be civilized and Christian.  And neither one of us would mind
if Vigor Church became Vigor City, and Vigor City became the capital of
the whole Wobbish territory.  There's even talk back in Philadelphia
about inviting Ohio to become a state and join right in, and certainly
they'll make such an offer to Appalachee.  Why not Wobbish someday?  Why
not a country that stretches from sea to sea, White man and Red, every
soul of us free to vote the government we want to make the laws we'll be
glad to obey?"

It was a good dream.  And Thrower could see himself within it.

The man who had the pulpit of the greatest church in the greatest city
of the territory would become the spiritual leader of a whole people.

For a few minutes he believed so intensely in his dream that when he
thanked Armor kindly for the meal and stepped outside, it made him gasp
to see that right now Vigor Township consisted entirely of Armor's big
store and its outbuildings, a fenced common with a dozen sheep grazing
on it, and the raw wood shell of a big new church.

Still, the church was real enough.  It was almost ready, the walls were
there, the roof was on.  He was a rational man.  He had to see something
solid before he could believe in a dream, but that church was solid
enough now, and between him and Armor they could make the rest of the
dream come true.  Bring people to this place, make this the center of
the territory.  This church was big enough for town meetings, not just
church meetings.  And what about during the week?

He'd be wasting his education if he didn't start a school for the
children hereabouts.  Teach them to read, to write, to cipher, and,
above all, to think, to expunge all superstition from their minds, and
leave behind nothing but pure knowledge and faith in the Savior.

He was so caught up in these thoughts that he didn't even realize he
wasn't heading for Peter McCoy's farm down river, where his bed would be
waiting for him in the old log cabin.  He was walking back up the slope
to the meetinghouse.  Not till he ]it a couple of candles did he realize
that he actually meant to spend the night here.  It was his home, these
bare wooden walls, as no other place in the world had ever been home to
him.  The sappish smell was like a madness in his nostrils, it made him
want to sing hymns he'd never even heard before, and he sat there
humming, thumbing through the pages of the Old Testament without so much
as noticing that there were words on the paper.

He didn't hear them until they stepped onto the wooden floor.

Then he looked up and saw, to his surprise, Mistress Faith carrying a
lantern, followed by the eighteen-year-old twins, Wastenot and Wantnot.
They were carrying a large wooden box between them.  It took a moment
before he realized that the box was meant to be an altar.

That in fact it was a rather fine altar, the wood was tightly fitted as
any master cabinetmaker could manage, beautifully stained. And burnt
into the boards surrounding the top of the altar were two rows of
crosses.

"Where do you want it?" asked Wastenot.

"Father said we had to bring it down tonight, now that the roof and
walls were done."

"Father?" asked Thrower.

"He made it for you special," said Wastenot.  "And little Al burnt in
the crosses hisself, seeing how he wasn't allowed down here no more."

By now Thrower was standing with them, and he could see that the altar
had been lovingly built It was the last thing he expected from Alvin
Miller.  And the perfectly even crosses hardly looked like the work of a
six-year-old child.

"Here," he said, leading them to the place where he had imagined his
altar would stand.  It was the only thing in the meetinghouse besides
the walls and the floor, and being stained, it was darker than the
new-wood floor and walls.  It was perfect, and tears came to Thrower's
eyes.  "Tell them that it's beautiful."

Faith and the boys snul ed as broad as could be.  "You see he ain't your
enemy," said Faith, and Thrower could only agree.

"I'm not his enemy, either," he said.  And he didn't say: I will win him
over with love and patience, but I will win, and this altar is a sure
sip that in his heart he secretly longs for me to set him free from the
darkness of ignorance.

They didn't finger, but headed home briskly through the night.

Thrower set his candlestick on the floor near the altar-never on it,
since that would smack of Papistry-and knelt in a prayer of
thanksgiving.  The church mostly built, and a beautiful altar already
inside it, built by the man he had most feared, the crosses burnt into
it by the strange child who most symbolized the compelling superstitions
of these ignorant people.

"You're so full of pride," said a voice behind him.

He turned, already smiling, for he was always glad when the Visitor
appeared.

But the Visitor was not smiling.  "So full of pride."

"Forgive me," said Thrower.  "I repent of it already.  Still, can I help
it if I rejoice in the great work that is begun here?"

The Visitor gently touched the altar, his fingers seeking out the
crosses.  "He made this, didn't he?"

"Alvin Miller."

"And the boy?"

"The crosses.  I was so afraid they were servants of the devil-" The
Visitor looked at him sharply.  "And because they built an altar, you
think that proves they're not?"

A thrill of dread ran through him, and Thrower whispered, "I didn't
think the devil could use the sip of the cross-"

"You're as superstitious as any of the others," said the Visitor coldly.
"Papists cross themselves all the time.  Do you think it's a hex against
the devil?"

"How can I know anything, then?" asked Thrower.  "If the devil can make
an altar and draw a cross-"

"No, no.  Thrower, my dear son, they aren't devils, either of them.

You'll know the devil when you see him.  Where other men have hair on
their heads, the devil has the horns -of a bull.  Where other men have
feet, the devil has the cloven hooves of a goat.  Where other men have
hands, the devil has the great paws of a bear.  And be sure of this:
he'll make no altars for you when he comes." Then the Visitor laid both
his hands on the altar.  "This is my altar now," he said.

"No matter who made it, I can turn it to my purpose."

Thrower wept in relief.  "Consecrated now, you've made it holy."

And he reached out a hand to touch the altar.

"Stop!" whispered the Visitor.  Even voiceless, though, his word had the
power to set the walls a-trembling.  "Hear me first," he said.

"I always listen to you," said Thrower.  "Though I can't guess why you
should have chosen such a lowly worm as me."

"Even a worm can be made great by a touch from the finger of God," said
the Visitor.  "No, don't misunderstand me-I am not the Lord of Hosts.
Don't worship me."

But Thrower could not help himself, and he wept in devotion, kneeling
before this wise and powerful angel.  Yes, angel, Thrower had no doubt
of it, though the Visitor had no wings and wore a suit of lothes one
might expect to'see in Parliament.

The man who built this is confused, but there is murder in his soul, and
if he is provoked enough, it will come forth.  And the child who made
the crosses-he is as remarkable as you suppose.  But he is not yet
ordained to a life of good or evil.  Both paths are set before him, and
he is open to influence.  Do you understand me?"

"Is this my work?" asked Thrower.  "Should I forget all else, and devote
myself to turning the child to righteousness?"

"If you seem too devoted, his parents will reject you.  Rather you
should conduct your ministry as you have planned.  But in your heart,
you'll bend everything toward this remarkable child, to win him to my
cause.  Because if he does not serve me by the time he's fourteen years
of age, then I'll destroy him."

The mere thought of Alvin Junior being hurt or killed was unbearable to
Thrower.  It filled him with such a sense of loss that he could not
imagine a father or even a mother feeling more.  "AB that a weak man can
do to save the child, I will do," he cried, his voice wrung almost to a
scream by his anguish.

The Visitor nodded, smiled his beautiful and loving smile, and reached
out his hand to Thrower.  "I trust you," he said softly.  His voice was
like healing water on a burning wound.  "I know you will do well.  And
as for the devil, you must feel no fear of him."

Thrower reached for the proffered hand, to cover it with kisses; but
when he should have touched flesh, there was nothing there, and in that
moment the Visitor was gone.

Taleswapper

There was once a time, Taleswapper well remembered, when he could climb
a tree in these parts and look out over a hundred square miles of
undisturbed forest.  A time when oaks lived a century or more, with
ever-thickening trunks making mountains out of wood.  A time when leaves
were so thick overhead that there were places where the forest ground
was bare from lack of light.

That world of eternal dusk was slipping away now.  There still were
reaches of primeval wood, where Red men wandered more quietly than deer
and Taleswapper felt himself to be in the cathedral of the most
well-worshipped God.  But such places were so rare that in this last
year of wandering, Taleswapper had not journeyed a single day in which
he could climb a tree and see no interruption in the forest roof.

All the country between the Ohio and the Wobbish was being settled,
sparsely but evenly, and even now, from his perch atop a willow at the
crest of a rise, Taleswapper could see three dozen cookfires sending
pillars of smoke straight up into the cold autumn air.  And in every
direction, great swatches of forest had been cleared, the land plowed,
crops planted, tended, harvested, so that where once great trees had
shielded the earth from the sky's eye, now the stubbled soil was naked,
waiting for winter to cover its shame.

Taleswapper remembered his vision of drunken Noah.  He had engraved it
for an edition of Genesis for Scottish rite Sunday schools.

Noah, nude, his mouth lolling open, a cup half-spilled still dangling
from his curled fingers; Ham, not far off, laughing derisively; and
Japheth and Shem, walking backward to draw a robe over their father, so
they would not see what their father had exposed in his stupefaction.
With an electric excitement, Taleswapper realized that this, now, is
what that prophetic moment foreshadowed.  That he, Taleswapper, perched
atop a tree, was seeing the naked land in its stupor, awaiting the
modest covering of winter.  It was prophecy fulfilled, a thing which one
hoped for but could not expect in one's own life.

.  Or, then again, the story of drunken Noah might not be a figure of
this moment at all.  Why not the other way around?  Why not cleared land
as a figure for drunken Noah?

Taleswapper was in a foul mood by the time he reached the ground.

He thought and thought, trying to open his mind to see visions, to be a
good prophet.  Yet every time he thought he had got something firm and
tight, it shifted, it changed.  He thought one thought too many, and the
whole fabric came undone, and he was left as uncertain as ever before.

At the base of the tree he opened his pack.  From it he took the Bt)ok
of Tales that he had first made for Old Ben back in '85.

Carefully he unbuckled the sealed portion, then closed his eyes and
riffled the pages.  He opened his eyes and found his fingers resting
among t Proverbs of Hell.  Of course, at a time like this.  His finger
touched two proverbs, both written by his own hand.  One meant nothing,
but the other seemed appropriate.  "A fool sees not the same tree that a
wise man sees."

Yet the more he tried to study out the meaning of that proverb at this
moment, the less connection he saw, except that it included mention of
trees.  So he tried the first proverb after all.  "If the fool would
persist in his folly he would become wise."

Ah.  This was speaking to him, after all.  This was the voice of
prophecy, recorded when he lived in Philadelphia, before he ever began
his journey, on a night when the Book of Proverbs came alive for him and
he saw as if in letters of flame the words that should have been
included.  That night he had stayed up until dawn's light killed the
fires of the page.  When Old Ben came thumping down the stairs to grouch
his way in for breakfast, he stopped and sniffed the air.

"Smoke," he said.  "You haven't been trying to burn down the house, have
you, Bill?"

"No, sir," answered Taleswapper.  "But I saw a vision of what God meant
the Book of Proverbs to say, and wrote them down."

"You are obsessed with visions," said Old Ben.  "The only true vision
comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the huMan mind. Write
that down as a proverb, if you want.  It's far too agnostic for me to
use it in Poor Richard's Almanac."

"Look," said Taleswapper.

Old Ben looked, and saw the last flames as they died.  "Well, now, if
that's not the most remarkable trick to do with letters.  And you told
me you weren't a wizard."

"I'm not.  God gave this to me."

"God or the devil?  When you're surrounded by light, Bill, how do you
know whether it's the glory of God or the flames of hell?"

"I don't know," said Taleswapper, growing confused.  Being young then,
not yet thirty, he was easily confused in the presence of the great man.

"Or perhaps you, wanting truth so badly, gave it to yourself."

Old Ben tilted his head to examine the pages of Proverbs through the
lower lenses of his bifocals.  "The letters have been burned right in.

Funny, isn't it, that I'm called a wizard, who am not, and you, who are,
refuse to adt it."

"I'm a prophet.  Or-want to be."

"If one of your prophecies comes true, Bill Blake, then I'll believe it,
but not until."

In the years since then, Taleswapper had searched for the fulfilment of
even one prophecy.  Yet whenever he thought he had found such a
fulfilment, he could hear Old Ben's voice in the back of his mind,
providing an alternate explanation, scoffing at him for thinking that
any connection between prophecy and reality could be true.

"Never true, " Old Ben would say.  "Useful-now, there's something.

Your mind might make a connection that is useful.  But true is another
matter.  True implies that you have found a connection that exists
independent of your apprehension of it, that would exist whether you
noticed it or not.  And I must say that I have never seen such a
connection in my life.  There are times when I suspect that there are no
such connections, that all links, bonds, ties, and similarities are
creatures of thought and have no substance."

"Then why doesn't the ground dissolve beneath our feet?" asked
Taleswapper.

"Because we have managed to persuade it not to let our bodies by.

Perhaps it was Sir Issac Newton.  He was such a persuasive fellow.

Even if human beings doubt him, the ground does not, and so it endures."
Old Ben laughed.  It was all a lark to him.  He never could bring
himself to believe even his own skepticism.

Now, sitting at the base of the tree, his eyes closed, Taleswapper
connected again: The tale of Noah with Old Ben.  Old Ben was Ham, who
saw the naked truth, limp and shameful, and laughed at it, while all the
loyal sons of church and university walked backward to cover it up
again, so the silly truth would not be seen.  Thus the world continued
to think of the truth as firm and proud, never having seen it in a slack
moment.

That is a true connection, thought Taleswapper.  That is the meaning of
the story.  That is the fulfilment of the prophecy.  The truth when we
see it is ridiculous, and if we wish to worship it, we must never allow
ourselves to see it'.

In that moment of discovery, Taleswapper sprang to his'feet.  He must
find someone at once, to tell of this great discovery while he still
believed it.  As his own proverb said, "The cistern contains: the
fountain overflows." If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and
musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed
fresh and virtuous.

Which way?  The forest road, not three rods off, led toward a large
white church with an oak-high steeple-he had seen it, not a mile away,
while up the tree.  It was the largest building Taleswapper had seen
since he last visited in Philadelphia.  Such a large building for people
to gather in implied that folks in this part of the land felt they had
plenty of room for newcomers.  A good sign for an itinerant teller of
tales, since he lived by the trust of strangers, who might take him in
and feed him when he brought nothing with him to pay with, except his
book, his memory, two strong arms, and sturdy legs that had carried him
ten thousand miles and were good for at least five thousand more.

The road was rutted with wagon tracks, which meant it was often used,
and in the low places it was rimed up with rails, making a good strong
corduroy so that wagons wouldn't mire in rain-soaked soil.  So this was
on its way to being a town, was it?  The large church might not mean
openness at all-it might speak more of ambition.  That's the danger of
judging anything, thought Taleswapper: There are a hundred possible
causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects from every,
cause.  He thought of writing down that thought, but decided against it.
It had no traces on it save the prints of his own soul-neither the marks
of heaven nor of hell.  By this he knew that it hadn't been given to
him.  He had forced the thought himself.  So it couldn't be prophecy,
and couldn't be true.

The road ended in a commons not far from a river.  Taleswapper knew that
from the smell of rushing water-he had a good nose.

Around the commons were scattered several buildings, but the largest of
all was a whitewashed clapboard two-story building with a small sign
that said "Weaver's."

Now when a house has a sign on it, Taleswapper knew, that generally
means the owners want people to recognize the place though they've never
been shown the way, which is the same as to say that the house is open
to strangers.  So Taleswapper went right up and knocked.

"Minute!" came a shout from inside.  Taleswapper waited on the porch.
Toward one end were several hanging baskets, with the long leaves of
various herbs dangling.  Taleswapper recognized many of them as being
useful in various arts, such as healing, finding, sealing, and
reminding.  He also recognized that the baskets were arranged so that,
seen from a spot near the base of the door, they would form a perfect
hex.  In fact, this was so pronounced an effect that Taleswapper
squatted and finally lay prone on the porch to see it properly.  The
colors daubed on the baskets at exactly the correct points proved that
it was no accident.  It was an exquisite hex of protection, oriented
toward the doorway.

Taleswapper tried to think of why someone would put up such a powerful
hex, and yet seek to conceal it.  Why, Taleswapper was probably the only
person around likely to feel the whiff of power from something as
passive as a hex, and so be drawn to notice it.  He was still lying
there on the floor, puzzling about it, when the door opened and a man
said, "Are you so tired, then, stranger?"

Taleswapper leapt to his feet.  "Admiring your arrangement of herbs.
Quite an aerial garden, sir."

"My wife's," said the man.  "She fusses over them all the time.

Has to have them just so."

Was the man a liar?  No, Taleswapper decided.  He wasn't trying to hide
the fact that the baskets made a hex and the trailing leaves intertwined
to bind them together.  He simply didn't know.  Someone -his wife,
probably, if it was her garden-had set up a protection on his house, and
the husband didn't have a clue.

"They look just right to me," said Taleswapper.

"I wondered how someone could arrive here, and me not hear the wagon nor
the horse.  But from the looks of you, I'd guess you came afoot."

"That I did, sir," said Taleswapper.

"And your pack doesn't look full enough to hold many articles to trade."

"I don't trade in things, sir," said Taleswapper.

"What, then?  What but things can be traded?"

"Work, for one thing," said Taleswapper.  "I work for food and shelter."

"You're an old man, to be a vagrant."

"I was born in fifty-seven, so I still have a good seventeen years until
I've used up my three-score and ten.  Besides, I have a few knacks."

At once the man seemed to shrink away.  It wasn't in his body.  It was
his eyes that got more distant, as he said, "My wife and I do our own
work here, seeing how our sons are right small yet.  We've no need of
help."

There was a woman behind him now, a girl still young enough that her
face hadn't grown hard and weathered, though she was solemn.

She held a baby in her arms.  She spoke to her husband.  "We have enough
to spare another place for dinner tonight, Armor-" At that the husband's
face went firm and set.  "My wife is more generous than I am, stranger.
I'll tell you straight out.  You spoke of having a few knacks, and in my
experience that means you make some claim to hidden powers.  I'll have
no such workings in a Christian house."

Taleswapper looked hard at him, and then looked a bit softer at the
wife.  So that was the way of it here: she working such hexes and spells
as she could hide from her husband, and he flat rejecting any sip of it.
If her husband ever realized the truth, Taleswapper wondered what would
happen to the wife.  The man-Armor?-seemed not to be the murderous kind,
but then, there was no telling what violence would flow in a man's veins
when the flood of rage came undammed.

"I understand your caution, sir," said Taleswapper.

"I know you have protections on you," said Armor.  "A lone man, afoot in
the wild for all this way?  The fact that your hair is still on your
head says that you must have warded off the Reds."

Taleswapper grinned and swept his cap off his head, letting his bald
crown show.  "Is it a true warding, to blind them with the reflected
glory of the sun?" he asked.  "They'd get no bounty for my scalp."

"Truth to tell," said Armor, "the Reds in these parts are more peaceable
than most.  The one-eyed Prophet has built him a city on the other side
of the Wobbish, where he teaches Reds not to drink likker."

"That's good advice for any man," said Taleswapper.  And he thought: A
Red man who calls himself a prophet.  "Before I leave this place I'll
have to meet that man and have words with him."

"He won't talk to you, " said Armor.  "Not unless you can change the
color of your skin.  He hasn't spoke to a White man since he had his
first vision a few years back."

"Will he kill me if I try?"

"Not likely.  He teaches his people not to kill White men."

"That's also good advice," said Taleswapper.

"Good for White men, but it may not have the best result for Reds.

There's folks like so-called Governor Harrison down in Carthage City who
mean naught but harm for all Reds, peaceable or not." The truculence had
not left Armor's face, but he was talking anyway, and from his heart,
too.  Taleswapper put a great deal of trust in the sort of man who spoke
his mind to all men, even strangers, even enemies.

"Anyway," Armor went on, "not all Reds are believers in the Prophet's
peaceable words.  Them as follow Ta-Kumsaw are stirring up trouble down
by the Ohio, and a lot of folks are moving north to the upper Wobbish
country.  So you won't lack for houses willing to take a beggar in-you
can thank the Reds for that, too."

"I'm no beggar, sir," said Taleswapper.  "As I told you, I'm willing to
work."

"With knacks and hidden shiftiness, no doubt."

The man's hostility was the plain opposite of his wife's gentle
welcoming air.  "What is your knack, sir?" asked the wife.  "From your
speech you're an educated man.  You'd not be a teacher, would you?"

"My knack is spoken with my name," he said.  "Taleswapper.  I have a
knack for stories."

"For making them up?  We call that lying, hereabouts." The more the wife
tried to befriend Taleswapper, the colder her husband became.

"I have a knack for remembering stories.  But I tell only those that I
believe are true, sir.  And I'm a hard man to convince.  If you tell me
your stories, I'll tell you mine, and we'll both be richer for the
trade, since neither one of us loses what we started with."

"I've got no stories," said Armor, even though he had already told a
tale of the Prophet and another of Ta-Kumsaw.

"That's sad news, and if it's so, then I've come to the wrong house
indeed." Taleswapper could see that this truly wasn't the house for him.
Even if Armor relented and let him in, he would be surrounded by
suspicion, and Taleswapper couldn't live where people looked time.

"Good day to you."

sharp at him all the But Armor wasn't letting him go so easily.

He took Taleswapper's words as a challenge.  "Why should it be sad?  I
live a quiet, ordinary life."

"No man's life is ordinary to himself," said Taleswapper, "and if he
says it is, then that's a story of the kind that I never tell.

"You calling me a liar?" demanded Armor.

"I'm asking if you know a place where my knack might be welcome."

Taleswapper saw, though Armor didn't, how the wife did a calming with
the fingers of her right hand, and held her husband's wrist with her
left.  It was smoothly done, and her husband must have become quite
attuned to it, because he visibly relaxed as she stepped a bit forward
to reply.  "Friend," she said, "if you take the track behind that hill
yonder, and follow it to the end, over two brooks, both with bridges,
you'll reach the house of Alvin Miller, and I know he'll take you in."

"Ha," said Armor.

"Thank you," said Taleswapper.  "But how can you know such a thing?"

"They'll take you in for as long as you want to stay, and never turn you
away, as long as you show willingness to help out."

"Willing I always am, milady," said Taleswapper.

"Always willing?" said Armor.  "Nobody's always willing.  I thought you
always spoke true."

"I always tell what I believe.  Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than
any man."

"Then how do you call me 'sir,' when I'm no knight, and call her
'milady,' when she's as common as myself?"

"Why, I don't believe in the King's knightings, that's why.  He calls a
man a knight because he owes him a favor, whether he's a true knight or
not.  And all his mistresses are called 'ladies' for what they do
between the royal sheets.  That's how the words are used among the
Cavaliers-lies half the time.  But your wife, sir, acted like a true
lady, gracious and hospitable.  And you, sir, like a true knight,
protecting your household against the dangers you most fear."

Armor laughed aloud.  "You talk so sweet I bet you have to suck on salt
for half an hour to get the taste of sugar out of your mouth."

"It's my knack," said Taleswapper.  "But I have other ways to talk, and
not sweetly, when the time is right.  Good afternoon to you, and your
wife, and your children, and your Christian house."

Taleswapper walked out onto the grass of the commons.  The cows paid him
no mind, because he did have a warding, though not of the sort that
Armor would ever see.  Taleswapper sat in the sunlight for a little
while, to let his brain get warm and see if it could come up with a
thought.  But it didn't work.  Almost never had a thought worth having,
after noon.  As the proverb said, "Think in the morning, Act in the
noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night." Too late for thinking
now.  Too early for eating.

He headed up the pathway to the church, which stood well back from the
commons, atop a good-sized hill.  If I were a true prophet, he thought,
I'd know things now.  I'd know whether I'd stay here for a day or a week
or a month.  I'd know whether Armor would be my friend, as I hope, or my
enemy, as I fear.  I'd know whether his wife would someday win herself
free to use her powers in the open.  I'd know whether I'd ever meet this
Red Prophet face to face.

But that was nonsense, he knew.  That was the sort of seeing that a
torch would do-he'd seen them doing it before, more than a few of them,
and it filled him with dread, because it wasn't good, he knew, for a man
to know too much of the path of his own life ahead.  No, for him the
knack he wanted was prophecy, to see, not the small doings of men and
women in their little corners of the world, but rather the great sweep
of events as directed by God.  Or by Satan-Taleswapper wasn't
particular, since both of them had a good idea of what they planned to
do in the world, and so either one was likely to know a few things about
the future.  Of course, it was likely to be more pleasant to hear from
God.  What traces of the devil he had touched so far in his life had all
been painful, each in its own way.

The church door stood open, this being a warmish day for autumn, and
Taleswapper buzzed right in along with the flies.  It was as fine a
church inside as outbviously Scottish rite, so it was plain-but all the
more cheerful for that, a bright and airy place, with whited walls and
glasspaned windows.  Even the pews and pulpit were of light wood.

The only thing dark in the whole place was the altar.  So naturally his
eye was drawn to it.  And, because he had a knack for this sort of
thing, he saw traces of a liquid touch upon the surface of it.

He walked slowly toward the altar.  Toward it, because he had to know
for sure; slowly, because this sort of thing ought not to be in a
Christian church.  Up close, though, there was no mistaking.  It was the
same trace he had seen on the face of the man in DeKane who tortured his
own children to death and blamed it on the Reds.  The same trace he had
seen lingering on the sword that beheaded George Washington.  It was
like a thin film of filthy water, invisible unless you looked at a
certain angle, in a certain light.  But to Taleswapper it was always
visible now-he had an eye for it.

He reached out his hand and set his forefinger carefully on the clearest
trace.  It took all his strength just to hold it there for a moment, it
burned so, setting his whole arm to trembling and aching, right to the
shoulder.

"You're welcome in God's house," said a voice.

Taleswapper, sucking on his burnt finger, turned to face the speaker. He
was robed as a Scottish Rite preacher-Presbyterian, they called them
here in America.

"You didn't get a splinter, did you?" asked the preacher.

It would have been easier just to say Yes, I got a splinter.  But
Taleswapper only told stories he believed.  "Preacher," said
Taleswapper, "the devil has set his hand upon this altar."

At once the preacher's lugubrious smile disappeared.  "How do you know
the devil's handprint?"

"It's a gift of God," said Taleswapper.  "To see."

The preacher looked at him closely, unsure whether or not to believe.
"Then can you also tell where angels have touched?"

"I could see traces, I think, if goodly spirits had intervened.

I've seen such marks before."

The preacher paused, as if he wanted to ask a very important question
but was afraid of the answer.  Then he shuddered, the desire to learn
plainly fled from him, and the preacher spoke now with contempt.
"Nonsense.  You can fool the common people, but I was educated in
England, and I am not deluded by talk of hidden powers."

"Oh," said Taleswapper.  "You're an educated man."

"And so are you, by your speech," said the preacher.  "The south of
England, I would say."

"The Lord Protector's Academy of Art," said Taleswapper.  "I was trained
as an engraver.  Since you're Scottish rite, I daresay you've seen my
work in your Sunday school book."

"I never notice such things," said the preacher.  "Engravings are a
waste of paper that could be given over to words of truth.  Unless they
illustrate matters that the artist's eye has actually seen, like
anatomies.  But what the artist conceives in his imagination has no
better claim on my eyes than what I imagine for myself."

Taleswapper followed that notion to its root.  "What if the artist were
also a prophet?"

The preacher half-closed his eyes.  "The day of prophets is over.

Like that apostate heathen one-eyed drunken Red man across the river,
all who claim to be prophets now are charlatans.  And I have no doubt
that if God granted the gift of prophecy even to one artist, we would
soon have a surplus of sketchers and daubers wishing to be taken for
prophets, especially if it would bring them better pay."

Taleswapper answered mildly, but he did not let the preacher's implicit
accusation stand.  "A man who preaches the word of God for a salary
ought not to criticize others who seek to earn a living by revealing the
truth."

"I was ordained," said the preacher.  "No one ordains artists.

They ordain themselves."

Just as Taleswapper had expected.  The preacher retreated to authority
as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit.
Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter;
Taleswapper returned to the immediate matter.  "The devil laid his
fingers on this altar," said Taleswapper.  "It burned my finger to touch
the place."

"It never burned mine," said the preacher.

"I expect not," said Taleswapper.  "You were ordained."

Taleswapper made no effort to hide the scorn in his voice, and it
plainly irked the preacher, who lashed back.  It did not bother
Taleswapper when people got angry at him.  It meant they were listening,
and at least half believing him.  "Tell me, then, if you have such keen
eyes," said the preacher.  "Tell me if a messenger from God has ever
touched the altar."

Plainly the preacher regarded this question as a test.

Taleswapper had no idea which answer the preacher thought was correct.

It hardly mattered; Taleswapper would answer truthfully, no matter what.

"No," he said.

It was the wrong answer.  The preacher smirked.  "Just like that?

You can say that he has not?"

Taleswapper thought for a moment that the preacher might believe his own
ordained hands had left the marks of God's will.  He would lay that
notion to rest at once.  "Most preachers don't leave tracks of light on
things they touch.  Only a few are ever holy enough.  But it wasn't
himself the preacher had in mind.  "You've said enough now," said the
preacher.  "I know that you're a fraud.  Get out of my church."

"I'm no fraud," said Taleswapper.  "I may be mistaken, but I never lie."

"And I never believe a man who says he never lies."

"A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself," said
Taleswapper.

The preacher's face flushed with anger.  "Get out of here, or I'll throw
you out."

"I'll go gladly," said Taleswapper.  He walked briskly to the door.

"I never hope to return to a church whose preacher is not surprised to
learn that Satan has touched his altar."

"I wasn't surprised because I don't believe you."

"You believed me," said Taleswapper.  "You also believe an angel has
touched it.  That's the story you think is true.  But I tell you that no
angel could touch it without leaving a trace that I could see.

And I see but one trace there."

"Liar!  You yourself are sent by the devil, trying to do your necromancy
here in the house of God!  Begone!  Out!  I conjure you to leave!"

"I thought churchmen like you didn't practice conjurings."

"Out!" The preacher screamed the last word, the veins standing out in
his neck.  Taleswapper put his hat back on and strode away.  He heard
the door slam closed behind him.  He walked across a hilly meadow of
dried-out autumn grass until he struck the track that led up toward the
house that the woman had spoken of.  Where she was sure they'd take him
in.

Taleswapper wasn't so sure.  He never made more than three visits in a
place-if he hadn't found a house to take him in by the third try, it was
best to move on.  This time, the first stop had been unusually bad, and
the second had gone even worse.

Yet his uneasiness wasn't just that things were going badly.  Even if at
this last place they fell on their faces and kissed his feet, Taper felt
peculiar about staying around here.  Here was a town so Christian that
the leading citizen wouldn't allow hidden powers in his house-yet the
altar in the church had the devil's mark on it.  Even worse was the
pattern of deception.  The hidden powers were being used right under
Armor's nose, and by the person he loved and trusted most; while in the
church, the preacher was convinced that God, not the devil, had claimed
his altar.  What could Taleswapper expect, in this place up the hill,
but more madness, more deception?

Twisted people entwined each other, Taleswapper knew that much from the
evidence of his own past.

The woman was right-the brooks were bridged.  Even this, though, wasn't
a good sign.  To bridge a river was a necessity; to bridge a broad
stream, a kindness to travelers.  But why did they build such elaborate
bridges over brooks so narrow that even a man as old as Taleswapper
could leap them without wetting a foot?  The bridges were sturdy,
anchored into the earth far to either side of the stream, and both had
roofs, well thatched.  People pay money to stay in inns that aren't as
tight and dry as these bridges, thought Taleswapper.

Surely this meant that the people at the end of the track were at least
as strange as those he had met so far.  Surely he ought to turn away.
Prudence demanded that he leave.

But prudence was not strong in Taleswapper's character.  It was as Old
Ben told him, years before.  "You'll go into the mouth of hell someday,
Bill, just to find out why the devil has such bad teeth."

There was a reason for the bridges, and Taleswapper sensed that it would
mean a story worth remembering in his book.

It was only a mile, after all.  Just when it seemed the track was about
to wander into impenetrable wood, it took a sharp northward turn and
opened into as pretty a holding as Taleswapper had seen, even in the
placid settled lands of New Orange and Pennsylvania.  The house was
large and fine, with shaped logs, to show that they meant it to last,
and there were barns and sheds and pens and coops that made it almost a
village in itself.  A wisp of smoke rising a half mile on up the track
told him that his guess wasn't all wrong.  There was another household
nearby, sharing the road, which meant it was probably kin.

Married children, no doubt, and all farming together, for the better
prosperity of all.  That was a good thing, Taleswapper knew, when
brothers could grow up liking each other well enough to plow each
other's fields.

Taleswapper always headed for the house-best to announce himself at
once, rather than skulking about and being taken for a robber.

Yet this time, when he meant to walk toward the house, he felt himself
become stupid all at once, unable to remember what it was he was about
to do.  It was a warding so powerful that he did not realize he had been
pushed away until he was halfway down the hill toward stone building
beside a brook.  He stopped abruptly, frightened, for no one had power
enough, he thought, to back him off without him realizing what was
happening.  This place was as strange as the other two, and he wanted no
part of Yet as he tried to turn back the way he had come, the same thing
happened again.  He found himself going down the hill toward the
stone-walled building.

Again he stopped, and this time muttered, "Whoever you are, and whatever
you want, I'll go of my own free will or I'll not go at all."

All at once it was like a breeze behind him, pushing him toward the
building.  But he knew he could go back if he wanted.  Against the
breeze, yes, but he could do it.  That eased his mind considerably.

Whatever constraints had been placed upon him, they were not meant to
enslave him.  And that, he knew, was one of the marks of a goodly
spell-not the hidden chains of a tormentor.

The path rounded to the left a bit, along the brook, and now he could
see that the building was a mill, for it had a millrace and the frame of
a tall wheel standing where the water would flow.  But no water flowed
in the race today, and as he came close enough to see through the large
barn-size door, he discovered why.  It wasn't just closed up for the
winter.  It had never been used as a mill.  The gears were in place, but
the great round millstone wasn't there.  Just a foundation of rammed
cobbles, level and ready and waiting.

Waiting a long time.  This construction was at least five years old,
from the vines and the mosses on the building.  It had been a lot of
work to build this millhouse, and yet it was being used as a common
haybarn.

Just inside the large door, a wagon was rocking back and forth as two
boys grappled together atop a half-load of hay.  It was a friendly bout;
the boys were obviously brothers, the one about twelve years old, the
other perhaps nine, and the only reason the young one wasn't thrown off
the wagon and out the door was because the older boy couldn't keep
himself from laughing.  They didn't notice Taleswapper, of course.

They also didn't notice the man standing at the edge of the loft,
pitchfork in hand, looking down at them.  Taleswapper thought at first
that the man was watching in pride, like a father.  Then he came close
enough to see how he held the fork.  Like a javelin, ready to cast.

For a single moment, Taleswapper saw in his mind's eye just what would
happen-the fork thrown, burying itself in the flesh of one of the boys,
surely killing him, if not immediately, then soon enough, with gangrene
or belly bleeding.  It was murder that Taleswapper saw.

"No!" he shouted.  He ran through the doorway, fetching up alongside the
wagon, looking up at the man in the loft.

The man plunged the pitchfork into the hay beside him and heaved the hay
over the edge onto the wagon, half-burying the two boys.  "I brought you
here to work, you two bearcubs, not to tie each other in knots." The man
was smiling, teasing.  He winked at Taleswapper.

Just as if there hadn't been death in his eyes a moment before.

"Howdy, young feller," said the man.

"Not so young," said Taleswapper.  He doffed his hat, letting his bare
pate give away his age.

The boys dug themselves out of the hay.  "What were you shouting at,
Mister?" asked the younger one.

"I was afraid someone might come to harm," said Taleswapper.

"Oh, we wrassle like that all the time," said the older boy.  "Put her
there, friend.  My name's Alvin, same as my pa." The boy's grin was
contagious.  Scared as he'd been, with so much dark dealing going on
today, Taleswapper had no choice but to smile back and take the
proffered hand.  Alvin Junior had a handshake like a grown man, he was
that strong.  Taleswapper commented on it.

"Oh, he gave you his fish hand.  When he gets to wringing and wrenching
on you, he like to pops your palm like a razzleberry." The younger boy
shook hands, too.  "I'm seven years old, and Al Junior, he's ten."
Younger than they looked.  They both had that nasty bitter body stench
that young boys get when they've been playing hard.  But TaleSWapper
never minded that.  It was the father who puzzled him.

Was it just a fancy in his own mind, that Taleswapper thought he meant
to kill the boys?  What man could take a murderous hand to boys as Sweet
and fine as these?

The man had left the pitchfork in the loft, clambered down the ladder,
and now strode toward Taleswapper with his arms out as if to hug him.
"Welcome here, stranger," said the man.  "I'm Alvin Miller, and these
are my two youngest sons, Alvin Junior and Calvin."

"Cally," corrected the younger boy.

"He doesn't like the way our names rhyme," said Alvin Junior.

"Alvin and Calvin.  See, they named him like me hoping he'd grow up to
be as fine a specimen of manhood as I am.  Too bad it ain't working.
Calvin gave him a shove of mock anger.  "Near as I can tell, he was the
first try, and when I came along they finally got it right!"

"Mostly we call them Al and Cally," said the father.

"Mostly you call us 'shutup' and 'get over here,"' said Cally.

Al Junior gave him a whack on the shoulder and sent him sprawling in the
dirt.  Whereupon his father placed a boot on his backside and sent him
head over heels out the door.  All in fun.  Nobody was hurt.

How could I have thought there was murder going on here?

"You come with a message?  A letter?" asked Alvin Miller.  Now that the
boys were outside, yelling at each other across the meadow, the grown
men could get a word in.

"Sorry," said Taleswapper.  "Just a traveler.  A young lady in town said
I might find a place to sleep up here.  In exchange for whatever good
hard work you might have for my arms."

Alvin Miller grinned.  "Let me see how much work those arms can do." He
thrust out an arm, but it wasn't to shake hands.  He gripped Taleswapper
by the forearm and braced his right foot against Taleswapper's right
foot.  "Think you can throw me?" asked Alvin Miller.

"Just tell me before we start," said Talesw apper, "whether I'll get a
better supper if I throw you, or if I don't throw you."

Alvin Miller leaned back his head and whooped like a Red.

"What's your name, stranger?"

"Taleswapper."

"Well, Mr.  Taleswapper, I hope you like the taste of dirt, cause that's
what you'll eat before you eat anything else here!"

Taleswapper felt the grip on his forearm tighten.  His own arms were
strong, but not like this, man's grip.  Still, a game of throws wasn't
all strength.  It was also wit, and Taleswapper had a bit of that.

He let himself slowly flinch under Alvin Miller's pressure, long before
he had forced the man to use his full strength.  Then, suddenly, he
pulled with all his might in the direction Miller was pushing.

Usually that was enough to topple the bigger man, using his own weight
against him-but Alvin Miller was ready, pulled the other way, and flung
Taleswapper so far that he landed right among the stones that formed the
foundation for the missing millstone.

There had been no malice in it, though, just the love of the contest.

No sooner was Taleswapper down than Miller was helping him up, asking
him if anything was broken.

"I'm just glad your millstone wasn't in place yet," said TaleswapPer,
"or you'd be stuffing brains back into my head."

"What?  You're in Wobbish country, man!  There ain't no need for brains
out here.

"Well, you threw me," said Taleswapper.  "Does that mean you won't let
me earn a bed and a meal?"

"Earn it?  No sir.  I won't allow such a thing." But the grin on his
face denied the harshness of his words.  "No, no, you can work if you
like, because a man likes to feel that he pays his way in the world. But
truth is I'd let you stay even if you had two legs broke and couldn't
help a lick.  We've got a bed all ready for you, just off the kitchen,
and I'll bet a hog against a huckleberry that them boys already told
Faith to set another bowl for supper."

:'That's kind of you, sir."

"Not at all," said Alvin Miller.  "You sure nothing got broke?

You hit them stones awful hard."

"Then I imagine you ought to check to make sure none of those stones got
split, sir."

Alvin laughed again, slapped him on the back, and led him up to the
house.

Such a house it was.  There couldn't be more screeching and shouting in
hell.  Miller tried to sort out all the children for him.

The four older girls were his daughters, busy as could be at half a
dozen jobs, each one carrying on separate arguments with each of her
sisters, at the top of her voice, passing from quarrel to quarrel as her
work took her from room to room.  The screaming baby was a grandchild,
as were the five toddlers playing Roundheads and Cavaliers on and under
the dining table.  The mother, Faith, seemed oblivious to it all as she
labored in the kitchen.  Occasionally she'd reach out to cuff a nearby
child, but otherwise she didn't let them interrupt her work)r her steady
stream of orders, rebukes, threats, and complaints.

"How do you keep your wits together, in all this?" Taleswapper asked
her.

"Wits?" she asked him sharply.  "Do you think anyone with wits would put
up with this?"

Miller showed him to his room.  That's what he called it, "your room, as
long as you care to stay." It had a large bed and a feather pillow, and
blankets, too, and half of one wall was the back of the chimney, so it
was warm.  Taleswapper hadn't been offered a bed like this in all his
wandering.  "Promise me that your name isn't really Procrustes," he
said.

Miller didn't understand the allusion, but it didn't matter, he knew the
look on Taleswapper's face.  No doubt he'd seen it before.

"We don't put our guests in the worst room, ;Taleswapper, we put them in
the best.  And no more talk about that."

"You have to let me work for you tomorrow, then."

"Oh, there's jobs to do, if you're good with your hands.  And if you
ain't ashamed of women's work, my wife could use a help or two.

We'll see what happens." Ai that, Miller left the room and closed the
door behind him.

The noise of the house was only partly dampened by the closed door, but
it was a music that Taleswapper didn't mind hearing.  It was only
afternoon, but he couldn't help himself.  He swung off his pack and
pried off his boots and eased himself down on the mattress.  It rustled
like a straw tick, but there was a feather mattress on top of that, so
it was deep and soft.  And the straw was fresh, and dried herbs hung by
the hearthstones to give it the smell of thyme and rosemary.

Did I ever lie upon so soft a bed in Philadelphia?  Or before that, in
England?  Not since I left my mother's womb, he thought.

There was nothing shy about the use of powers in this house; the hex was
right in the open, painted above the door.  But he recognized the
pattern.  It wasn't a peacemaker, designed to quell any violence in the
soul that slept here.  It wasn't a warning, and it wasn't a fending.

Not a bit of it was designed to protect the house from the guest, or the
guest from the house.  It was for comfort, pure and simple.  And it was
perfectly, exquisitely drawn, exactly the right proportions.  An exact
hex wasn't easy to draw, being made of threes.  Taleswapper couldn't
remember seeing a more perfect one.

So it didn't surprise him, as he lay on the bed, to feel the muscles of
his body unknotting, as if this bed and this room were undoing the
weariness of twenty-five years of wandering.  It occurred to him that
when he died, he hoped the grave was as comfortable as this bed.

When Alvin Junior rocked him awake, the whole house smelled of sage and
pepper and simmered beef.  "You've just got time to use the privy, wash
up, and come eat," said the boy.

"I must have fallen asleep," said Taleswapper.

"That's what I made that hex to do," said the boy.  "Works good, don't
it?" Then he charged out of the room.

Almost immediately Taleswapper heard one of the girls yelling the most
alarming series of threats at the boy.  The quarrel continued at top
volume as Taleswapper went out to the privy, and when he came back
inside, the yelling was still going on-though Taleswapper thought
perhaps now it was a different sister yelling.

"I swear tonight in your sleep Al Junior I'll sew a skunk to the soles
of your feet!" Al's answer was muffled by distance, but it caused
another bout of screaming.  Taleswapper had heard yelling before.

Sometimes it was love and sometimes it was hate.  When it was hate, he
got out as quickly as he could.  In this house, he could stay.

Hands and face washed, he was clean enough that Goody Faith allowed him
to carry the loaves of bread to the table-"as long as you don't let the
bread touch that gamy shirt of yours." Then Taleswapper took his place
in line, bowl in hand, as the whole family trooped into the kitchen and
emerged with the majority of a hog parceled out among them.

It was Faith, not Miller himself, who called on one of the girls to
pray, and Taleswapper took note that Miller didn't so much as close his
eyes, though all the children had bowed heads and clasped hands.

It was as if prayer was a thing he tolerated, but didn't encourage.

Without having to ask, Taleswapper knew that Alvin Miller and the
preacher down in that fine white church did not get along at all.

Taleswapper decided Miller might even appreciate a proverb from his
book: "As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,
so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys."

The meal was not a time of chaos, to Taleswapper's surprise.  Each child
in turn reported what he did that day, and all listened, sometimes
giving advice or praise.  Finally, when the stew was gone and
Taleswapper was dabbing at the last traces in his bowl with a sop of
bread, Miller turned to him, just like he had to everyone else in the
family.

"And your day, Taleswapper.  Was it well spent?"

"I walked some miles before noon, and climbed a tree," said Taleswapper.
"There I saw a steeple, which led me to a town.  There a Christian man
feared my hidden powers, though he saw none of them, and so did a
preacher, though he said he didn't believe I had any.  Still, I was
looking for a meal and a bed, and a chance to work to earn them, and a
woman said that the folks at the end of a particular wagon track would
take me in."

"That would be our daughter Eleanor," said Faith.

"Yes," said Taleswapper.  "I see now that she has her mother's eyes,
which are always calm no matter what is happening."

"No, friend," said Faith.  "It's just that these eyes have seen such
times that since then it hasn't been easy to alarm me."

"I hope before I leave to hear the story of such times," Taleswapper
said.

Faith looked away as she put another slab of cheese on a grandchild's
bread.

Taleswapper went right on With his account of the day, however, not
wishing to show that she might have embarrassed him by not answering.
"That wagon track was most peculiar)" he said.  "There were covered
bridges over brooks that a child could wade in, an( a man could step
over.  I hope to hear the story of those bridges before I go.

Again, no one would meet his gaze.

"And when I came out of the woods, I found a mill with no milld two boys
wrestling on a wagon, and a miller who gave me stone, an the worst throw
of my life, and a family that took me in and gave me the best room in
the house even though I was a stranger, and they didn't know me to be
good or evil."

"Of course you're good," said Al Junior.

"Do you mind my asking?  I've met many hospitable people in my time, and
stayed in many a happy home, but not one happier than this, and no one
quite so glad to see me."

all were still around the table.  Finally, Faith raised her head and
smiled at him.  "I'm glad you found us to be happy," she said.

"But we all remember other times as well, and perhaps our present
happiness is sweeter, from the memory of grief "

"But why do you take in a man like me?"

Miller himself answered.  "Because once we were strangers, and good folk
took us in."

"I lived in Philadelphia for a time, and it strikes me to ask you, are
you of the Society of Friends?"

Faith shook her head.  "I'm Presbyterian.  So are many of the children."

Taleswapper looked at Miller.

"I'm nothing," he said.

"A Christian isn't nothing," said Taleswapper.

"I'm no Christian, either."

"Ah," said Taleswapper.  "A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson." The
children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.

"Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves
his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a
millstone." Then the man stood up from the table and walked away.

They heard a door close.  He was gone away outside.

Taleswapper turned to Faith.  "Oh, milady, I'm afraid you must regret my
coming to your house."

"You ask a powerful lot of questions," she said.

"I told you my name, and my name is what I do.  Whenever I sense that
there's a story, one that matters, one that's true, I hunger for it.

And if I hear it, and believe it, then I remember it forever, and tell
it again wherever I go."

"That's how you earn your way?" asked one of the girls.

"I earn my way by helping mend wagons and dig ditches and spin thread
and anything else that needs doing.  But my life work is tales, and I
swap them one for one.  You may think right now that you don't want to
tell me any of your stories, and that's fine with me, because I never
took a story that wasn't willingly told.  I'm no thid But you see, I've
already got a story-the things that happened to me today.

The kindest people and the softest bed between the Mizzipy and the
Alph."

:'Where's the Alph?  Is that a river?" asked Cally.

"What, you want a story?" asked Taleswapper.

Yes, clamored the children.

"But not about the river Alph," said Al Junior.  "That's not a real
place."

Taleswapper looked at him in genuine surprise.  "How did you know?

Have you read Lord Byron's collection of Coleridge's poetry.?"

Al Junior looked around in bafflement.

"We don't get much bookstuff here," said Faith.  "The preacher gives
them Bible lessons, so they can learn to read."

"Then how did you know the river Alph isn't real?"

Al Junior scrunched his face, as if to say, Don't ask me questions when
I don't even know the answer myself.  "The story I want is about
Jefferson.  You said his name like you met him."

"Oh, I did.  And Tom Paine, and Patrick Henry before they hanged him,
and I saw the sword that cut off George Washington's head.  I even saw
King Robert the Second, before the French sank his ship back in naught
one and took him to the bottom of the sea."

"Where he belonged," murmured Faith.

"If not deeper," said one of the older girls.

"I'll say amen to that.  They say in Appalachee that he had so much
blood on his hands that even his bones are stained brown with it, and
even the most indiscriminate fish won't gnaw at them."

The children laughed.

"Even more than Tom Jefferson," said Al Junior, "I want a tale of the
greatest American wizard.  I bet you knew Ben Franklin."

Again, the child had startled him.  How did he guess that of all tales,
those about Ben Franklin were the ones he best loved to tell?

"Know him?  Oh, a little," said Taleswapper, knowing that the way he
said it promised them all the stories they could hope for.  "I lived
with him only half a dozen years, and there were eight hours every night
that I wasn't with him-so I can't say I know much."

Al Junior leaned over the table, his eyes bright and unblinking.

"Was he truly a maker?"

"All those stories, each in its own time," said Taleswapper.  "As long
as your father and mother are willing to have me around, and as long as
I believe I'm being useful, I'll stay and tell stories night and day."

"Starting with Ben Franklin," insisted Alvin Junior.  "Did he really
pull lightning out of the sky?"

Visions

Alvin Junior woke up sweating from the nightmare.  It was so real, and
he was panting just as if he had been trying to run away.  But there was
no running away, he knew that.  He lay there with his eyes closed,
afraid to open them for a while, knowing that when he did, it would
still be there.  A long time ago, when he was still little, he used to
cry out when this nightmare came.  But when he tried to explain it to Pa
and Mama, they always said the same thing.  "Why, that's just nothing,
son.  You're telling me you're so a-scared of nothing?" So he learned
himself to stifle and never cry when the dream came.

He opened his eyes, and it fled away to the corners of the room, where
he didn't have to look right at it.  That was good enough.  Stay, there
and let me be, he said silently.

Then he realized that it was full daylight, and Mama had laid out his
black broadcloth pants and jacket and a clean shirt.  His Sunday
go-to-meeting clothes.  He'd almost rather go back to the nightmare than
wake up to this.

Alvin Junior hated Sunday mornings.  He hated getting all dressed UP, so
he couldn't set on the ground or kneel in the grass or even bend over
without something getting messed up and Mama telling him to have some
respect for the Lord's day.  He hated having to tiptoe around the house
all morning because it was the Sabbath and there wasn't to be no playing
or making noise on the Sabbath.  Worst of all he hated the thought of
sitting on a hard bench down front, with Reverend Thrower looking him in
the eye while he preached about the fires of hell that were waiting for
the ungodly who despised the true religion and put their faith in the
feeble understanding of man.

Every Sunday, it seemed like.

And it wasn't that Alvin really despised religion.  He just despised
Reverend Thrower.  It was all those hours in school, now that harvest
was over.  Alvin Junior was a good reader, and he got right answers most
of the time in his ciphering.  But that wasn't enough for old Thrower.
He also had to teach religion right along with it.  The other
children-the Swedes and Knickerbockers from upriver, the Scotch and
English from downnly got a licking when they sassed or got three wrong
answers in a row.  But Thrower took his cane to Alvin Junior every
chance he got, it seemed like, and it wasn't over book learning, it was
always about religion.

Of course it didn't help much that the Bible kept striking Alvin funny
at all the wrong times.  That's what Measure said, the time that Alvin
ran away from school and hid in David's house till Measure found him
nigh onto suppertime.  "If you just didn't laugh when he reads from the
Bible, You wouldn't get whupped so much."

But it was funny.  When Jonathan shot all those arrows in the sky and
they missed.  When Jeroboam didn't shoot enough arrows out his window.
When Pharaoh kept finding tricky ways to keep the Israelites from
leaving.  When Samson was so dumb he told his secret to Delilah after
she already betrayed him twice.  "How can I keep from laughing?"

"Just think about getting blisters on your butt," said Measure.

"That ought to take the smile off your face."

"But I never remember till after I already laughed."

"Then you'll probably never need a chair till you're fifteen years old,"
said Measure.  "Cause Mama won't ever let you out of that school, and
Thrower won't ever let up on you, and you can't hide in David's house
forever."

"Why not?"

"Because hiding from your enemy is the same as letting him win."

So Measure wouldn't keep him safe, and he had to go back-and take a
licking from Pa, too, for scaring everybody by running away and hiding
so long.  Still, Measure had helped him.  It was a comfort to know that
somebody else was willing to say that Thrower was his enemy.

All the others were so full of how wonderful and godly and educated
Thrower was, and how kind he was to teach the children from his fount of
wisdom, that it like to made Alvin puke.

Even though Alvin mostly kept his face under control during school, and
so got less lickings, Sunday was the most terrible struggle of all,
because he sat there on that hard bench listening to Thrower, half the
time wanting to bust out laughing till he fell on the floor, and half
the time wanting to stand up and shout, "That's just about the stupidest
thing I ever heard a growed man say!" He even had a feeling Pa wouldn't
lick him very hard for saying that to Thrower, since Pa never had much
of an opinion of the man.  But Mama-she'd never forgive him for doing
blasphemy in the house of the Lord.

Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of
the first day of eternity in hell.

Probably Mama wouldn't even let Taleswapper tell so much as the tiniest
story today, lessen it came from the Bible.  And since Taleswapper never
seemed to tell stories from the Bible, Alvin Junior guessed that nothing
good would come today.

Mama's voice blasted up the stairs.  "Alvin Junior, I'm so sick and
tired of you taking three hours to get dressed on Sunday morning that
I'm about to take you to church naked!"

"I ain't naked!" Alvin shouted down.  But since what he was wearing was
his nightgown, it was probably worse than being naked.  He shucked off
the flannel nightgown, hung it on a peg, and started dressing as fast as
he could.

It was funny.  On any other day, he only had to reach out for his
clothes without even thinking, and they'd be there, just the piece he
wanted.  Shirt, trousers, stockings, shoes.  Always there in his hand
when he reached.  But on Sunday morning, it was like the clothes ran
away from his hand.  He'd go for his shirt and come back with his pants.
He'd reach for a sock and come up with a shoe, time after time.

It was like as if the clothes didn't want to get put on his body any
more than he wanted them there.

So when Mama banged open the door, it wasn't altogether Alvin's fault
that he didn't even have his pants on yet.

"You've missed breakfast!  You're still half-naked!  If you think I'm
going to make the whole family parade into church late on account of
you, you've got-"

"Another think coming," said Alvin.

It wasn't his fault that she always said the same thing.  But she got
mad at him as if he should have pretended to be surprised to hear her
say it for the ninetieth time since summer.  Oh, she was all set to give
him a licking, all right, or call for Pa to do it even worse, when there
was Taleswapper, come to save him.

"Goody Faith," said Taleswapper, "I'd be glad to see to it he comes to
church, if you want to go on ahead with the others."

The minute Taleswapper spoke, Mama whirled around and tried to hide how
mad she'd been.  Alvin right away started doing a calming on her-with
his right hand, where she couldn't see it, since if she saw him doing a
spell on her, she'd break his arm, and that was one threat Alvin Junior
truly believed.  A calming didn't work so well without touching, but
since she was trying so hard to look calm in front of Taleswapper, it
worked all right.

"I hate to put you to any trouble," said Mama.

"No trouble, Goody Faith," said Taleswapper.  "I do little enough to
repay your kindness to me."

"Little enough!" The fretfulness was almost gone from Mama's voice now.
"Why, my husband says you do the work of two grown men.

And when you tell stories to the little ones I get more peace and quiet
in this house than I've had since-since ever.  " She turned back to
Alvin, but now her anger was more an act than real.  "Will you do what
Taleswapper tells you, and come to church right quick?"

"Yes, Mama," said Alvin Junior.  "Quick as I can."

"All right then.  Thank you kindly, Taleswapper.  If you can get that
boy to obey, that's more than anybody else has managed since he learned
to talk."

"He's a real brat," said Mary, from the hallway outside.

Shut your mouth, Mary," Mama said, "or I'll stuff your lower lip up your
nose and tack it there to keep it shut."

Alvin sighed in relief.  When Mama made impossible threats it meant she
wasn't all that angry anymore.  Mary put her nose in the air and
flounced down the hall, but Alvin didn't even bother with it.

He just grinned at Taleswapper, and Taleswapper grinned at him.

"Having trouble getting dressed for church, lad?" asked Taleswapper.

"I'd rather dress myself in lard and walk through a herd of hungry
bears," said Alvin Junior.

"More people live through church than survive encounters with bears."

"Not by much, though."

Soon enough he got dressed.  But he was able to talk Taleswapper into
taking the shortcut, which meant walking through the woods up over the
hill behind the house, instead of going around by way of the road. Since
it was right cold outside, and hadn't rained in a while, and wasn't
about to snow yet, there'd be no mud and Mama'd probably not even guess.
And what Mama didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

"I noticed," said Taleswapper as they climbed up the leaf-covered slope,
"that your father didn't go with your mother and Cally and the girls."

"He doesn't go to that church," said Alvin.  "He says Reverend Thrower
is a jackass.  Course, he don't say that where Mama can hear."

"I suppose not," said Taleswapper.

They stood at the top of the hill, looking down across open meadowland
toward the church.  The church's own hill hid the town of Vigor Church
from view.  The frost was just beginning to melt off the brown autumn
grass, so that the church looked to be the whitest thing in a world of
whiteness, and the sun flashed on it like it was another sun.  Alvin
could see wagons still pulling into place, and horses being tied to the
posts on the meadow.  If they hurried right now, they'd probably be in
their places before Reverend Thrower started up the hymn.

But Taleswapper didn't start down the hill.  He just set himself on a
stump and started to recite a poem.  Alvin listened tight, because
Taleswapper's poems often had a real bite to them.

"I went to the Garden oflove,

And saw what I never had seen:

A chapel was built in the midst,

"ere I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door,

So I turned to the Garden oflove,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be.

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with
briars my joys and desires.

Oh, Taleswapper had a knack, he did, for as he recited, the very world
changed before Alvin's eyes.  The meadows and trees looked like the
loudest shout of spring, vivid yellow-green with ten thousand blossoms,
and the white of the chapel in the midst of it was no longer gleaming,
but instead the dusty, chalky white of old bones.  "Binding with briars
my joys and desires," Alvin repeated.  "You ain't got much use for
religion."

"I breathe religion with my every breath," said the Taleswapper.

"I long for visions, I search for the traces of God's hand.  But in this
Seventh Son III world I see more traces of the other.  A trail of
glistening slime that burns me when I touch it.  God is a bit
standoffish these days, Al Junior, but Satan has no fear of getting down
in the muck with mand."

"Thrower says his church is the house of God."

Taleswapper, he just sat there and said nothing for the longest time.

Finally Alvin asked him right out: "Have you seen devil traces in that
church?"

In the days that Taleswapper had been with them, Alvin had come to know
that Taleswapper never exactly lied.  But when he didn't want to get
pinned down- with the true answer, he'd say a poem.  He said one now.

"O Rose, thou art sick

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Alvin was impatient with such twisting answers.  "If I want to hear
something I don't understand, I can read Isaiah.  "Music to my ears, my
lad, to compare me to the greatest of prophets."

"He ain't much of a prophet if nobody can understand a thing he wrote."

"Or perhaps he meant us all to become prophets."

"I don't hold with prophets," said Alvin.  "Near as I can tell, they end
up just as dead as the next man." It was something he had heard his
father say.

"Everybody ends up dead," said Taleswapper.  "But some who are dead live
on in their words."

"Words never stay straight," said Alvin.  "Now, when I make a thing,
then it's the thing I made.  Like when I make a basket.  It's a basket.
When it gets tore, then it's a tored-up basket.  But when I say words,
they can get all twisted up.  Thrower can take those same very words I
said and bend them back and make them mean just contrary to what I
said."

"Think of it another way, Alvin.  When you make one basket, it can never
be more than one basket.  But when you say words, they can be repeated
over and over, and MI men's hearts a thousand miles from where you first
spoke them.  Words can magnify, but things are never more than what they
are."

Alvin tried to picture that, and with Taleswapper saying it, the picture
came easy to his mind.  Words as invisible as air, coming out of
Taleswapper's mouth and spreading from person to person.  Growing larger
all the time, but still invisible.

Then, suddenly, the vision changed.  He saw the words coming from the
preacher's mouth, like a trembling in the air, spreading out, seeping
into everything-and suddenly it became his nightmare, the terrible dream
that came on him, waking or sleeping, and spiked his heart to his spine
till he like to died.  The world filling up with an invisible trembling
nothing that seeped into everything and shook it apart.  Alvin could see
it, rolling toward him like a huge ball, growing all the time.  He knew
from all the nightmares before that even if he clenched his fists it
would thin itself out and seep between his fingers, and even when he
closed his mouth and his eyes it would press on his face and ooze into
his nose and ears andTaleswapper shook him.

Shook him hard.  Alvin opened his eyes.

The trembling air retreated back to the edges of his sight.

That's where Alvin saw it most of the time, waiting just barely out of
sight, wary as a weasel, ready to flit away if he turned his head.

"What's wrong with you, lad?" asked Taleswapper.  His face looked
afraid.

"Nothing," said Alvin.

"Don't tell me nothing," said Taleswapper.  "All of a sudden I saw a
fear come over you, as if you were seeing a terrible vision."

"It wasn't a vision," said Alvin.  "I had a vision once, and I know."

"Oh?" said Taleswapper.  "What vision was that?"

"A Shining Man," said Alvin.  "I never told nobody about it, and I don't
reckon to start now."

Taleswapper didn't press him.  "What you saw now, if it wasn't a
vision-well, what was it?"

"It was nothing." It was a true answer, but he also knew it was no
answer at all.  But he didn't want to answer.  Whenever he told people,
they just scoffed at him for being such a baby about nothing.

But Taleswapper wouldn't let him slough off his question.  "I've been
longing for a true vision all my life, Al Junior, and you saw one, here
in broad daylight, with your eyes wide open, you saw something so
terrible it made you stop breathing, now tell me what it was."

"I told you!  It was nothing!" Then, quieter: "It's nothing, but I can
see it.  Like the air gets wobbly wherever it goes."

"It's nothing, but not invisible?"

"It gets into everything.  It gets into all the smallest cracks and
shakes everything apart.  Just shivers and shivers until there's nothing
left but dust, and then it shivers the dust, and I try to keep it out,
but it gets bigger and bigger, it rolls over everything, till it like to
fills the whole sky and the whole earth." Alvin couldn't help himself.
He was shaking with cold, even though he was bundled up thick as a bear,
"How many times have you seen this before?"

"Ever since I can remember.  Just now and then it'll come on me.

Most times I just think about other things and it stays back."

"Where?"

"Back.  Out of sight." Alvin knelt down and then sat down, exhausted.
Sat right in the damp grass with his Sunday pants, but he didn't hardly
notice.  "When you talked about words spreading and spreading, it made
me see it again."

"A dream that comes again and again is trying to tell you the truth,"
said Taleswapper.

The old man was so plainly eager about the whole thing that Alvin
wondered if he really understood how frightening it was.  "This ain't
one of your stories, Taleswapper."

"It will be," said Taleswapper, "as soon as I understand it."

Taleswapper sat beside him and thought in silence for the longest time.
Alvin just sat there, twisting grass in his fingers.  After a while he
got impatient.  "Maybe you can't understand everything," he said.

"Maybe it's just a craziness in me.  Maybe I get lunatic spells."

"Here," said Taleswapper, taking no notice that Alvin had even spoke.
"I've thought of a meaning.  Let me say it, and see if we believe it.
Alvin didn't like being ignored.  "Or maybe you get lunatic spells, you
ever think of that, Taleswapper?"

Taleswapper brushed aside Alvin's doubt.  "All the universe is just a
dream in God's mind, and as long as he's asleep, he believes in it, and
things stay real.  What you see is God waking up, gradually waking up,
and his wakefulness sweeps through the dream, undoes the universe, until
finally he sits up, rubs his eyes, and says, 'My, what a dream, I wish I
could remember what it was,' and in that moment we'll all be gone." He
looked eagerly at Alvin.  "How was that?"

"If you believe that, Taleswapper, then you're a blamed fool, just like
Armor-of-God says."

"Oh, he says that, does he?" Taleswapper suddenly snaked out his hand
and took Alvin by the wrist.  Alvin was so surprised he dropped what he
was holding.  "No!  Pick it up!  Look what you were doing!"

"I was just fiddling, for pete's sake."

Taleswapper reached down and picked up what Alvin had dropped.  It was a
tiny basket, not an inch across, made from autumn grasses.  "You made
this, just now."

"I reckon so," said Alvin.

"Why did you make it?"

"Just made it."

"You weren't even thinking about it?"

"It ain't much of a basket, you know.  I used to make them for Cally. He
called them bug baskets when he was little.  They just fall apart pretty
soon."

"You saw a vision of nothing, and then you had to make something.

" Alvin looked at the basket.  "Reckon so."

"Do you always do that?"

Alvin thought back to other times he'd seen the shivering air.

"I'm always making things," he said.  "Don't mean much."

"But you don't feel right again until you've made something.

After you see the vision of nothing, you aren't at peace until you put
something together."

"Maybe I've just got to work it off."

"Not just work, though, is it, lad?  Chopping wood doesn't do the job
for you.  Gathering eggs, toting water, cutting hay, that doesn't ease
you.

Now Alvin began to see the pattern Taleswapper had found.  It was true,
near as he could remember.  He'd wake up after such a dream at night,
and couldn't stop fidgeting until he'd done some weaving or built a
haystack or done up a doll out of corn shucks for one of the nieces.
Same thing when the vision came on him in the day-he wasn't no good at
whatever chore he was doing, until he built something that hadn't been
there before, even if it was nothing more than a pile of rocks or part
of a stone wall.

"It's true, isn't it?  You do that every time, don't you?"

"Mostly."

"Then let me tell you the name of the nothing.  It's the Unmaker."

"Never heard of it," said Alvin.

"Neither did I, till now.  That's because it likes to keep itself
secret.

It's the enemy of everything that exists.  All it wants is to break
everything into pieces, and break those pieces into pieces, until
there's nothing left at all."

"If you break something into pieces, and break the pieces into pieces,
you don't get nothing, " said Alvin.  "You just get lots of little
pieces."

"Shut up and listen to the story," said Taleswapper.

Alvin was used to him saying that.  Taleswapper said it to Alvin Junior
more often than to anybody else, even the nephews.

"I'm not talking about good and evil," said Taleswapper.  "Even the
devil himself can't afford to break everything down, can he, or he'd
cease to be, just like everything else.  The most evil creatures don't
desire the destruction of everything-they only desire to exploit it for
themselves."

Alvin had never heard the word exploit before, but it sounded nasty.

"So in the great war between the Urunaker and everything else, God and
the devil should be on the same side.  But the devil, he doesn't know
it, and so he serves the Umnaker as often as not."

"You mean the devil's out to beat himself?"

"My story isn't about the devil," said Taleswapper.  He was steady as
rain when a story was coming out of him.  "In the great war against the
Unmaker of your vision, all the men and women of the world should be
allies.  But the great enemy remains invisible, so that no one guesses
that they unwittingly serve him.  They don't realize that war is the
Umnaker's ally, because it tears down everything it touches.

They don't understand that fire, murder, crime, cupidity, and
concupiscence break apart the fragile bonds that make human beings into
nations, cities, families, friends, and souls."

"You must be a prophet right enough," said Alvin Junior, "cause I can't
understand a thing you said."

"A prophet," murmured Taleswapper, "but it was your eyes that saw.

Now I know the agony of Aaron: to speak the words of truth, yet never
have the vision for himself "

"You're making a big lot out of my nightmares."

Taleswapper was silent, sitting on the ground, his elbows on his knees,
his chin propped all dismal on his palms.  Alvin tried to figure out
what the man was talking about.  It was a sure thing that what he saw in
his bad dreams wasn't a thing of any kind, so it must be poetical to
talk about the Unmaker like a person.  Maybe it was true, though, maybe
the Unmaker wasn't just something he imagined up in his brain, maybe it
was real, and Al Junior was the only person who could see it.  Maybe the
whole world was in terrible danger, and it was Alvin's job to fight it
off, to beat it back, to keep the thing at bay.

It was sure enough that when the dream was on him, Alvin couldn't bear
it, wanted to drive it away.  But he never could figure out how.

"Sposing I believe you," said Alvin.  "Sposing there's such a thing as
the Unmaker.  There ain't a blame thing I can do."

A slow smile crept over Taleswapper's face.  He tipped himself to one
side, to free up his hand, which slowly reached down to the ground and
picked up the little bug basket where it lay in the grass.

"Does that look like a blamed thing?"

"That's just a bunch of grass."

"It was a bunch of grass," said Taleswapper.  "And if you tore it up
it'd be a bunch of grass again.  But now, right now, it's something more
than that."

A little bug basket is all."

"Something that you made."

"Well, it's a sure thing grass don't grow that way."

"And when you made it, you beat back the Unmaker."

"Not by much," said Alvin.

"No," said Taleswapper.  "But by the making of one bug basket.  By that
much, you beat him back."

It came together in Alvin's mind.  The whole story that the Taleswapper
was trying to tell.  Alvin knew all kinds of opposites in the world:
good and evil, light and dark, free and slave, love and hate.

But deeper than all those opposites was making and unmaking.  So deep
that hardly anybody noticed that it was the most important opposite of
all.  But he noticed, and so that made the Unmaker his enemy.  That's
why the Unmaker came after him in his sleep.  After all, Alvin had his
knack.  His knack for setting things in order, putting things in the
shape they ought to be in.

"I think my real vision was about the same thing," said Alvin.

'.You don't have to tell me about the Shining Man," said Taleswapper. "I
never mean to pry."

"You mean you just pry by accident?" said Alvin.

That was the kind of remark that got him a slap across the face at home,
but Taleswapper only laughed.

"I did something evil and I didn't even know it," said Alvin.

"The Shining Man came and stood by the foot of my bed, and first he
showed me a vision of what I done, so I knowed it was bad.  I tell you I
cried, to know I was so wicked.  But then he showed me what my knack was
for, and now I see it's the same thing you're talking about.

I saw a stone that I pulled out of a mountain, and it was round as a
ball, and when I looked close I saw it was the whole world, with forests
and animals and oceans and fish and all on it.  That's what my knack is
for, to try to put things in order."

Taleswapper's eyes were gleaming.  "The Shining Man showed you such a
vision," he said.  "Such a vision as I'd give my life to see."

"Only cause I'd used my knack to cause harm to others, just for my own
pleasure," said Alvin.  "I made a promise then, my most solemn vow, that
I'd never use my knack for my own good.  Only for others."

"A good promise," said Taleswapper.  "I wish all men and women in the
world would take such an oath and keep it."

"Anyway, that's how I know that the-the Unmaker, it isn't a vision.  The
Shining Man wasn't even a vision.  What he showed me, that was a vision,
but him standing there, he was real "And the Unmaker?"

"Real, too.  I don't just see it in my head, it's there."

Taleswapper nodded, his eyes never leaving Alvin's face.

"I've got to make things," said Alvin.  "Faster than he can tear them
down."

"Nobody can make things fast enough for that," said Taleswapper.

"If all the men in all the world made all the earth into a million
million million million bricks, and built a wall all the days of their
lives, the wall would crumble faster than they could build it.

Sections of the wall would fall apart even before they built them."

"Now that's silly," said Alvin.  "A wall can't fall down before you
build it up."

"If they keep at it long enough, the bricks will crumble into dust when
they pick them up, their own hands will rot and slough like shine from
their bones, until brick and flesh and bone alike all break down into
the same indistinguishable dust.  Then the Unmaker will sneeze, and the
dust will be infinitely dispersed so that it can never come together
again.  The universe will be cold, still, silent, dark, and at last the
Unmaker will be at rest."

Alvin tried to make sense out of what Taleswapper was saying.  It was
the same thing he did whenever Thrower talked about religion in school,
so Alvin thought of it as kind of a dangerous thing to do.  But he
couldn't stop himself from doing it, and from asking his questions, even
if they made people mad.  "If things are breaking down faster than
they're getting made, then how come anything's still around?

Why hasn't the Unmaker already won?  What are we doing here?"

Taleswapper wasn't Reverend Thrower.  Alvin's question didn't make him
angry.  He just knit his brow and shook his head.  "I don't know.

You're right.  We can't be here.  Our existence is impossible."

"Well we are here, in case you didn't notice," said Alvin.  "What kind
of stupid tale is that, when we just have to look at each other to know
it isn't true?"

"It has problems, I admit."

"I thought you only told stories you believe."

"I believed it while I was telling it."

Taleswapper looked so mournful that Alvin reached out and laid his hand
on the man's shoulder, though his coat was so thick and Alvin's hand so
small that he wasn't altogether sure Taleswapper felt his touch.  "I
believed it, too.  Parts of it.  For a while."

"Then there is truth in it.  Maybe not much, but some."

Taleswapper looked relieved.

But Alvin couldn't leave well enough alone.  "Just because you believe
it doesn't make it so.

Taleswapper's eyes went wide.  Now I've done it, thought Alvin.

Now I've made him mad, just like I make Thrower mad.  I do it to
everybody.  So he wasn't surprised when Taleswapper reached out both
arms toward him, took Alvin's face between his hands, and spoke with
such force as to drive the words deep into Alvin's forehead.

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth."

And the words did pierce him, and he understood them, though he could
not have put in words what it was he understood.  Everything possible to
be believed is an image of truth.  If it feels true to me, then there is
something true in it, even if it isn't all true.  And if I study it out
in my mind, then maybe I can find what parts of it are true, and what
parts are false, andAnd Alvin realized something else.

That all his arguments with Thrower came down to this: that if something
just plain didn't make sense to Alvin, he didn't believe it, and no
amount of quoting from the Bible would convince him.  Now Taleswapper
was telling him that he was right to refuse to believe things that made
no sense.  "Taleswapper, does that mean that what I don't believe can't
be true?"

Taleswapper raised his eyebrows and came back with another proverb.
"Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed."

Alvin was fed up with proverbs.  "For once would you tell me straight
out!"

"The proverb is the straight truth, lad.  I refuse to twist it up to fit
a confused mind."

"Well, if my mind's confused, it's all your fault.  All your talk about
bricks crumbling before the wall is built-"

"Didn't you believe that?"

"Maybe I did.  I reckon if I set out to weave all the grass of this
meadow into bug baskets, before I got to the far end of the meadow the
grass would all have died and rotted to nothing.  I reckon if I set out
to turn all the trees from here to Noisy River into barns, the trees'd
all be dead and fell before I ever got to the last of them.

Can't build a house out of rotted logs."

"I was going to say, Then cannot build permanent things out of
impermanent pieces." That is the law.  But the way you said it was the"
proverb of the law: 'You can't build a house out of rotted logs."' "I
said a proverb?"

"And when we get back to the house, I'll write it in my book."

"In the sealed part?" asked Alvin.  Then he remembered that he had only
seen that book by peeking through a crack in his floor late at night
when Taleswapper was writing by candlelight in the room below him.

Taleswapper looked at him sharp.  "I hope you never tried to conjure
open that seal."

Alvin was offended.  He might peek through a crack, but he'd never
sneak.  "Just knowing you don't want me to read that part is better than
any old seal, and if you don't know that, you ain't my friend.  I don't
pry into your secrets."

"My secrets?" Taleswapper laughed.  "I seal that back part because
that's where my own writings go, and I simply don't want anyone else
writing in that part of the book."

"Do other people write in the front part?"

"They do."

"Well, what do they write?  Can I write there?"

"They write one sentence about the most important thing they ever did or
ever saw with their own eyes.  That one sentence is all I need from then
on to remind me of their story.  So when I visit in another city, in
another house, I can open the book, read the sentence, and tell the
story."

Alvin thought of a remarkable possibility.  Taleswapper had lived with
Ben Franklin, hadn't he?  "Did Ben Franklin write in your book?"

"He wrote the very first sentence."

"He wrote down the most important thing he ever did?"

"That he did."

"Well, what was it?"

Taleswapper stood up.  "Come back to the house with me, lad, and I'll
show you.  And on the way I'll tell you the story to explain what he
wrote."

Alvin sprang up spry, and took the old man by his heavy sleeve, and
fairly dragged him toward the path back down to the house.

"Come on, then!" Alvin didn't know if Taleswapper had decided not to go
on to church, or if he plumb forgot that's where they were supposed to
go-whatever the reason, Alvin was happy enough with the result.  A
Sunday with no church at all was a Sunday worth being alive.

Add to that Taleswapper's stories and Maker Ben's own writing in a book,
and it was well nigh to being a perfect day.

"There's no hurry, lad.  I won't die before noon, nor will you, and
stories take some time to tell."

"Was it something he made?" asked Alvin.  "The most important thing?"

"As a matter of fact, it was."

"I knew it!  The two-glass spectacles?  The stove?"

"People used to say to him all the time, Ben, you're a true Maker.

But he always denied it.  Just like he denied he was a wizard.

I've got no knack for hidden powers, he said.  I just take pieces of
things and put them together in a better way.  There were stoves before
I made my stove.  There were spectacles before I made my spectacles.  I
never really made anything in my life, in the way a true Maker would do
it.

I give you two-glass spectacles, but a Maker would give you new eyes."

"He figured he never made anything?"

"I asked him that one day.  The very day that I was starting out with my
book.  I said to him, Ben, what's the most important thing you ever
made?  And he started in on what I just told you, about how he never
really made anything, and I said to him, Ben, you don't believe that,
and I don't believe that.  And he said, Bill, you found me out.

There's one thing I made, and it's the most important thing I ever did,
and it's the most important thing I ever saw."

Taleswapper fell silent, just shambling down the slope through leaves
that whispered loud underfoot.

"Well, what was it?"

"Don't you want to wait till you get home and read it for yourself?"

Alvin got real mad-then, madder than he meant to.  "I hate it when
people know something and they won't say!"

"No need to get your dander up, lad.  I'll tell you.  What he wrote was
this: The only thing I ever truly made was Americans."

"That don't make sense.  Americans are born."

"Well, now, that's not so, Alvin.  Babies are born.  In England the same
as in America.  So it isn't being born that makes them American."

Alvin thought about that for a second.  "It's being born in America."

"Well, that's true enough.  But along about fifty years ago, a baby born
in Philadelphia was never called an American baby.  It was a
Pennsylvanian baby.  And babies born in New Amsterdam were
Knickerbockers, and babies born in Boston were Yankees, and babies born
in Charleston were Jacobians or Cavaliers or some such name."

"They still are," Alvin pointed out.

"They are indeed, lad, but they're something else besides.  All those
names, Old Ben figured, those names divided us up into Virginians and
Orangemen and Rhode Islanders, into Whites and Reds and Blacks, into
Quakers and Papists and Puritans and Presbyterians, into Dutch, Swedish,
French, and English.  Old Ben saw how a Virginian could never quite
trust a man from Netticut, and how a White man could never quite trust a
Red, because they were different.  And he said to himself, If we've got
all these names to hold us apart, why not a name to bind us together? He
toyed with a lot of names that already were used.

Colonials, for instance.  But he didn't like calling us all Colonials
because that made us always turn our eyes back to Europe, and besides,
the Reds aren't Colonials, are they!  Nor are the Blacks, since they
came as slaves.  Do you see the problem?"

"He wanted a name we could all share the same," said Alvin.

"Just right.  There was one thing we all had in common.  We all lived on
the same continent.  North America.  So he thought of calling us North
Americans.  But that was too long.  So-"

"Americans."

"That's a name that belongs to a fisherman living on the rugged coast of
West Anglia as much as to a baron ruling his slavehold in the southwest
part of Dryden.  It belongs as much to the Mohawk chief in Irrakwa as to
the Knickerbocker shopkeeper in New Amsterdam.

Old Ben knew that if people could once start thinking of themselves as
Americans, we'd become a nation.  Not just a piece of some tired old
European country, but a single new nation here in a new land.  So he
started using that word in everything he wrote.  Poor Richard's Almanac
was full of talk about Americans this and Americans that.

And Old Ben wrote letters to everybody, saying things like, Conflict
over land claims is a problem for Americans to solve together.

Europeans can't possibly understand what Americans need to survive.

Why should Americans die for European wars?  Why should Americans be
bound by European precedents in our courts of law?  Inside of five
years, there was hardly a person from New England to Jacobia who didn't
think of himself as being, at least partly, an American."

"It was just a name."

"But it is the name by which we call ourselves.  And it includes
everyone else on this continent who's willing to accept the name.  Old
Ben worked hard to make sure that name included as many people as
possible.  Without ever holding any public office except postmaster, he
singlehandedly turned a name into a nation.  With the King ruling over
the Cavaliers in the south, and the Lord Protector's men ruling over New
England in the north, he saw nothing but chaos and war ahead, with
Pennsylvania smack in the middle.  He wanted to forestall that war, and
he used the name 'American' to fend it off.  He made the New Englanders
fear to offend Pennsylvania, and made the Cavaliers bend over backward
trying to woo Pennsylvanian support.

He was the one who agitated for an American Congress to establish trade
policies and uniform land law.

"And finally," Taleswapper continued, "just before he invited me over
from England, he wrote the American Compact and got the seven original
colonies to sign it.  It wasn't easy, You knowyen the number of states
was the result of a great deal of struggle.  The Dutch could see that
most of the immigrants to America were English and Irish and Scotch, and
they didn't want to be swallowed up-so Old Ben allowed them to divide
New Netherland into three colonies so they'd have more votes in the
Congress.  With Suskwahenny split off from the land claimed by New
Sweden and Pennsylvania, another squabble was put to rest."

"That's only six states," said Alvin.

"Old Ben refused to allow anyone to sign the Compact unless the Irrakwa
were included as the seventh state, with firm borders, with Reds
governing themselves.  There were plenty of people who wanted a White
man's nation, but Old Ben wouldn't hear of it.  The only way to have
peace, he said, was for all Americans to join together as equals.

That's why big Compact doesn't allow slavery or even bonding. That's why
his Compact doesn't allow any religion to have authority over any other.
That's why his Compact doesn't let the government close down a press or
silence a speech.  White, Black, and Red; Papist, Puritan, and
Presbyterian; rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief-we all live under the
same laws.  One nation, created out of a single word."

"American."

"Now do you see why he calls it his greatest deed?"

"How come the Compact itself ain't more important?"

"The Compact was just the words.  The name 'American' was the idea that
made the words."

"It still doesn't include the Yankees and the Cavaliers, and it didn't
stop war, neither, cause the Appalachee folk are still fighting against
the King."

"But it does include all those people, Alvin.  Remember the story of
George Washington in Shenandoah?  He was Lord Potomac in those days,
leading King Robert's largest army against that poor ragtag band that
was all Ben Arnold had left.  It was plain to see that in the morning,
Lord Potomac's Cavaliers would overrun that little fort and seal the
doom of Tom Jefferson's free-mountain rebellion.  But Lord Potomac had
fought beside those mountain men in the wars against the French.  And
Tom Jefferson had been his friend in days gone by.

In his heart he could not bear to think of the morrow's battle.

Who was King Robert, that so much blood should be shed for him? All
these rebels wanted was to own their land, and not have the King set
barons over them, to tax them dry and turn them into slaves as surely as
any Black in the Crown Colonies.  He didn't sleep at all that night."

"He was praying," said Alvin.

"That's the way Thrower tells it," Taleswapper said sharply.  "But no
one knows.  And when he spoke to the troops the next morning, he didn't
say a word about prayer.  But he did speak about the word Ben Franklin
made.  He wrote a letter to the King, resigning from his command and
rejecting his lands and titles.  He didn't sign it 'Lord Potomac,' he
signed it 'George Washington." Then he rose up in the morning and stood
before the blue-coat soldiers of the King and told them what he had
done, and told them that they were free to choose, all of them, whether
to obey their officers and go into battle, or march instead in defense
of Tom Jefferson's great Declaration of Freedom.

He said, 'The choice is yours, but as for me-"' Alvin knew the words, as
did every man, woman, and child on the continent.  Now the words meant
all the more to him, and he shouted them out: "'My American sword will
never shed a drop of American blood!"

"And then, when most of his army had gone and joined the Appalachee
rebels, with their guns and their powder, their wagons and their
supplies, he ordered the senior officer of the men loyal to the King to
arrest him.  "I broke my oath to the King," he said.  'It was for the
sake of a higher good, but still I broke my oath, and I will pay the
price for my treason." He paid, yes sir, paid with a blade through his
neck.  But how many people outside the court of the King think it was
really treason?"

"Not a one," said Alvin.

"And has the King been able to fight a single battle against the
Appalachees since that day?"

"Not a one."

"Not a man on that battlefield in Shenandoah was a citizen of the United
States.  Not a man of them lived under the American Compact.

And yet when George Washington spoke of American swords and American
blood, they understood the name to mean themselves.

Now tell me, Alvin Junior, was old Ben wrong to say that the greatest
thing he ever made was a single word?"

Alvin would have answered, but right then they stepped up onto the porch
of the house, and before they could get to the door, it swung open, and
Ma stood there looking down at him.  From the look on her face, Alvin
knew that he was in trouble this time, and he knew why.

"I meant to go to church, Ma!"

"Lots of dead people meant to go to heaven," she answered, "and they
didn't get there, neither."

"It was my fault, Goody Faith," said Taleswapper.

"It surely was not, Taleswapper," she said.

"We got to talking, Goody Faith, and I'm afraid I distracted the boy."

"The boy was born distracted," said Ma, never taking her eyes from
Alvin's face.  "He takes after his father.  If you don't bridle and
saddle him and ride him to church, he never gets there, and if you don't
nail his feet to the floor of the church he's out that door in a minute.
A ten-year-old boy who hates the Lord is enough to make his mother wish
he'd never been born."

The words struck Alvin Junior to the heart.

"That's a terrible thing to wish," said Taleswapper.  His voice was real
quiet, and Ma finally lifted her gaze to the old man's face.

"I don't wish it," she finally said.

"I'm sorry, Mama," said Alvin Junior.

"Come inside," she said.  "I left church to come and find you, and now
there's not time to get back before the sermon ends."

"We talked about a lot of things, Mama," Alvin said.  "About my dreams,
and about Ben Franklin, and-"

"The only story I want to hear from you," said Ma, "is the sound of hymn
singing.  If you won't go to the church, then you'll sit in the kitchen
with me and sing me hymns while I fix the dinner."

So Alvin didn't get to see Old Ben's sentence in Taleswapper's book, not
for hours.  Ma kept him singing and working till dinnertime, and after
dinner Pa and the big boys and Taleswapper sat around planning
tomorrow's expedition to bring a millstone down from the granite
mountain.

"I'm doing it for you," Pa said to Taleswapper, "so you better come
along."

"I never asked you to bring a millstone."

"Not a day since you've been here that you haven't said something about
what a shame it is that such a fine mill gets used as nothing but a
haybarn, when people hereabouts need good flour."

"I only said it the once, that I remember."

"Well, maybe so," said Pa, "but every time I see you, I think about that
millstone."

"That's because you keep wishing the millstone had been there when you
threw me."

"He don't wish that!" shouted Cally.  "Cause then you'd be dead!"

Taleswapper just grinned, and Papa grinned back.  And they went on
talking about this and that.  Then the wives brought the nephews and
nieces over for Sunday supper, and they made Taleswapper sing them the
laughing song so many times that Alvin thought he'd scream if he heard
another chorus of "Ha, Ha, Hee."

It wasn't till after supper, after the nephews and nieces were all gone,
that Taleswapper brought out his book.

"I wondered if you'd ever open that book," Pa said.

"Just waiting for the right time." Then Taleswapper explained about how
people wrote down their most important deed.

"I hope you don't expect me to write in there," Pa said.

"Oh, I wouldn't let you write in it, not yet.  You haven't even told me
the story of your most important deed." Taleswapper's voice got even
softer.  "Maybe you didn't actually do your most important deed."

Pa looked just a little angry then, or maybe a little afraid.

Whichever it was, he got up and came over.  "Show me what's in that
book, that other people thought was so all-fired important."

"Oh," said Taleswapper.  "Can you read?"

"I'll have you know I got a Yankee education in Massachusetts before I
ever got married and set up as a miller in West Hampshire, and long
before I ever came out here.  It may not amount to much compared to a
London education like you got, Taleswapper, but you don't know how to
write a word I can't read, lessen it's Latin."

Taleswapper didn't answer.  He just opened the book.  Pa read the first
sentence.  "The only thing I ever truly made was Americans." Pa looked
up at Taleswapper.  "Who wrote that?"

"Old Ben Franklin."

"The way I heard it the only American he ever made was illegitimate."

"Maybe Al Junior will explain it to you later," said Taleswapper.

While they said this, Alvin wormed his way in front of them, to stare at
Old Ben's handwriting.  It looked no different from other men's writing.
Alvin felt a little disappointed, though he couldn't have said what he
expected.  Should the letters be made of gold?  Of course not.  There
was no reason why a great man's words should look any different on a
page than the words of a fool.

Still, he couldn't rid himself of frustration that the words were so
plain.  He reached out and turned the page, turned many pages, riffling
them with his fingers.  The words were all the same.  Grey ink on
yellowing paper.

A flash of light came from the book, blinding him for a moment.

"Don't play with the pages like that," said Papa.  "You'll tear one."

Alvin turned around to look at Taleswapper.  "What's the page with light
on it?" he asked.  "What does it say there?"

"Light?" asked Taleswapper.

Then Alvin knew that he alone had seen it.

"Find the page yourself," said Taleswapper.

"He'll just tear it," said Papa.

"He'll be careful," said Taleswapper.

But Papa sounded angry.  "I said stand away from that book, Alvin
Junior."

Alvin started to obey, but felt Taleswapper's hand on his shoulder.

Taleswapper's voice was quiet, and Alvin felt the old man's fingers
moving in a sign of warding.  "The boy saw something in the book," said
Taleswapper, "and I want him to find it again for me."

And, to Alvin's surprise, Papa backed down.  "If you don't mind getting
your book ripped up by that careless lazy boy," he murmured, then fell
silent.

Alvin turned to the book and carefully thumbed the pages, one at a time.
Finally one fell into place, and from it came a light, which at first
dazzled him, but gradually subsided until it came only from a single
sentence, whose letters were on fire.

"Do you see them burning?" asked Alvin.

"No," said Taleswapper.  "But I smell the smoke of it.  Touch the words
that burn for you."

Alvin reached out and gingerly touched the beginning of the sentence.
The flame, to his surprise, was not hot, though it did warm him.  It
warmed him through to the bone.  He shuddered as the last cold of autumn
fled from his body.  He smiled, he was so bright inside.

But almost as soon as he touched it, the flame collapsed, cooled, was
gone.

"What does it say?" asked Mama.  She was standing now, across the table
from them.  She wasn't such a good reader, and the words were upside
down to her.

Taleswapper read.  "A Maker is born."

"There hasn't been a Maker," said Mama, "since the one who changed the
water into wine."

"Maybe not, but that's what she wrote," said Taleswapper.

"Who wrote?" demanded Mama.

"A slip of a girl.  About five years ago."

"What was the story that went with her sentence?" asked Alvin Junior.

Taleswapper shook his head.

"You said you never let people write unless you knew their story."

"She wrote it when I wasn't looking," said Taleswapper.  "I didn't see
it till the next place I stopped."

"Then how did you know it was her?" asked Alvin.

"It was her," he answered.  "She was the only one there who could have
opened the hex I kept on the book in those days."

"So you don't know what it means?  You can't even tell me why I saw
those letters burning?"

Taleswapper shook his head.  "She was an innkeeper's daughter, if I
remember rightly.  She spoke very little, and when she did, what she
said was always strictly truthful.  Never a lie, even to be kind.  She
was considered to be something of a shrew.  But as the proverb says, If
you always speak your mind, the evil man will avoid you.  Or something
like that.  "

"Her name?" asked Mama.  Alvin looked up in surprise.

Mama hadn't seen the glowing letters, so why did she look so powerful
eager to know about who wrote them?

"Sorry," said Taleswapper.  "I don't remember her name right now' And if
I remembered her name, I wouldn't tell it, nor will I tell whether I
know the place where she lived.  I don't want people seeking her out,
troubling her for answers that she may not want to give.

But I will say this.  She was a torch, and saw with true eyes.  So if
she wrote that a Maker was born, I believe it, and that's why I let her
words stay in the book."

"I want to know her story someday," said Alvin.  "I want to know why the
letters were so bright."

He looked up and saw Mama and Taleswapper looking steadily into each
other's eyes.

And then, around the fringes of his'own vision, where he could almost
but not quite see it, he sensed the Unmaker, trembling, invisible,
waiting to shiver the world apart.  Without even thinking about it,
Alvin pulled the front of his shirt out of his pants and knotted the
corners together.  The Unmaker wavered, then retreated out of sight.

Millstone

Taleswapper woke up to somebody shaking him.  Still full dark outside,
but it was time to be moving.  He sat, flexed himself a little, and took
some pleasure -in how few knots and pains he had these days, sleeping on
a soft bed.  I could get used to this, he thought.  I could enjoy living
here.

The bacon was so fat he could hear it sizzling clear from the kitchen.
He was just about to pull his boots on when Mary knocked at the door.
"I'm presentable, more or less," he said.

She came in, holding out two pair of long thick stockings.  "I knotted
them myself," she said.

"I couldn't buy socks this thick in Philadelphia."

"Winter gets right cold here in the Wobbish country, and' She didn't
finish.  Got too shy, ducked her head, and scampered out of the room.

Taleswapper pulled on the stockings, and his boots over them, and
grinned.  He didn't feel bad about accepting a few things like this.

He worked as hard as anybody, and he'd done a lot to help ready this
farm for winter.  He was a good roof man-he liked climbing and didn't
get dizzy.  So his own hands had made sure the house and barns and coops
and sheds all were tight and dry.

And, without anybody ever deciding to do it, he had prepared the
millhouse to receive a millstone.  He had personally loaded all the hay
from the mill floor, five wagons full.  The twins, who really hadn't got
their two farms going yet, since they married only that summer, did the
unloading up in the big barn.  It was all done without Miller himself
ever touching a pitchfork.  Taleswapper saw to that, without making a
fuss over it, and Miller never insisted.

Other things, though, weren't gong so well.  Ta-Kumsaw and his ShawNee
Reds were driving off so many folks from down Carthage way that
everybody had the jitters.  It was fine for the Prophet to have his big
town of thousands of Reds across the river, all talking about how they'd
never again raise their hands in war for any reason.  But there were a
lot of Reds who felt the way Ta-Kumsaw did, that the White man ought to
be forced to the shores of the Atlantic and floated back to Europe, with
or without boats.  There was war talk, and word was that Bill Harrison
down in Carthage was only too happy to fan that particular flame, not to
mention the French in Detroit, always urging the Reds to attack the
American settlers in land the French claimed was part of Canada.

Folks in the town of Vigor Church talked about this all the time, but
Taleswapper knew that Miller didn't take it all that seriously.  He
thought of Reds as country clowns that wanted nothing more than to
guzzle such whisky as they could find.  Taleswapper had seen that
attitude before, but only in New England.  Yankees never seemed to
realize that New England Reds with any gumption had long since moved to
the state of Irrakwa.  It would surely open Yankee eyes to see that the
Irrakwa were working heavily with steam engines brought straight from
England, and up in the Finger Lakes country a White named Eli Whitney
was helping them make a factory that could turn out guns about twenty
times faster than it had ever been done before.  Someday those Yankees
were going to wake up and find out that the Reds weren't all likker-mad,
and some White folks were going to have to scramble fast to catch up.

In the meantime, though, Miller didn't take the war talk very seriously.
"Everybody knows there's Reds in the woods.  Can't stop them from
skulking around, but I haven't missed any chickens so it's no problem
yet."

"More bacon?" asked Miller.  He shoved the bacon board across the table
toward Taleswapper.

"I'm not used to eating so much in the morning," said Taleswapper.

"Since I've been here I've had more food at every meal than I used to
eat in a whole day."

"Put some meat on your bones," said ]Faith.  She slapped down a couple
of hot scones with honey smeared on them.

"I can't eat another bite," protested Taleswapper.

The scones slid right off Taleswapper's plate.  "Got em," said Al
Junior.

"Don't reach across the table like that," said Miller.  "And you can't
eat both those scones."

Al Junior proved his father wrong in an alarmingly short time, Then they
washed the honey off their hands, put on their gloves, and went out to
the wagon.  The first light was just showing in the east as David and
Calm, who lived townward from the farm, rode up.  Al Junior climbed in
the back of the wagon, along with all the tools and ropes and tents and
supplies-it would be a few days before they came back.

"So-do we wait for the twins and Measure?" asked Taleswapper.

Miller swung up onto the wagon seat.  "Measure's on ahead, telling trees
for the sledge.  And Wastenot and Wantnot are staying back here, riding
circuit from house to house." He grinned.  "Can't leave the womenfolk
unprotected, with all the talk of wild Reds prowling around, can we?"

Taleswapper grinned back.  Good to know that Miller wasn't as complacent
as he seemed.

It was a good long way up to the quarry.  On the road they passed the
ruins of a wagon with a split millstone right in the middle of it.

"That was our first try," said Miller.  "But an axle dried out and
jammed up coming down this steep hill, and the whole wagon fell in under
the weight of the stone."

They came near a good-sized stream, and Miller told about how they had
tried to float two millstones down on a raft, but both times the raft
just up and sank.  "We've had bad luck," said Miller, but from the set
of his face he seemed to take it personally, as if someone had set out
to make things fail.

"That's why we're using a sledge and rollers this time," said Al Junior,
leaning over the back of the seat.  "Nothing can fall off, nothing can
break, and even if it does, it's all just logs, and we got no shortage
of replacements."

"As long as it don't rain," said Miller.  "Nor snow."

"Sky looks clear enough," said Taleswapper.

"Sky's a liar," said Miller.  "en it comes to anything I want to do,
water always gets in my way."

They got to the quarry when the sun was full up, but still far from
noon.  Of course, the trip back would be much longer.  Measure had
already felled six stout young trees and about twenty small ones.

David and Calm set right to work, stripping off branches and rounding
them smooth as possible.  To Taleswapper's surprise, it was Al Junior
who picked up the sack of stonecutting tools and headed up into the
rocks.

"Where are you going?" asked Taleswapper.

"Oh, I've got to find a good place for cutting," said Al Junior.

"He's got an eye for stone," said Miller.  But he wasn't saying all he
knew.

"And when you find the stone, what'll you do then?" asked Taleswapper.

"Why, I'll cut it." Alvin sauntered on up the path with all the
arrogance of a boy who knows he's about to do a man's job.

"Got a good hand for stone, too," said Miller.

"He's only ten years old," said Taleswapper.

"He cut the first stone when he was six," said Miller.

Are you saying it's a knack?"

"I ain't saying nothing."

"Will you say this, Al Miller?  Tell me if by chance you are a seventh
son."

:,Why do you ask?"

"It's said, by those who know such things, that a seventh son of a
seventh son is born with the knowledge of how things look under the
surface.  That's why they make such good dowsers."

"Is that what they say?"

Measure walked up, faced his father, put his hands on his hips, and
looked plain exasperated.  "Pa, what harm is there in telling him?

Everybody in the whole country roundabout here knows it."

"Maybe I think Taleswapper here knows more than I want him to know
already."

"That's a right ungracious thing to say, Pa, to a man who's proved
himself a friend twice over."

He doesn't have to tell me anything he doesn't want me to know," said
Taleswapper.

Then I'll tell you," said Measure.  "Pa is a seventh son, all right."

"And so is Al Junior," said Taleswapper.  "Am I right?  You've never
mentioned it, but I'd guess that when a man gives his own name to a son
other than his firstborn, it's bound to be his seventh born."

"Our oldest brother Vigor died in the Hatrack River only a few minutes
after Al Junior was born" said Measure.

Hatrack," said Taleswapper.

"Do you know the place?" asked Measure.

"I know every place.  But for some reason that name makes me think I
should have remembered it before now, and I can't think why.

Seventh son of a seventh son.  Does he conjure the millstone out of the
rock?"

"We don't talk about it like that," said Measure.

"He cuts," said Miller.  "Just like any stonecutter."

"He's a big boy, but he's still just a boy," said Taleswapper.

"Let's just say," said Measure, "that when he cuts the stone it's a mite
softer than when I cut it."

"I'd appreciate it," said Miller, "if you'd stay down here and help with
the rounding and notching.  We need a nice tight sledge and some smooth
true rollers." What he didn't say, but Taleswapper heard just as plain
as day, was, Stay down here and don't ask too many questions about Al
Junior.

So Taleswapper worked with David and Measure and Calm all morning and
well into the afternoon, all the time hearing a steady chinking sound of
iron on stone.  Alvin Junior's stonecutting set the rhythm for all their
work, though no one commented on it.

Taleswapper wasn't the sort of man who could work in silence, though.
Since the others weren't too conversational at first, he told stories
the whole time.  And since they were grown men instead of children, he
told stories that weren't all adventure and heroics and tragic death.

Most of the afternoon, in fact, he devoted to the saga of John Adams:
How his house was burnt down by a Boston mob after he won the acquittal
of ten women accused of witchcraft.  How Alex Hamilton invited him to
Manhattan Island, where the two of them set up a law practice together.
How in ten years they managed to maneuver the Dutch government to allow
unlimited immigration of non -Dutch-speaking people, until English,
Scotch, Welsh, and Irish were a majority in New Amsterdam and New
Orange, and a large minority in New Holland.  How they got English
declared a second official language in 1780, just in time for the Dutch
colonies to become three of the seven original states under the American
Compact.

"I'll bet the Dutchmen hated those boys, by the time they were through,"
said David.

"They were better politicians than that, " said Taleswapper.

"Why, both of them learned to speak Dutch better than most Dutchmen, and
had their children grow up speaking Dutch in Dutch schools.

They were so dadgum Dutch, boys, that when Alex Hamilton ran for
governor of New Amsterdam and John Adams ran for president of the United
States, they both did better in the Dutch parts of New Netherland than
they did among the Scotch and Irish."

"Reckon if I run for mayor, I could get those Swedes and Dutchmen down
river to vote for me?" said David.

"I wouldn't even vote for you," said Calm.

"I would," said Measure.  "And I hope someday you do run for mayor."

"He can't run for mayor," said Calm.  "This ain't even a proper town."

"It will be," said Taleswapper.  "I've seen it before.  Once you get
this mill working, it won't be long before three hundred people dwell
between your mill and Vigor Church."

"You think so?"

"Right now people come in to Armor's store maybe three or four times a
year," said Taleswapper.  "But when they can get flour, they'll come in
much more often.  They'll prefer your mill to any other around here for
some time, too, since you've got a smooth road and good bridges."

"If the mill makes money," Measure said, "Pa's sure to send for a
BuhrStone from France.  We had one back in West Hampshire, before the
flood broke up the mill.  And a BuhrStone means fine white flour."

"Amd white flour means good business," said David.  "We older ones, we
remember." He smiled wistfully.  "We were almost rich there, once."

"So," said Taleswapper.  "With all that traffic here, it won't be just a
store and a church and a mill.  There's good white clay down on the
Wobbish.  Some potter's bound to go into business, making redware and
stoneware for the whole territory."

"Sure wish they'd hurry with that, " said Calm.  "My wife is sick unto
death, she says, of having to serve food on tin plates."

"That's how towns grow," said Taleswapper.  "A good store, a church,
then a mill, then a pottery.  Bricks, too, for that matter.

And when there's a town-"

"David can be mayor," said Measure.

"Not me," said David.  "All that politics business is too much.

It's Armor wants that, not me."

"Armor wants to be king," said Calm.

"That's not kind," said David.

"But it's true," said Calm.  "He'd try to be God, if he thought the job
was open."

Measure explained to Taleswapper.  "Calm and Armor don't get along."

"It ain't much of a husband that calls his wife a witch," said Calm
bitterly.

"Why would he call her that?" asked Taleswapper.

"It's sure he doesn't call her that now, " said Measure.  "She promised
him to give them up.  All her knacks in the kitchen.  It's a shame to
make a woman run a household with just her own two hands."

"That's enough," David said.  Taleswapper caught just a corner of his
warning look.

Obviously they didn't trust Taleswapper enough to let him in on the
truth.  So Taleswapper let them know that the secret was already in his
possession.  "It seems to me that she uses more than Armor guesses,"
said Taleswapper.  "There's a clever hex out of baskets on the front
porch.  And she used a calming on him before my eyes, the day I arrived
in town."

Work stopped then, for just a moment.  Nobody looked at him, but for a
second they did nothing.  Just took in the fact that Taleswapper knew
Eleanor's secret and hadn't told about it to outsiders.  Or to
Armor-of-God Weaver.  Still, it was one thing for him to know, and
something else for them to confirm it.  So they said nothing, just
resumed notching and binding the sledge.

Taleswapper broke the silence by returning to the main topic.

"It's just a matter of time before these western lands have enough
people in them to call themselves states, and petition to join the
American Compact.  When that happens, there'll be need for honest men to
hold office."

"You won't find no Hamilton or Adams or Jefferson out here in the wild
country," said David.

"Maybe not," said Taleswapper.  "But if you local boys don't set up your
own government, you can bet there'll be plenty of city men willing to do
it for you.  That's how Aaron Burr got to be governor of Suskwahenny,
before Daniel Boone shot him dead in ninety-nine."

"You make it sound like murder," said Measure.  "It was a fair duel."

"To my way of thinking," said Taleswapper, "a duel is just two murderers
who agree to take turns trying to kill each other."

"Not when one of them is an old country boy in buckskin and the other is
a lying cheating city man," said Measure.

"I don't want no Aaron Burr trying to be governor over the Wobbish
country," said David.  "And that's what kind of man Bill Harrison is,
down there in Carthage City.  I'd vote for Armor before I'd vote for
him."

"And I'd vote for you before I'd vote for Armor," said Taleswapper.

David grunted.  He continued weaving rope around the notches of the
sledge logs, binding them together.  Taleswapper was doing the' same
thing on the other side.  When he got to the knotting place, Taleswapper
started to tie the two ends of the rope together.

"Wait on that," said Measure.  "I'll go fetch Al Junior." Measure took
off at a jog up the slope to the quarry.

Taleswapper dropped the ends of the rope.  "Alvin Junior ties the knots?
I would have thought grown men like you could tie them tighter."

David grinned.  "He's got a knack."

"Don't any of you have knacks?" asked Taleswapper.

"A few."

"David's got a knack with the ladies," said Calm.

"Cahn's got dancing feet at a hoedown.  Ain't nobody fiddles like him,
neither," said David.  "It ain't on tune all the time, but he keeps that
bow busy."

"Measure's a true shot," said Cahn.  "He's got an eye for things too far
off for most folks to see."

"We got our knacks," said David.  "The twins have a way of knowing when
trouble's brewing, and getting there just about in time."

"And Pa, he fits things together.  We have him do all the wood joints
when we're building furniture."

"The womenfolk got women's knacks."

"But," said Calm, "there ain't nobody like Al Junior."

David nodded gravely.  "Thing is, Taleswapper, he don't seem to know
about it.  I mean, he's always kind of surprised when things turn out
good.  He's right proud when we give him a job to do.  I never seen him
lord it over nobody because he's got more of a knack than they do."

"He's a good boy," said Calm.

"Kind of clumsy," said David.

"Not clumsy, " said Calm.  "Most times it isn't his fault.

"Let's just say that accidents happen more common around him."

"I wouldn't say jinx or nothing," said Calm.

"No, I wouldn't say jinx."

Taleswapper noted that in fact they both had said it.  But he didn't
comment on their indiscretion.  After all, it was the third voice that
made bad luck true.  His silence was the best cure for their
carelessness.  And the other two caught on quickly enough.  They, too,
held their silence.

After a while, Measure came down the hill with Alvin Junior.

Taleswapper dared not be the third voice, since he had taken part in the
conversation before.  And it would be even worse if Alvin himself spoke
next, since he was the one who had been linked with a jinx.  So
Taleswapper kept his eye on Measure, and raised his eyebrows, to show
Measure that he was expected to speak.

Measure answered the question that he thought Taleswapper was asking.
"Oh, Pa's staying up by the rock.  To watch."

Taleswapper could hear David and Calm breathe a sigh of relief.

The third voice didn't have jinx in his mind, so Alvin Junior was safe.

Now Taleswapper was free to wonder why Miller felt he had to keep watch
at the quarry.  "What could happen to a rock?  I've never heard of Reds
stealing rocks."

Measure winked.  "Powerful strange things happen sometimes, specially
with millstones."

Alvin was joking with David and Calm now, as he tied the knots.

He worked hard to get them as tight as he could, but Taleswapper saw
that it wasn't in the knot itself that his knack was revealed.  As Al
Junior pulled the ropes tight, they seemed to twist and bite into the
wood in all the notches, drawing the whole sledge tighter together.

It was subtle, and if Taleswapper hadn't been watching for it, he
wouldn't have seen.  But it was real.  What Al Junior bound was bound
tight.

"That's tight enough to be a raft," said Al Junior, standing back to
admire.

"Well, it's floating on solid earth this time," said Measure.  "Pa says
he won't even piss into water no more."

Since the sun was low in the west, they set to laying the fire.

Work had kept them warm today, but tonight they'd need the fire to back
off the animals and keep the autumn cold at bay.

Miller didn't come down, even at supper, and when Calm got up to carry
food up the hill to his father, Taleswapper offered to come along.

I don't know," said Calm.  "You don't need to.  "I want to."

"Pa-he don't like lots of people gathered at the rock face, time like
this." Calm looked a little sheepish.  "He's a miller, and it's his
stone getting cut there."

"I'm not a lot of people," said Taleswapper.  Calm didn't say anything
more.  Taleswapper followed him up among the rocks.

On the way, they passed the sites of two early stonecuttings.  The
scraps of cut stone had been used to make a smooth ramp from the cliff
face to ground level.  The cuts were almost perfectly round.

Taleswapper had seen plenty of stone cut before, and he'd never seen one
cut this way-perfectly round, right in the cliff.  Most times it was a
whole slab they cut, then rounded it on the ground.  There were several
good reasons for doing it that way, but the best of all was that there
was no way to cut the back of the stone unless you took a whole slab.
Calm didn't slow down for him, so Taleswapper didn't have a chance to
look closely, but as near as he could tell there was no possible way
that the stonecutter in this quarry could have cut the back of the
stone.

It looked just the same at the new site, too.  Miller was raking chipped
rock into a level ramp in front of the millstone.  Taleswapper stood
back and, in the last specks of daylight, studied the cliff.  In a
single day, working alone, Al Junior had smoothed the front of the
millstone and chipped away the whole circumference.  The stone was
practically polished, still attached to the cliff face.  Not only that,
but the center hole had been cut to take the main shaft of the mill
machinery.  It was fully cut.  And there was no way in the world that
anybody could get a chisel in position to cut away the back.

"That's some knack the boy has," said Taleswapper.

Miller grunted assent.

"Hear you plan to spend the night up here," said Taleswapper.

"Heard right."

"Mind company?" asked Taleswapper.

Calm rolled his eyes.

But after a little bit, Miller shrugged.  "Suit yourself."

Calm looked at Taleswapper with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, as if to
say, Miracles never cease.

When Calm had set down Miller's supper, he left.  Miller set aside the
rake.  "You et yet?"

"I'll gather wood for tonight's fire," said Taleswapper.  "While there's
still light.  You eat."

"Watch out for snakes," said Miller.  "They're mostly shut in for the
winter now, but you never know."

Taleswapper watched out for snakes, but he never saw any.  And soon they
had a good fire, laid with a heavy log that would burn all night.

They lay there in the firelight, wrapped in their blankets.  It occurred
to Taleswapper that Miller might have found softer ground a few yards
away from the quarry.  But apparently it was more important to keep the
millstone in plain sight.

Taleswapper began talking.  Quietly, but steadily, he talked about how
hard it must be for fathers, to watch their sons grow, so full of hope
for the boys, but never knowing when death would come and take the child
away.  It was the right thing to talk about, because soon it was Alvin
Miller doing the talking.  He told the story of how his oldest boy Vigor
died in the Hatrack River, only a few minutes after Alvin Junior was
born.  And from there, he turned to the dozens of ways that Al Junior
had almost died.  "Always water," Miller said at the end.

"Nobody believes me, but it's so.  Always water."

"The question is," said Taleswapper, "is the water evil, trying to
destroy a good boy?  Or is it good, trying to destroy an evil power?"

It was a question that might have made some men angry, but Taleswapper
had given up trying to guess when Miller's temper would flare.  This
time it didn't.  "I've wondered that myself," said Miller.

"I've watched him close, Taleswapper.  Of course, he has a knack for
making people love him.  Even his sisters.  He's tormented them
unmerciful since he was old enough to spit in their food.  Yet there's
not a one of them who doesn't find a way to make him something special,
and not just at Christmas.  They'll sew his socks shut or smear soot on
the privy bench or needle up his nightshirt, but they'd also die for
him."

"I've found," said Taleswapper, "that some people have a knack for
winning love without ever earning it."

"I feared that, too," said Miller.  "But the boy doesn't know he has
that knack.  He doesn't trick people into doing what he wants.  He lets
me punish him when he does wrong.  And he could stop me, if he wanted."

"How?"

"Because he knows that sometimes when I see him, I see my boy Vigor, my
firstborn, and then I can't do him any harm, even harm that's for his
own good."

Maybe that reason was partly true, Taleswapper thought.  But it
certainly wasn't the whole truth.

A bit later, after Taleswapper stirred the fire to make sure the log
caught well, Miller told the story that Taleswapper had come for.

"I've got a story," he said, "that might belong in your book."

"Give it a try," said Taleswapper.

"Didn't happen to me, though."

"Has to be something you saw yourself," said Taleswapper.  "I hear the
craziest stories that somebody heard happened to a friend of a friend. "

"Oh, I saw this happen.  It's been going on for years now, and I've had
some discussions with the fellow.  It's one of the Swedes down river,
speaks English good as I do.  We helped him put up his cabin and his
barn when he first come here, the year after us.  And I watched him a
little bit even then.  See, he has a boy, a blond Swede boy, you know
how they get."

"Hair almost white?"

"Like frost in the first morning sun, white like that, and shiny.

A beautiful boy."

"I can see him in my mind," said Taleswapper.

"And that boy, his papa loved him.  Better than his life.  You know that
Bible story, about that papa who gave his boy a coat of many colors?"

"I've heard tell of it."

"He loved his boy like that.  But I saw them two walking alongside the
river, and the father all of a sudden lurched kind of, just bumped his
boy, and sent the lad tumbling down into the Wobbish.  Now, it happened
that the boy caught onto a log and his father and I helped pull him in,
but it was a scary thing to see that the father might have killed his
own best-loved child.  It would'n't've been a-purpose, mind you, but
that wouldn't make the boy any less dead, or the father any less
blameful."

"I can see the father might never get over such a thing."

"Well, of course not.  Yet not long after that, I seen him a few more
times.  Chopping wood, and he swung that axe wild, and if the boy hadn't
slipped and fell right at that very second, that axe would've bit into
the boy's head, and I never seen nobody live after something like that.

"Nor I."

"And I tried to imagine what must be happening.  What that father must
be thinking.  So I went to him one day, and I said, 'Nels, you ought to
be more careful round that boy.  You're likely to take that boy's head
off someday, if you keep swinging that axe so free."

"And Nels, he says to me, 'Mr.  Miller, that wasn't no accident." Well,
you could've blowed me down with a baby's burp.  What does he mean, no
accident?  And he says to me, 'You don't know how bad it is.

I think maybe a witch cursed me, or the devil takes me, but I'm just
working there, thinking how much I love the boy, and suddenly I have
this wish to kill him.  It came on me first when he was just a baby, and
I stood at the top of the stairs, holding him, and it was like a voice
inside my head, it said, "Throw him down," and I wanted to do it, even
though I also knew it would be the most terrible thing in the world.  I
was hungry to throw him off, like a boy gets when he wants to smash a
bug with a stone.  I wanted to see his head break open on the floor.

"'Well, I just fought off that feeling, just swallowed it back and held
that boy so tight I like to smothered him.  Finally when I got him back
into his cradle, I knew that from then on I wasn't going to carry him up
those stairs no more.

"But I couldn't just leave him alone, could I?  He was my boy, and he
grew up so bright and good and beautiful that I had to love him.  If I
stayed away, he cried cause his papa didn't play with him.  But if I
stayed with him, then those feelings came back, again and again.  Not
every day, but many a day, sometimes so fast that I did it afore I even
knew what I was doing.  Like the day I bumped him into the river, I just
took a wrong step and tripped, but I knew even as I took that step that
it was a wrong step, and that I'd trip, and that I'd bump him, I knew
it, but I didn't have time to stop myself And someday I know that I
won't be able to stop myself, I won't mean to do it, but someday when
that boy is under my hand, I'll kill him."' Taleswapper could see
Miller's arm move, as if to wipe tears away from his cheek.

"Ain't that the strangest thing?" Miller asked.  "A man having that kind
of feeling for his own son."

"Does that fellow have any other sons?"

"A few.  Why?"

"I just wondered if he ever felt a desire to kill them."

"Never, not a speck.  I asked him that, matter of fact.  I asked him,
and he said not a speck."

"Well, Mr.  Miller, what did you tell him?"

Miller breathed in and out a few times.  "I didn't know what to tell
him.  Some things are just too big for a man like me to understand.  I
mean, the way that water is out to kill my boy Alvin.

And then this Swede fellow with his son.  Maybe there's some children
that wasn't meant to grow up.  Do you think so, Taleswapper?"

"I think there are some children that are so important, that
someone-some force in the world-may want them dead.  But there are
always other forces, maybe stronger forces, that want them alive."

"Then why don't those forces show theirselves, Taleswapper?  Why don't
some power from heaven come and say-come to that poor Swedish man and
say, 'Don't you fear no more, your boy is safe, even from you!"' 'Maybe
those forces don't speak out loud in words.  Maybe those forces just
show you what they're doing."

"The only force that shows itself in this world is the one that kills."

"I don't know about that Swedish boy," said Taleswapper, "but I'd guess
that there's a powerful protection on your son.  From what you said,
it's a miracle he isn't dead ten times over."

"That's the truth."

"I think he's being watched over."

"Not well enough."

"The water never got him, did it?"

"It came so close, Taleswapper."

"And as for that Swedish boy, I know he's got somebody watching over
him."

"Who?" asked Miller.

"Why, his own father."

"His father is the enemy," said Miller.

"I don't think so," said Taleswappr.  "Do you know how many fathers kill
their sons by accident?  They're out hunting, and a shot goes wrong.  Or
a wagon crushes the boy, or he takes a fall.  Happens all the time.
Maybe those fathers just didn't see what was happening.

But this Swedish man is sharp, he sees what's happening, and he watches
himself, catches himself in time."

Miller sounded a little more hopeful.  "You make it sound like maybe the
father ain't all bad."

"If he were all bad, Mr.  Miller, that boy would be dead and buried long
ago."

"Maybe.  Maybe."

Miller thought for a while more.  So long, in fact, that Taleswapper
dozed a little.  He snapped awake with Miller already talking.

,-and it's just getting worse, not better.  Harder to fight off those
feelings.  Not all that long ago, he was standing up in a loft in the-in
his barn-and he was pitching down hay.  And there below him was his boy,
and all it would take is to let fly with the pitchfork, easiest thing in
the world, he could say the pitchfork slipped and no one would ever
know.  Just let it fly, and stick that boy right through.  And he was
going to do it.  Do you understand me?  It was so hard to fight off
those feelings, harder than ever before, and he just gave up.  Just
decided to have it done with, to give in.  And in that very moment, why,
a stranger appeared in the doorway, and shouted, 'No,' and I set down
the pitchfork-that's what he said, "I set down the pitchfork, but I was
shaking so bad I could hardly walk, knowing that the stranger saw me
with murder in my heart, he must think I'm the most terrible man in the
world to think of killing my own boy, he can't even guess how hard I've
struggled all those years before-"

"Maybe that stranger knew something about the powers that can work
inside a man's heart, said Taleswapper.

"Do you think so?"

"Oh, I can't be sure, but maybe that stranger also saw how much that
father loved the boy.  Maybe the stranger was confused for a long time,
but finally began to realize that the child was extraordinary, with
powerful enemies.  And then maybe he came to understand that no matter
how many enemies the boy had, his father wasn't one of them.

Wasn't an enemy.  And he wanted to say something to that father."

"What did he want to say?" Miller brushed his eyes with his sleeve
again.  "What do you think that stranger might want to say?"

"Maybe he wanted to say, 'You've done all you can do, and now it's too
strong for you.  Now you ought to send that boy away.  To relatives back
east, maybe, or as a prentice in some town." That might be a hard thing
for the father to do, since he loves the boy so much, but he'll do it
because he knows that real love is to take the boy out of danger."

"Yes," said Miller.

"For that matter," said Taleswapper, "maybe you ought to do something
like that with your own boy, Alvin."

"Maybe," said Miller.

"He's in some danger from the water around here, wouldn't you say?

Somebody's protecting him, or something.  But maybe if Alvin weren't
living here-"

"Then some of the dangers would go away," said Miller.

"Think about it," said Taleswapper.

"It's a terrible thing," said Miller, "to send your boy away to live
with strangers."

"It's a worse thing, though, to put him in the ground."

"Yes," said Miller.  "That's the worst thing in the world.  To put your
child in the ground."

They didn't talk any more, and after a while they both slept.

The morning was cold, with a heavy frost, but Miller wouldn't even let
Al Junior come up to the rock until the sun burned it away.

Instead they all spent the morning preparing the ground from the cliff
face to the sledge, so they could roll the stone down the mountain.

By now, Taleswapper was sure that Al Junior used a hidden power to get
the millstone away from the cliff face, even if he didn't realize it
himself Taleswapper was curious.  He wanted to see just how powerful
this power was, so he could understand more about its nature.

And since Al Junior didn't realize what he was doing, Taleswapper's
experiment had to be subtle, too.  "How do you dress your stone?" asked
Taleswapper.

Miller shrugged.  "BuhrStone is what I used before.  They all come with
sickle dress."

"Can you show me?" asked Taleswapper.

Using a corner of the rake, Miller drew a circle in the frost.

Then he drew a series of arcs, radiating from the center of the circle
out to the edges.  Between each pair of arcs he drew a shorter arc,
which began at the edge but never came closer than two-thirds of the way
toward the center.  "Like that," said Miller.

"Most millstones in Pennsylvania and Suskwahenny are quarter dress,"
said Taleswapper.  "You know that cut?"

"Show me."

So Taleswapper drew another circle.  It didn't show up as well, since
the frost was burning off now, but it was good enough.  He drew straight
lines instead of curved ones from the center to the edge, and the
shorter lines branched directly from the long ones and ran straight to
the edge.  "Some millers like this better, because you can keep it sharp
longer.  Since all the lines are straight, you get a nice even draw when
you're tooling the stone."

"I can see that," said Miller.  "I don't know, though.  I'm used to
those curvy lines."

"Well, suit yourself," said Taleswapper.  "I've never been a Miller, so
I don't know.  I just tell stories about what I've seen."

"Oh, I don't mind you showing me," said Miller.  "Don't mind a bit."

Al Junior stood there, studying both circles.

"I think if we once get this stone home," said Miller, "I'll try that
quarter dress on it.  Looks to me like it might be easier to keep up a
clean grind."

Finally the ground was dry, and Al Junior walked to the cliff face.

The other boys were all down below, breaking camp or bringing the horses
up to the quarry.  Only Miller and Taleswapper watched as Al Junior
finally carried his hammer to the cliff face.  He had a little more
cutting to do, to get the circle to its full depth all around.

To Taleswapper's surprise, when Al Junior set the chisel in place and
gave a whang with the hammer, a whole section of stone, some inches
long, split away from the cliff face and crumbled to the ground.

"Why, that stone's as soft as coal," said Taleswapper.  "What kind of
millstone can it make, if it's as weak as that?"

Miller grinned and shook his head.

Al Junior stepped away from the stone.  "Oh, Taleswapper, it's hard
stone, unless you know just the right place to crack it.  Give it a try,
you'll see."

He held out the chisel and hammer.  Taleswapper took them and approached
the rock.  Carefully he laid the chisel onto the stone, a slight angle
away from perpendicular.  Then, after a few trial taps, he laid on a
blow with the hammer.

The chisel practically jumped out of his left hand, and the shock of
impact was so great that he dropped the hammer.  "Sorry," he said, "I've
done this before, but I must have lost the skill-"

"Oh, it's just the stone," said Al Junior.  "It's kind of temperamental.
It only likes to give in certain directions."

Taleswapper inspected the place where he had tried to cut.  but couldn't
find the spot.  His mighty blow had left no mark at all.

Al Junior picked up the tools and laid the chisel against the stone.

It looked to Taleswapper as though he put it in exactly the same place.
But Al acted as though he had placed it quite differently.

"See, it's getting just the angle on it.  Like this."

He whanged with the hammer, the iron rang out, there was a cracking of
stone, and once again crumbled stone pattered on the ground.

"I can see why you have him do all the cutting," Taleswapper said.

"Seems like the best way," said Miller.

In only a few minutes, the stone was fully rounded.  Taleswapper said
nothing, just watched to see what Al would do.

He set down his tools, walked to the millstone, and embraced it.

His right hand curled around the lip of it.  His left hand probed back
into the cut on the other side.  Alvin's cheek pressed against the
stone.

His eyes were closed.  It looked for all the world as though he were
listening to the rock.

He began to hum softly.  A mindless little tune.  He moved his hands.
Shifted his position.  Listened with the other ear.

"Well," Alvin said, "I can't hardly believe it."

"Believe what?" asked his father.

"Those last few cuts must have set up a real shiver in the rock.

The back is already split right off."

"You mean that millstone is standing free?" asked Taleswapper.

"I think we can rock it forward now," said Alvin.  "It takes a little
rope work, but we'll get it out of there without too much trouble."

The brothers arrived with the ropes and horses.  Alvin passed a rope
back behind the stone.  Even though not a single cut had been made
against the back, the rope dropped easily into place.  Then another
rope, and another, and soon they were all tugging, first left, then
right, as they slowly walked the heavy stone out of its bed in the cliff
face.

"If I hadn't seen it," murmured Taleswapper.

"But you did," said Miller.

It was only a few inches clear when they changed the ropes, passing four
lines through the center hole and hitching them to a team of horses
uphill of the stone.  "It'll roll on downhill just fine," Miller
explained to Taleswapper.  "The horses are there as a drag, pulling
against it."

"It looks heavy."

"Just don't lie down in front of it," said Miller.

They started it rolling, very gently.  Miller took hold of Alvin's
shoulder and kept the boy well back from the stone-and uphill of it,
too.  Taleswapper helped with the horses, so he didn't get a good look
at the back surface of the stone until it was down on level ground by
the sledge.

It was smooth as a baby's backside.  Flat as icein a basin.

Except that it was scored in a quarter dress pattern, straight lines
radiating from the lip of the center hole to the edge of the stone.

Alvin came up to stand beside him.  "Did I do it right?" he asked.

"Yes," said Taleswapper.

"It was the luckiest thing," said the boy.  "I could just feel that
stone ready to split right along those lines.  It just wanted to split,
easy as you please."

Taleswapper reached out and drew his finger gently along the edge of a
dress cut.  It stung.  He brought his finger to his mouth, sucked, and
tasted blood.

"Stone holds a nice sharp edge, don't it?" said Measure.  He sounded as
if this sort of thing happened every day.  But Taleswapper could see the
awe in his eyes.

"Good cut," said Calm.

"Best one yet," said David.

Then, with horses bracing against a rapid fall, they gently tipped it to
lie on the sledge, dress side up.

"Will you do me a favor, Taleswapper?" asked Miller.

"If I can."

"Take Alvin back home with you now.  His work's done."

"No, Papa!" Alvin shouted.  He ran over to his father.  "You can't make
me go home now.  "

"Don't need no ten-year-old boys underfoot while we're manhandling a
stone that size," said his father.

"But I've got to watch the stone, to make sure it don't split or chip,
Pa!"

The older sons looked at their father, waiting.  Taleswapper wondered
what they hoped for.  They were too old now, surely, to resent their
father's particular love for his seventh son.  They also must hope to
keep the boy safe from harm.  Yet it meant much to all of them that the
stone arrive safely, unbroken, to begin its service in the mill.

There could be no doubt that young Alvin had the power to keep it whole.

"You can ride with us till sundown," Miller finally said.  "By then
we'll be close enough to home that you and Taleswapper can head back and
spend the night in beds."

"Fine with me," said Taleswapper.

Alvin Junior plainly wasn't satisfied, but he didn't answer back.

They got the sledge under way before noon.  Two horses in front and two
behind, for stopping, were hitched to the stone itself.  The stone
rested on the wooden raft of the sledge, and the sledge rode atop seven
or eight of the small rollers at a time.  The sledge moved Forward,
passing over new rollers waiting in front.  As the rollers merged from
the back, one of the boys immediately yanked theroller out from under
the ropes hitched to the trailing team, raced to the front, and laid it
in place directly behind the lead team.  It meant that each man ran
about five miles for every mile the stone traveled.

Taleswapper tried to take his turn, but David, Calm, and Measure
wouldn't hear of it.  He ended up tending the trailing team, with Alvin
perched atop one of the horses.  Miller drove the leading team, walking
backward half the time to make sure he wasn't going too fast for the
boys to keep up.

Hour after hour they went on.  Miller offered to let them stop and rest,
but they seemed not to tire, and Taleswapper was amazed to see how the
rollers help up.  Not a one split on a rock or from the sheer weight of
the stone.  They got scuffed and dented, but that was about all.

And as the sun sank to about two fingers above the horizon, awash in the
ruddy clouds of the western sky, Taleswapper recognized the Meadow
opening up before them.  They had made the whole journey in a single
afternoon.

"I think I got the strongest brothers in the whole world." Alvin
murmured.

I have no doubt of it, Taleswapper said silently.  You who can cut a
stone from the mountain without hands, because you "find" the right
fractures in the rock, it's no surprise that your brothers find in
themselves exactly as much strength as you believe they have.

Taleswapper tried again, as he had tried so many times before, to puzzle
out the nature of the hidden powers.  Surely there was some natural law
that overned their use-Old Ben had always said so.  And yet here was
this boy who, by mere belief and desire, could cut stone like butter and
give strength to his brothers.  There was a theory that the hidden power
came from friendship with a particular element, but which was it that
could do all that Alvin did?  Earth?  Air?  Fire?

Certainly not water, for Taleswapper knew that Miller's stories were all
true.  Why was it that Alvin Junior could wish for something, and the
earth itself would bend to his will, while others could long for things
and never cause so much as a breeze to blow?

They needed lanterns inside the mihhouse by the time they rolled the
stone through the doors.  "Might as well lay it in place tonight," said
Miller.  Taleswapper imagined the fears that ran through Miller's mind.
If he left the stone upright, it would surely roll in the morning and
crush a particular child as he innocently carried water up to the house.
Since the stone had miraculously come down from the mountain in a single
day, it would be foolish to leave it anywhere but in its proper place,
on the foundation of rammed earth and stone in the millhouse.

They brought a team inside and hitched it to the stone, as they had when
they lowered it on the sledge back by the quarry.  The team would pull
against the weight of the stone as they levered it downward onto the
foundation.

At the moment, though, the stone was resting on built-up earth just
outside the circle of foundation stones.  Measure and Calm were working
their lever poles under the outside edge of the stone, ready to pry it
up and make it fall into place.  The stone rocked a little as they
worked.  David was holding the horses, since it would be a disaster if
they pulled too soon and rocked the stone over the wrong way, to lie on
its dress face in the plain dirt.

Taleswapper stood aside, watching as Miller directed his sons with
useless calls of "Careful there" and "Steady now." Alvin had been beside
him ever since they brought the millstone inside.  One of the horses got
jumpy.  Miller reacted at once.  "Calm, go help your brother with the
horses!" Miller also took a step that way.

At that moment, Taleswapper realized that Alvin was not beside him,
after all.  He was carrying a broom, walking briskly toward the
millstone.  Perhaps he had seen some loose stones lying on the
foundation; he had to sweep them away, didn't he?  The horses backed up;
the lines went slack.  Taleswapper realized, just as Alvin got behind
the stone, that with ropes so slack there'd be nothing to keep the stone
from falling all the way over, if it should fall at just this moment.

Surely it would not fall, in a reasonable world.  But Taleswapper knew
by now that it was not a reasonable world at all.  Alvin Junior had a
powerful, invisible enemy, and it would not miss such a chance as this.

Taleswapper bounded forward.  Just as he came level with the stone, he
felt a lurching in the earth under his feet, a collapse of the firm
dirt.  Not much, just a few inches, but it was enough to let the inside
lip of the millstone fall that much, which rocked the top of the great
wheel more than two feet, and so quickly that the momentum could not be
stopped.  The millstone would fall all the way down, right into its
proper place on the foundation, with Alvin Junior underneath, ground
like grain under the stone.

With a shout, Taleswapper caught hold of Alvin's arm and yanked him
back, away from the stone.  Only then did Alvin see the great stone
falling upon him.  Taleswapper had enough force in his movement to carry
the boy several feet back, but it was not quite enough.

The boy's legs still lay in the stone's shadow.  It was falling fast
now, too fast for Taleswapper to respond, to do anything but watch it
crush Alvin's legs.  He knew that such an injury was the same as death,
except that it would take longer.  He had failed.

In that moment, though, as he watched the stone in its murderous fall,
he saw a crack appear in the stone and, in less than an instant, it
became a clean split right through the stone.  The two halves leapt
apart from each other, each with such a movement that it would fall
beside Alvin's legs, not touching him.

No sooner had Taleswapper seen lantern light through the middle of the
stone than Alvin himself cried, "No!"

To anyone else, it would seem the boy was shouting at the fall of the
stone, at his impending death.  But to Taleswapper, lying on the ground
beside the boy, with the light of the lantern dazzling through the split
in the millstone, the cry meant something else altogether.

Heedless of his own danger, as children usually are, Alvin was crying
out against the breaking of the millstone.  After all his work, and the
labors in bringing the stone home, he could not bear to see it breaking.

And because he could not bear it, it did not happen.  The halves of the
stone jumped back together like a needle jumping at a magnet, and the
stone fell in one piece.

The shadow of the stone had exaggerated its footprint on the ground.  It
did not crush both Alvin's legs.  His left leg, in fact, was completely
clear of the stone, tucked up under him as it was.  The right leg,
however, lay so that the rim of the stone overlapped his shin by two
inches at the widest point.  Since Alvin was still pulling his legs
away, the blow from the stone pushed it further in the direction it was
already going.  It peeled off all the skin and muscle, right down to the
bone, but it did not catch the leg directly when it came to rest.  The
leg might not even have broken, had the broom not been lying crosswise
under it.  The stone drove Alvin's leg downward against the broom
handle, just hard enough to snap both bones of the lower leg clean in
half.  The sharp edges of the bone broke the skin and came to rest like
two sides of a vise, gripping the broom handle.

But the leg was not under the millstone, and the bones were broken
cleanly, not ground to dust under the rock.

The air was filled with the crash of stone on stone, the greatthroated
shouts of men surprised by grief, and above all the piercing cry of
agony from one boy who was never so young and frail as now.

By the time anyone else could get there, Taleswapper had seen that both
Alvin's legs were free of the stone.  Alvin tried to sit up and look at
his injury.  Either the sight or the pain of it was too much for him,
and he fainted.  Alvin's father reached him then; he had not been
nearest, but he had moved faster than Alvin's brothers.

Taleswapper tried to reassure him, for with the bones gripping the broom
handle, the leg did not look broken.  Miller lifted his son, but the leg
would not come, and even unconscious the pain wrung a cruel moan from
the boy.  It was Measure who steeled himself to pull on the leg and free
it from the broom handle.

David already held a lantern, and as Miller carried the boy, David ran
alongside, lighting the way.  Measure and Calm would have followed, but
Taleswapper called to them.  "The womenfolk are there, and David, and
your father," he said.  "Someone needs to see to all this."

"You're right," said Cahn.  "Father won't be eager to come down here
soon."

The young men used levers to raise the stone enough that Taleswapper
could pull out the broom handle and the ropes that were still tied to
the horses.  The three of them cleared all the equipment out of the
millhouse, then stabled the horses and put away the tools and supplies.
Only then did Taleswapper return to the house to find that Alvin Junior
was sleeping in Taleswapper's bed.

"I hope you don't mind," said Anne anxiously.

"Of course not," said Taleswapper.

The other girls and Cally were clearing away the supper dishes.

In the room that had been Taleswapper's, Faith and Miller, both ashen
and tight-lipped, sat beside the bed, where Alvin lay with his leg
splinted and bandaged.

David stood near the door.  "It was a clean break," he whispered to
Taleswapper.  "But the cuts in the skin-we fear infection.  He lost all
the skin off the front of his shin.  I don't know if bare bone like that
can ever heal."

"Did you put the skin back?" asked Taleswapper.

"Such as was left, we pressed into place, and Mother sewed it there."

"That was well done," said Taleswapper.

Faith lifted her head.  "Do you know aught of physicking, then,
Taleswapper?"

"Such as a man learns after years trying to do what he can among those
who know as little as he."

"How could this happen?" Miller said.  "Why now, after so many other
times that did him no injury?" He looked up at Taleswapper.  "I had come
to think the boy had a protector."

"He has."

"Then the protector failed him."

"It did not fail," said Taleswapper.  "For a moment, as the stone fell,
I saw it split, wide enough that it wouldn't have touched him."

"Like the ridgebeam," whispered Faith.

"I thought I saw it too, Father," said David.  "But when it came down
whole, I decided I must have seen what I wished for, and not what was."

"There's no split in it now," said Miller.

"No," said Taleswapper.  "Because Alvin Junior refused to let it split.
"Are you saying he knit it back together?  So it would strike him and
wreck his leg?"

"I'm saying he had no thought of his leg," said Taleswapper.

"Only of the stone."

"Oh, my boy, my good boy," murmured his mother, gently caressing the arm
that extended thoughtlessly toward her.  As she moved his fingers, they
limply bent as she pushed them, then sprang back.

"Is it possible?" asked David.  "That the stone split and was made whole
again, as quickly as that?"

"It must be," said Taleswapper, "because it happened."

Faith moved her son's fingers again, but this time they did not spring
back.  They extended even further, then flexed into a fist, then
extended flat again.

"He's awake," said his father.

"I'll fetch some rum for the boy," said David.  "To slack the pain.

Armor'll have some in his store."

No," murmured Alvin.

The boy says no," said Taleswapper.

"What does he know, in pain as he is?"

"He has to keep his wits about him, if he can," said Taleswapper.

He knelt by the bed, just to the right of Faith, so he was even nearer
to the boy's face.  "Alvin, do you hear me?"

Alvin groaned.  It must have meant yes.

"Then listen to me.  Your leg is very badly hurt.  The bones are broken,
but they've been set in place-they'll heal well enough.  But the skin
was torn away, and even though your mother has sewn it back in place,
there's a good chance the skin will die and take gangrene, and kill you.
Most surgeons would cut off your leg to save your life."

Alvin tossed his head back and forth, trying to shout.  It came out as a
moan: "No, no, no."

"You're making things worse!" Faith said angrily.

Taleswapper looked at the father for permission to go on.

"Don't torment the boy," said Miller.

"There's a proverb," said Taleswapper.  "The apple tree never asks the
beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse, how he shall take his
prey.

"What does that mean?" asked Faith.

"It means that I have no business trying to teach him how to use powers
that I can't begin to understand.  But since he doesn't know how to do
it himself, I'll have to try, won't I?"

Miller pondered a moment.  "Go ahead, Taleswapper.  Better for him to
know how bad it is, whether he can heal himself or not."

Taleswapper held the boy's hand gently between his own.  "Alvin, you
want to keep your leg, don't you?  Then you have to think of it the way
you thought of the stone.  You have to think of the skin of your leg,
growing back, attaching to the bone as it should.  You have to study it
out.  You'll have plenty of time for it, lying here.  Don't think about
the pain, think about the leg as it should be, whole and strong again."

Alvin lay there, squinting his eyes closed against the pain.

"Are you doing that, Alvin?  Can you try?"

"No," said Alvin.

"You have to fight against the pain, so you can use your own knack to
make things right."

"I never will," said Alvin.

"Why not!" cried Faith.

"The Shining Man," said Alvin.  "I promised him."

Taleswapper remembered Alvin's oath to the Shining Man, and his heart
sank.

"What's the Shining Man?" asked Miller.

"A-visitation he had, when he was little," said Taleswapper.

"How come we never heard of this afore now?" Miller asked.

"It was the night the ridgebeam split," said Taleswapper.  "Alvin
promised the Shining Man that he'd never use his power for his own
benefit."

"But Alvin," said Faith.  "This isn't to make you rich or nothing, this
is to save your life.

The boy only winced against the pain and shook his head.

"Will you leave me with him?" said Taleswapper.  "Just for a few
minutes, so I can talk to him?"

Miller was rushing Faith out the door of the room before Taleswapper
even finished his sentence.

"Alvin," said Taleswapper.  "You must listen to me, listen carefully.
You know I won't lie to you.  An oath is a terrible thing, and I'd never
counsel a man to break his word, even to save his own life.  So I won't
tell you to use your power for your own good.  Do you hear me?"

Alvin nodded.

"Just think, though.  Think of the Unmaker going through the world.
Nobody sees him as he does his work, as he tears down and destroys
things.  Nobody but one solitary boy.  Who is that boy, Alvin?"

Alvin's lips formed the word, though no sound came out.  Me.

"And that boy has been given a power that he can't even begin to
understand.  The power to build against the enemy's unbuilding.  And
more than that, Alvin, the desire to build as well.  A boy who answers
every glimpse of the Unmaker with a bit of making.  Now, tell me, Alvin,
those who help the Unmaker, are they the friend or the enemy of
mankind?"

Enemy, said Alvin's lips.

"So if you help the Unmaker destroy his most dangerous foe, you're an
enemy of mankind, aren't you?"

Anguish wrung sound from the boy.  "You're twisting it," he said.

"I'm straightening it," said Taleswapper.  "Your oath was never to use
your power for your own benefit.  But if you die, only the Unmaker
benefits, and if you live, if that leg is healed, then that's for the
good of all mankind.  No, Alvin, it's for the good of the world and all
that's in it."

Alvin whimpered, more against the pain in his mind than the pain in his
body.

"But your oath was clear, wasn't it?  Never to your own benefit.

So why not satisfy one oath with another, Alvin?  Take an oath now, that
you will devote your whole life to building up against the Unmaker.

If you keep that oath-and you will, Alvin, you're a boy who keeps his
word-if you keep that oath, then saving your own LIFE is truly for the
benefit of others, and not for your private good at all."

Taleswapper waited, waited, until at last Alvin nodded slightly.

"Do you take an oath, Alvin Junior, that you will live your life to
defeat the Unmaker, to make things whole and good and right?"

"Yes," whispered the boy.

"Then I tell you, by the terms of your own promise, you must heal
yourself."

Alvin gripped Taleswapper's arm.  "How," he whispered.

"That I don't know, boy," said Taleswapper.  "How to use your power, you
have to find that out inside yourself.  I can only tell you that you
must try, or the enemy has his victory, and I'll have to end your tale
with your body being lowered into a grave."

To Taleswapper's surprise, Alvin smiled.  Then Taleswapper understood
the joke.  His tale would end with the grave no matter what he did
today.  "Right enough, boy," said Taleswapper.  "But I'd rather have a
few more pages about you before I put finis to the Book of Alvin."

"I'll try," whispered Alvin.

If he tried, then surely he would succeed.  Alvin's protector had not
brought him this far only to let him die.  Taleswapper had no doubt that
Alvin had the power to heal himself, if he could only figure out the
way.  His own body was far more complicated than the stone.  But if he
was to live, he had to learn the pathways of his own flesh, bind the
fissures in the bones.

They made a bed for Taleswapper out in the great room.  He offered to
sleep on the floor beside Alvin's bed, but Miller shook his head and
answered, "That's my place."

Taleswapper found it hard to sleep, though.  It was the middle of the
night when he finally gave up, lit a lantern with a match from the fire,
bundled on his coat, and went outside.

The wind was brisk.  There was a storm coming, and from the smell in the
air, it would be snow.  The animals were restless in the big barn.

It occurred to Taleswapper that he might not be alone outside tonight.
There might be Reds in the shadows, or even wandering among the
buildings of the farm, watching him.  He shuddered once, then shrugged
off the fear.  It was too cold a night.  Even the most bloodthirsty,
White-hating ChocTaws or Cree-Eks spying from the south were too smart
to be outside with such a storm coming.

Soon the snow would fall, the first of the season, but it would be no
slight trace.  It would snow all day tomorrow, Taleswapper could feel
it, for the air behind the storm would be even colder than this, cold
enough for the snow to be fluffy and dry, the kind of snow that piled
deeper and deeper, hour after hour.  If Alvin had not hurried them home
with the millstone in a single day, they would have been trying to
sledge the stone home in the midst of the snowfall.  It would have
become slippery.  Something even worse might have happened.

Taleswapper found himself in the miuhouse, looking at the stone.

It was so solid-looking, it was hard to imagine anyone ever moving it.

He touched the face of it again, being careful not to cut himself.

His fingers brushed over the shallow dress cuts, where flour would
collect when the great water wheel turned the shaft and made the
grindstone roll around and around atop the millstone, as steadily as the
Earth rolled around and around the sun, year after year, turning time
into dust as surely as the mill turned grain into flour.

He glanced down, to the place where the earth had given way slightly
under the millstone, tipping it and nearly killing the boy.

The bottom of the depression glistened in the lantern light.

Taleswapper knelt and dipped his finger into a half-inch of water.

It must have collected there, weakening the ground, carrying away the
soil.  Not so that it would ever be visibly moist.  Just enough that
when great weight was placed on it, it would give way.

Oh, Unmaker, thought Taleswapper, show yourself to me, and I'll build
such a building that you'll be trussed up and held captive forever.  But
try as he might, he could not make his eyes see the trembling air that
had shown itself to Alvin Miller's seventh son.

Finally Taleswapper took up the lantern and left the millhouse. The
first flakes were falling.  The wind had almost died.  The snow came
faster and faster, dancing in the light of his lantern.  By the time he
reached the house, the ground was grey with snow, the forest invisible
in the distance.  He went inside the house, lay down on the floor
without removing even his boots, and fell asleep.

Book

They kept a three-log fire, night and day, so the stones of the wall
seemed to glow with heat, and the air in his room was dry.  Alvin lay
unmoving on his bed, his right leg heavy with splints and bandages,
pressing into the bed like an anchor, the rest of his body afloat,
adrift, pitching and rolling and yawing.  He was dizzy, and a little
sick.

But he hardly noticed the weight of his leg, or the dizziness.

The pain was his enemy, throbs and stabs of it taking his mind away from
the task that Taleswapper had set him: to heal himself.

Yet the pain was his friend, too.  It built a wall around him so he
scarce knew he was in a house, in a room, on a bed.  The outside world
could burn up and turn to ash and he'd never notice it.  It was the
world inside that he was exploring now.

Taleswapper didn't know half what he was talking about.  It wasn't a
matter of making pictures in his mind.  His leg wouldn't get better from
just pretending it was all healed up.  But Taleswapper still had the
right idea.  If Alvin could feel his way through the rock, could find
the weak and strong places and teach them where to break and where to
hold firm, why couldn't he do it with skin and bone?

Trouble was, skin and bone was all mixed up.  The rock was pretty much
the same thing through and through, but the skin changed with every
layer, and it wasn't no easy trick figuring where everything went.  He
lay there with his eyes closed, looking into his own flesh for the first
time.  At first he tried following the pain, but that didn't get
nowhere, just led him to where everything was mashed and cut and messed
up so he couldn't tell up from down.  After a long while he tried a
different tack.  He listened to his heart beating.  At first the pain
kept tearing him away, but after a while he closed in on that sound.  If
there was noise in the world outside he didn't know about it, because
the pain shut all that out.  And the rhythm of the heartbeat, that shut
out the pain, or mostly, anyway.

He followed the tracks of his blood, the big strong stream, the little
streams.  Sometimes he got lost.  Sometimes a stab from his leg just
broke in and demanded to be heard.  But by and by he found his way to
healthy skin and bone in the other leg.  The blood wasn't half so strong
there, but it led him where he wanted to go.  He found all the layers,
like the skin of an onion.  He learned their order, saw how the muscle
was tied together, how the tiny veins linked up, how the skin stretched
taut and bonded tight.

Only then did he find his way to the bad leg.  The patch of skin Mama
sewed on was pretty much dead, just turning to rot.  Alvin Junior knew
what it needed, though, if any part of it was to live.  He found the
mashed-off ends of the arteries around the wound, and began to urge them
to grow, just the way he made cracks travel through stone.  The stone
was easy, compared to this-to make a crack, it just had to let go,
that's all.  The living flesh was slower to do what he wanted, and
pretty soon he gave up on an but the strongest artery.

He began to see how it was using bits and pieces of this and that to
build with.  A lot was happening that was far too small and fast and
complicated for Alvin to get hold of with his mind.  But he could get
his body to free up what the artery needed in order to grow.  He could
send it where it was needed, and after a while the artery linked up with
the rotted tissue.  It took some doing, but he finally found the end of
a shriveled artery and linked them up, and sent the blood flowing into
the sewn-on patch.

Too soon, too fast.  He felt the heat on his leg from blood pouring out
of the dead flesh at a dozen points; it couldn't hold in all the blood
he sent.  Slow, slow, slow.  He followed the blood, now seeping instead
of pumping, and again linked up blood vessels, arteries to veins, trying
to match it, as best he could, to the other leg.

Finally it was done, or well enough.  The normal flow of blood could be
contained.  Many parts of the patch of skin came back to life as the
blood returned.  Other parts stayed dead.  Alvin kept going around and
around with the blood, stripping away the dead parts, breaking them up
into bits and pieces too small for him to recognize.

But the living parts recognized them well enough, took them up, put them
to work.  Wherever Alvin explored, he made the flesh grow.

Until he was so weary in his mind from thinking so small and working so
hard that he fell asleep in spite of himself.

"I don't want to wake him."

"No way to change the bandage without touching it, Faith."

"All right, then-oh, be careful, Alvin!  No, let me!"

"I've done this before-"

"On cows, Alvin, not on little boys!"

Alvin Junior felt pressure on his leg.  Something pulling at the skin
there.  The pain wasn't as bad as yesterday.  But he was still too tired
even to open his eyes.  Even to make a sound to let them know he was
awake, he could hear them.

"Good laws, Faith, he must have bled something awful in _ the night.
"Mama, Mary says I have to-"

"Hush up and get on out of here, Cally!  Can't you see your ma's worried
about-"

"No need to yell at the boy, Alvin.  He's only seven."

"Seven's old enough to keep his mouth shut and leave grown-ups alone
when we've got things to-look at that."

"I can hardly believe it."

"I thought to see PUS Coming Out like cream from a cow's tit."

"Clean as can be."

"And skin growing back, will you look at that?  Your sewing must've
took."

"I hardly dared to hope that skin would live."

"Can't even see no bone under there."

"The Lord is blessing us.  I prayed all night, Alvin, and look what God
has done."

"Well, you should've prayed harder, then, and got it healed up tight.  I
need this boy for chores."

"Don't you get blasfemious with me, Alvin Miller."

"It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the
credit.  Maybe Alvin's just a good healer, you ever think of that?"

"Look, your nastiness is waking the boy."

"See if he wants a drink of water."

"He's getting one whether he wants it or not."

Alvin wanted it badly.  His body was dry, not just his mouth; it needed
to make back what it lost in blood.  So he swallowed as much as he
could, from a tin cup held to his mouth.  A lot of it spilled around his
face and neck but he didn't hardly notice that.  It was the water that
trickled into his belly that mattered.  He lay back and tried to find
out from the inside how his wound was doing.  But it was too hard to get
back there, too hard to concentrate.  He dropped off before he was
halfway there.

He woke again, and thought it must be night again, or maybe the curtains
were drawn.  He couldn't find out cause it was too hard to open his
eyes, and the pain was back, fierce again, and something maybe even
worse: the wound was a-tickling till he could hardly keep himself from
reaching down to scratch.  After a while, though, he was able to find
the wound and once again help the layers to grow.  By the time he slept,
there was a thin, complete layer of skin over the whole wound.

Underneath, the body was still working to renew the ravaged muscles and
knit the broken bones.  But there'd be no more loss of blood, no more
open wound to get infected.

"Look at this, Taleswapper.  You ever seen the like of this?"

"Skin like a newborn baby."

"Maybe I'm crazy, but except for the splint I can't see no reason to
leave this leg bound up no more."

"Not a sign of a wound.  No, you're right, there's no need for a bandage
now."

"Maybe my wife is right, Taleswapper.  Maybe God just rared back and
passed a miracle on my boy."

"Can't prove anything.  When the boy wakes up, maybe he'll know
something about it."

"Not a chance of that.  He hasn't even opened his eyes this whole time."

"One thing's certain, Mr.  Miller.  The boy isn't about to die.

That's more than I could have guessed yesterday."

"I was set to build him a box to hold him underground, that I was.

I didn't see no chance him living.  Will you look at how healthy he is?

I want to know what's protecting him, or who."

"Whatever is protecting him, Mr.  Miller, the boy is stronger.

That's something to think about.  His protector split that stone, but Al
Junior put it back together and not a thing his protector could do about
it."

"Reckon he even knew what he was doing?"

"He must have some notion of his powers.  He knew what he could do with
the stone."

"I never heard of a knack like this, to tell you straight.  I told Faith
what he did with that stone, dressing it on the backside without ever
laying on a tool, and she starts reading from the Book of Daniel and
crying about fulfilment of the prophecy.  Wanted to rush in here and
warn the boy about clay feet.  Don't that beat all?  Religion makes them
crazy.  Not a woman I ever met wasn't crazy with religion."

The door opened.

"Get out of here!  Are you so dumb I have to tell you twenty times,
Cally?  Where's his mother, can't she keep one seven-year-old boy away
from-"

"Be easy on the lad, Miller.  He's gone now, anyway."

"I don't know what's wrong with him.  As soon as Al Junior is down, I
see Cally's face wherever I look.  Like an undertaker hoping for a fee."

"Maybe it's strange to him.  To have Alvin hurt."

"As many times as Alvin's been an inch from death' "But never injured."

A long silence.

"Taleswapper."

"Yes, Mr.  Miller?"

"You've been a good friend to us here, sometimes in spite of ourselfs.
But I reckon you're still a walking man."

"That I am, Mr.  Miller."

"What I'm saying is, not to rush you off, but if you go anytime soon,
and you happen to be heading generally eastward, do you think you could
carry a letter for me?"

"I'd be glad to.  And no fee, to sender or receiver."

"That's right kind of you.  I been thinking on what you said.

About a boy needing to be sent far off from certain dangers.  And I
thought, in all the world where's there some folks I can trust to look
after the boy?  We got no kin worth speaking of back in New England-I
don't want the boy raised Puritan on the brink of hell anyway."

"I'm relieved to hear that, Mr.  Miller, because I have no great longing
to see New England again myself."

"If you just follow back on the road we made coming west, sooner or
later you come along to a place on the Hatrack River, some thirty miles
north of the Ohio, not all that far down river from Fort Dekane.

There's a road house there, or leastwise there was, with a graveyard out
back where a stone says 'Vigor he died to save his kin."' "You want me
to take the boy?"

"No, no, I'll not send him now that the snow's come.  Water-"

"I understand."

"There's a blacksmith there, and I thought he might want a prentice.
Alvin's young, but he's big for his age, and I reckon he'll be a bargain
for the smith."

"Prentice?"

"Well, I sure won't make him a bond slave, now, will I?  And I got no
money to send him off to school."

"I'll take the letter.  But I hope I can stay till the boy is awake, so
I can say good-bye."

"I wasn't going to send you out tonight, was I?  Nor tomorrow, with new
snow deep enough to smother bunnies."

"I didn't know if you had noticed the weather."

"I always notice when there's water underfoot." He laughed wryly, and
they left the room.

Alvin Junior lay there, trying to figure why Pa wanted to send him away.
Hadn't he done right all his life, as best he could?  Hadn't he tried to
help all he knew how?  Didn't he go to Reverend Thrower's school, even
though the preacher was out to make him mad or stupid?

Most of all, didn't he finally get a perfect stone down from the
mountain, holding it together all the time, teaching it the way to go,
and at the very end risking his leg just so the stone wouldn't split?

And now they were going to send him away.

Prentice!  To a blacksmith!  In his whole life he never even saw a
blacksmith up to now.  They had to ride three days to the nearest
smithy, and Pa never let him go along.  In his whole life he never even
been ten mile from home one way or any other.

In fact, the more he thought about it the madder he got.  Hadn't he been
begging Mama and Papa just to let him go out walking in the woods alone,
and they wouldn't let him.  Had to have somebody with him all the time,
like he was a captive or a slave about to run off.  If he was five
minutes late getting somewhere, they came to look for him.

He never got to go on long trips-the longest one ever was to the quarry
a few times.  And now, after they kept him penned up like a Christmas
goose all his life, they were set to send him off to the end of the
whole earth.

It was so blame unfair that tears come to his eyes and squeezed out and
tickled down his cheeks right into his ears, which felt so silly it made
him laugh.

"What you laughing at?" asked Cally.

Alvin hadn't heard him come in.

"Are you all better now?  It ain't bleeding nowhere, Al."

Cally touched his cheek.

"You crying cause it hurts so bad?"

Alvin probably could have spoke to him, but it seemed like too much work
to open up his mouth and push words out, so he kind of shook his head,
slow and gentle.

"You going to die, Alvin?" asked Cally.

He shook his head again.

"Oh," said Cally.

He sounded so disappointed that it made Alvin a little mad.  Mad enough
to get his mouth working after all.  "Sorry," he croaked.

"Well it ain't fair, anyhow," said Cally.  "I didn't want you dead, but
they all said you was going to die.  And I got to thinking what it'd be
like if I was the one they all took care of.  All the time, everybody
watching out for you, and when I say one little thing they just say, Get
out of here, Cally, Just shut up, Cally.  Nobody asked you, Cally, Ain't
you spose to be in bed, Cally?  They don't care what I do.

Except when I start hitting you, then they all say, Don't get in fights,
Cally."

"You wrestle real good for a field mouse." At least that was what Alvin
meant to say, but he didn't know for sure if his lips even moved.

"You know what I did one time when I was six?  I went out and got myself
lost in the woods.  I just walked and walked.  Sometimes I closed my
eyes and spun around a few times so I'd sure not know where I was.  I
must have been lost half the day.  Did one soul come looking for me?  I
finally had to turn around and find my own way home.  Nobody said, Where
you been all day, Cally?  Mama just said, Your hands are dirty as the
back end of a sick horse, go wash yourself " Alvin laughed again, near
silently, his chest heaving.

"It's funny for you.  Everybody looks after you.  " Alvin worked hard to
make a sound this time.  "You want me gone?"

Cally waited a long time to answer.  "No.  Who'd play with me then? Just
the dumb old cousins.  There ain't a good wrassler in the bunch of
them."

"I'm going," whispered Alvin.

"No you ain't.  You're the seventh son and they'll never let you go."

"Going.

"Course the way I count up it's me that's number seven.  David,

Calm, Measure, Wastenot, Wantnot, Alvin Junior that's you, and then me,
that's seven."

"Vigor.

"He's dead.  He's been dead a long time.  Somebody ought to tell that to
Ma and Pa."

Alvin lay there, near wore out from the few things he said.  Cany didn't
say anything much after that.  Just sat there, still as could be.

Holding Alvin's hand real tight.  Pretty soon Alvin started drifting, so
he wasn't sure altogether whether Cally really spoke or it was in a
dream.  But he heard Cally say, "I don't never wish you dead, Alvin."

And then he might have said, "I wish I was you." But anyway Alvin
drifted off to sleep, and when he woke up again there was nobody with
him and the house was still except for nightsounds, the wind rattling
the shutters, the timbers popping as they shrunk from the cold, the log
snapping in the hearth.

One more time Alvin went inside himself and worked his way down to the
wound.  Only this time he didn't have much to do with the skin and
muscle.  It was the bones he worked on now.  It surprised him how lacy
it was, pocked with little hollows all over, not solid straight through
like the millstone was.  But he learned the way of it soon enough, and
it was easy after a while to knit the bones up tight.

Still, there was something wrong with that bone.  Something in his bad
leg just wouldn't get exactly like the good leg.  But it was so small he
couldn't see it clear.  Just knew that whatever it was, it made the bone
sick inside, just a little patch of sickness, but he couldn't figure how
to make it better.  Like trying to pick up snowflakes off the ground,
whenever he thought he had ahold of something, it turned out to be
nothing, or maybe just too small to see.

Maybe, though, it would just go away.  Maybe if everything else got
better, that sick place on his bone would get better by itself.

Eleanor was late getting back from her mother's house.  Armor believed
that a wife should have strong ties with her family, but coming home at
dusk was too dangerous.

"There's talk of wild Reds up from the south," said Armor-of-God.

"And you traipsing about after dark."

"I hurried home," she said.  "I know the way in the dark."

"It's not a question of knowing the way," he said sternly.  "The French
are giving guns as bounty on White scalps now.  It won't tempt the
Prophet's people, but there's many a ChocTaw who'd be glad to come up to
Fort Detroit, gathering scalps along the way."

"Alvin isn't going to die," said Eleanor.

Armor hated it when she turned the subject like that.  But it was such
news that he couldn't very well not ask after it.  "They decide to take
off the leg, then?"

"I saw the leg.  It's getting better.  And Alvin Junior was awake late
this afternoon.  I talked to him awhile."

I'm glad he was awake, Elly, I truly am, but I hope you don't expect the
leg to get better.  A big wound like that may look to be healing for a
while, but the rot'll set in pretty soon."

"I don't think so this time," she said.  "You want supper?"

"I must have gnawed down two loaves just pacing back and forth wondering
whether you were even coming home."

"It isn't good for a man to get a belly."

"Well, I got one, and it calls out for food just like any other man's."

"Mama gave me a cheese to bring home." She set it out on the table.

Armor had his doubts.  He figured half the reason Faith Miller's cheeses
turned out so good was because she did things to the milk.  At the same
time, there wasn't no better cheese on the banks of the Wobbish, nor up
Tippy-Canoe Creek neither.

It put him out of sorts when he caught himself compromising with
witchery.  And being out of sorts, he wasn't about to let anything he,
even though he knew Elly plain didn't want to talk about it.  "Why don't
you think the leg will rot?"

"It's just getting better so fast," she said.

"How much better?"

"Oh, pert near fixed."

"How near?"

She turned around, rolled her eyes, and turned back away from him.

She started cutting up an apple to eat with the cheese.

"I said how near, Elly?  How near fixed?"

"Fixed."

"Two days after a millstone rips off the front half of his leg, and it's
fixed?"

"Only two days?" she said.  "Seems like a week to me."

"Calendar says it's two days," said Armor.  "eh means there's been
witchery up there."

"As I read the gospels, the one that healed people wasn't no witch."

"Who did it?  Don't tell me your pa or ma suddenly figured out something
as strong as that Did they conjure up a devil?"

She turned around, the knife in her hands still poised for cutting.

There was a flash in her eyes.  "Pa may be no kind of church man, but
the devil never set foot in our house."

That wasn't what Reverend Thrower said, but Armor knew better than to
bring him into the conversation.  "It's that beggar, then."

"He works for his room and board.  Hard as anyone."

"They say he knew that old wizard Ben Franklin.  And that atheist from
Appalachee, Tom Jefferson."

"He tells good stories.  And he didn't heal the boy neither."

"Well, somebody did."

"Maybe he just healed up himself.  Anyway, the leg's still broke.

So it ain't a miracle or nothing.  He's just a fast healer."

"Well maybe he's a fast healer cause the devil takes care of his own."

From the look in her eye when she turned around, Armor kind of wished he
hadn't said it.  But dad-gum it, Reverend Thrower as much as said the
boy was as bad as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

But beast or boy, he was Elly's brother, and whereas she might be as
quiet as you please most of the time, when she got her dander up she
could be a terror.

"Take that back," she said.

"Now, that's about as silly a thing as I ever heard.  How can I take
back what I said?"

"By saying you know it ain't so."

"I don't know it is and I don't know it ain't.  I said maybe, and if a
man can't say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead."

"I reckon that's about true," she said.  "And if you don't take that
back you'll wish you was dead!" And she started coming after him with
two chunks of apple, one in each hand.

Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad,
if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up
laughing.  But not this time.  She mushed one apple in his hair and
threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs
bedroom, crying her eyes out.

She wasn't one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.

"I take it back, EBY," he said.  "He's a good boy, I know that."

"Oh, I don't care what you think," she said.  "You don't know a thing
about it anyway."

There weren't many husbands who'd let their wife say such a thing
without slapping her upside the head.  Armor wished sometimes that
Elly'd appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.

"I know a thing or two," he said.

"They're going to send him off," she said.  "Once spring comes, they're
going to prentice him out.  He's none too happy about it, I can tell,
but he don't argue none, he just Hes there in his bed, talking real
quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying goodbye
all the time."

"What are they wanting to send him off for?"

"I told you, to prentice him."

"The way they baby that boy, I can't hardly believe they'd let him out
of their sight."

"They ain't talking about nothing close by, neither.  Clear back at the
east end of Ohio Territory, near Fort Dekane.  Why, that's halfway to
the ocean."

"You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it."

"It does?"

"With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone.  The others can
all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior."

She looked at him with withering contempt.  "Sometimes you're so
suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God."

"It ain't suspicion to say what's really happening."

"You can't tell real from a rutabaga."

"You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you
lick it out?"

"I expect I'll have to do something, or you'll rub it all over the bed
linen."

Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he
left.  Two pair of thick stockings.  A new blanket.  An elkhide cloak.

Jerky and cheese.  A good whetstone.

And things they couldn't even know they gave him.  A rested body, free
of aches and bruises.  A jaunty step.  Kind faces fresh in his mind.

And stories.  Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones
he wrote down himself And true stories painfully inscribed by their own
hands.

Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to.  Roofs patched for winter,
other jobs here and there.  More important, they'd seen a book with Ben
Franklin's own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben
Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamiltonyen Aaron Burr, from before
the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after.

Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the
Wobbish country, and that's all.  Now they belonged to much larger
stories.  The War of Appalachee Independence.  The American Compact.
They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many,
and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads.
Not a tapestry, really.  A rug.  A good, thick, solid rug that
generations of Americans after them could tread on.  There was a poem in
that; he'd work that into a poem sometime.

He left them a few other things, too.  A beloved son he pulled from
under a falling millstone.  A father who now had the strength to send
away his son before he killed him.  A name for a young man's nightmare,
so he could understand that his enemy was real.  A whispered
encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.

And a single drawing, burnt into a fine slab of oakwood with the tip of
a hot knife.  He'd rather have worked with wax and acid on metal, but
there was neither to he had in this place.  So he burnt fines into the
wood, making of it what he could.  A picture of a young man caught in a
strong river, bound up in the roots of a floating tree, gasping for
breath, his eyes facing death fearlessly.  It would have earned nothing
but scorn at the Lord Protector's Academy of Art, being so plain.  But
Goody Faith cried out when she saw it, and hugged it to her, dropping
her tears over it like the last drips from the eaves after a rainstorm.
And Father Alvin, when he saw it, nodded and said, "That's your vision,
Taleswapper.  You got his face perfect, and you never even saw him.
That's Vigor.  That's my boy." Then he cried, too.

They set it right up on the mantel.  It might not be great art, thought
Taleswapper, but it was true, and it meant more to these folks than any
portrait could mean to some fat old lord or parliamentarian in London or
Camelot or Paris or Vienna.

"It's fair morning now," said Goody Faith.  "You've got long to go
before dark."

"You can't blame me for being reluctant to leave.  Though I'm glad you
trusted me with this errand, and I won't fail you." He patted his
pocket, wherein lay the letter to the blacksmith of Hatrack River.

"You can't go without you say good-bye to the boy," said Miller.

He'd put it off as long as it could be delayed.  He nodded once, then
eased himself from the comfortable chair by the fire and went on into
the room where he'd slept the best nights of his life.  It was good to
see Alvin Junior's eyes wide open, his face lively, no longer slack the
way it was for a while, or winced up with pain.  But the pain was still
there, Taleswapper knew.

"You going?" asked the boy.

"I ' 'm gone, except for saying good-bye to you."

Alvin looked a little angry.  "So you ain't even going to let me write
in your book?"

"Not everybody does, you know."

"Pa did.  And Mama."

"And Cally, too."

"I bet that looks good," said Alvin.  "He writes like a, like a-"

"Like a seven-year-old." It was a rebuke, but Alvin had no intention of
squirming.

"Why not me, then?  Why Cally and not me?"

"Because I only let people write the most important thing they ever did
or ever saw with their own eyes.  What would you write?"

"I don't know.  Maybe about the millstone."

Taleswapper made a face.

"Then maybe my vision.  That's important, you said so yourself."

"And that got written up somewhere else, Alvin."

"I want to write in the book," he said.  "I want my sentence in there
along with Maker Ben's."

"Not yet," said Taleswapper.

"When!"

"When you've whipped that old Unmaker, lad.  That's when I'll let you
write in this book."

"What if I don't ever whip him?"

"Then this book won't amount to much, anyway."

Tears sprang to Alvin's eyes.  "What if I die?"

Taleswapper felt a thrill of fear.  "How's the leg?"

The boy shrugged.  He blinked back the tears.  They were gone.

"That's no answer, lad."

"It won't stop hurting."

"It'll be that way till the bone knits."

Alvin Junior smiled wanly.  "Bone's all knit."

"Then why don't you walk?"

"It pains me, Taleswapper.  It never goes away.  It's got a bad place on
the bone, and I ain't figured out yet how to make it right."

"You'll find a way."

"I ain't found it yet."

"An old trapper once said to me, 'It don't matter if you start at the
bung or the breastbone, any old way you get the skin off a panther is a
good way."' "Is that a proverb?"

"It's close.  You'll find a way, even if it isn't what you expect."

"Nothing's what I expect," said Alvin.  "Nothing turns out like anything
I figured."

"You're ten years old, lad.  Weary of the world already?"

Alvin kept rubbing folds of the blanket between his thumb and fingers.
"Taleswapper, I'm dying."

Taleswapper studied his face, trying to see death there.  It wasn't.

"I don't think so."

"The bad place on my leg.  It's growing.  Slow, maybe, but it's growing.
It's invisible, and it's eating away at the hard places of the bone, and
after a while it'll go faster and faster and-"

"And Unmake you."

Alvin started to cry for real this time, and his hands were shaking.

"I'm scared to die, Taleswapper, but it got inside me and I can't get it
out."

Taleswapper laid a hand on his, to still the trembling.  "You'll find a
way.  You've got too much work to do in this world, to die now."

Alvin rolled his eyes.  "That's about as dumb a thing as I've heard this
year.  Just because somebody's got things to do don't mean he won't
die."

"But it does mean he won't die willingly.

"I ain't willing."

"That's why you'll find a way to live."

Alvin was silent for a few seconds.  "I've been thinking.  About if I do
live, what I'll do.  Like what I done to make my leg get mostly better.
I can do that for other folks, I bet.  I can lay hands on them and feel
the way it is inside, and fix it up.  Wouldn't that be good?"

"They'd love you for it, all the folks you healed."

"I reckon the first time was the hardest, and I wasn't partickler strong
when I done it.  I bet I can do it faster on other people."

"Maybe so.  But even if you heal a hundred sick people every day, and
move on to the next place and heal a hundred more, there'll be ten
thousand people die behind you, and ten thousand more ahead of you, and
by the time you die, even the ones you healed will almost all be dead."

Alvin turned his face away.  "If I know how to fix them, then I got to
fix them, Taleswapper."

"Those you can, you must," said Taleswapper.  "But not as your life's
work.  Bricks in the wall, Alvin, that's all they'll ever be.

You can never catch up by repairing the crumbling bricks.  Heal those
who chance to fall under your hand, but your life's work is deeper than
that."

"I know how to heal people.  But I don't know how to beat down the
Un-the Unmaker.  I don't even know what it is."

"As long as you're the only one that can see him, though, you're also
the only one who has a hope of beating him."

"Maybe.  Another long silence.  Taleswapper knew it was time to go.

"Wait."

"I've got to leave now."

Alvin caught at his sleeve.  "Not yet."

"Pretty soon."

"At least-at least let me read what the others wrote."

Taleswapper reached into his bag and pulled out the book pouch.

"I can't promise I'll explain what they mean," he said, sliding the book
out of its waterproof cover.

Alvin quickly found the last, newest writings.

In his mother's hand: "Vigor he push a log and he don die til the boy is
borned."

In David's hand: "A mil ston splits in two then it suks bak not a crak."

In Cally's hand: "A sevent sunn."

Alvin looked up.  "He ain't talking about me, you know."

"I know," said Taleswapper.

Alvin looked back at the book.  In his father's hand: "He don't kil a
boy cus a stranjer corn in time."

"What's Pa talking about?" asked Alvin.

Taleswapper took the book from his hands and closed it.  "Find a way to
heal your leg," he said.  "There's a lot more souls than you who need it
to be strong.  It's not for yourself, remember?"

He bent over and kissed the boy on the forehead.  Alvin reached up and
held him with both arms, hanging on him so that he couldn't stand up
without lifting the boy clear out of bed.  After a while, Taleswapper
had to reach up and pull the boy's arms away.  His cheek was wet with
Alvin's tears.  He didn't wipe them away.  He let the breeze dry them as
he trudged along the cold dry path, with fields of halfmelted snow
stretching left and right.

He paused a moment on the second covered bridge.  Just long enough to
wonder if he'd ever come back here, or see them again.  Or get Alvin
Junior's sentence for his book.  If he were a prophet, he'd know.  But
he hadn't the faintest idea.

He walked on, setting his feet toward morning.

Surgery

The Visitor sat comfortably upon the altar, leaning casually on his left
arm, so that his body had a jaunty tilt.  Reverend Thrower had seen just
such an informal pose taken by a dandy from Camelot, a rakehell who
clearly despised everything that the Puritan churches of England and
Scotland stood for.  It made Thrower more than a little uncomfortable to
see the Visitor in such an irreverent pose.

"Why?" asked the Visitor.  "Just because the only way you can maintain
control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair,
knees together, hands delicately arranged in your lap, fingers tightly
interwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same."

Thrower was embarrassed.  "It isn't fair to chastise me for my
thoughts."

"It is, when your thoughts chastise me for my actions.  Beware of
hubris, my friend.  Do not fancy yourself so righteous that you can
judge the acts of angels."

It was the first time the Visitor had ever called himself an angel.

"I did not call myself anything, " said the Visitor.  "You must learn to
control your thoughts, Thrower.  You leap to conclusions far too easily.

"Why have you come to me?"

"It's a matter of the maker of this altar," said the Visitor.  He patted
one of the crosses Alvin Junior had burnt into the wood.

"I've done my best, but the boy is unreachable.  He doubts everything,
and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the
same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of
science."

"In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense."

"He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries,
comprehensible only to the mind of God.  Ambiguity makes him saucy, and
paradox causes open rebellion."

"An obnoxious child."

"The worst I have ever seen," said Thrower.

The Visitor's eyes flashed.  Thrower felt a stab in his heart.

"I've tried," said Thrower.  "I've tried to turn him to serve the Lord.
But the influence of his father-"

"It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others,"
said the Visitor.

"I haven't failed yet!" said Thrower.  "You told me I had until the boy
was fourteen-"

"No.  I told you I had until the boy was fourteen.  You only have him as
long as he lives here."

"I've heard nothing about the Millers moving.  They just got their
millstone in place, they're going to start grinding in the spring, they
wouldn't leave without-" The Visitor stood up from the altar.  "Let me
put a case to you, Reverend Thrower.  Purely hypothetical.  Let us
suppose you were in the same room with the worst enemy of all that I
stand for.  Let us suppose that he were ill, and lay helpless in his
bed.  If he recovered, he would be removed from your reach, and would
thus go on to destroy all that you and I love in this world.  But if he
died, our great cause would be safe.  Now suppose that someone put a
knife into your hand, and begged you to perform a delicate surgery upon
the boy.

And suppose that if you were to slip, just the tiniest bit, your knife
could cut a great artery.  And suppose that if you simply delayed, his
lifeblood would flow out so quickly that in moments he would die.  In
that case, Reverend Thrower, what would be your duty?"

Thrower was aghast.  All his life he had prepared to teach, persuade,
exhort, expound.  Never to perform a bloody-handed act like the one the
Visitor suggested.  "I'm not suited for such things," he said.

"Are you suited for the kingdom of God?" asked the Visitor.

"But the Lord said Thou shalt not kill."

"Oh?  Is that what he said to Joshua, when he sent him into the promised
land?  Is that what he said to Saul, when he sent him against the
Amalekites?"

Thrower thought of those dark passages in the Old Testament, and
trembled with fear at the thought of taking part in such things himself.

But the Visitor did not relent.  "The high priest Samuel commanded King
Saul to kill all the Amalekites, every man and woman, every child.

But Saul hadn't the stomach for it.  He saved the king of the Amalekites
and brought him back alive.  For that crime of disobedience, what did
the Lord do?"

"Chose David to be king in his place," murmured Thrower.

The Visitor stood close to Thrower, his eyes wounding him with their
fire.  "And then Samuel, the high priest, the gentle servant of God,
what did he do?"

"He called for Agag the king of the Amalekites to be brought before
him."

The Visitor would not relent.  "And what did Samuel do?"

"Killed him," whispered Thrower.

"What does the scripture say that he did!" roared the Visitor.

The walls of the meetinghouse shook, the glass of the windows rattled.

Thrower wept in fear, but he spoke the words that the Visitor demanded:
"Samuel hacked Agag in pieces-in the presence of the Lord."

Now the only sound in the church was Thrower's own ragged breath as he
tried to control his hysterical weeping.  The Visitor smiled at him, his
eyes filled with love and forgiveness.  Then he was gone.

Thrower sank to his knees before the altar and prayed.  Father, I would
die for Thee, but do not ask me to kill.  Take away this cup from my
lips, I am too weak, I am unworthy, do not lay this burden upon my
shoulders.

His tears fell on the altar.  He heard a sizzling sound and jumped back
from the altar, startled.  His tears skittered along the surface of the
altar like water on a hot skillet, until finally they were consumed.

The Lord has rejected me, he thought.  I pledged to serve Him however He
required, and now, when He asks something difficult, when He commands me
to be as strong as the great prophets of old, I discover myself to be a
broken vessel in the hands of the Lord.  I cannot contain the destiny He
wanted to pour into me.

The door of the church opened, letting in a wave of freezing air that
rushed along the floor and sent a chill through the minister's flesh. He
looked up, fearing that it was an angel sent to punish him.

It was no angel, though.  Merely Armor-of-God Weaver.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you in prayer," said Armor.

"Come in," said Thrower.  "Close the door.  What can I do for you?"

"Not for me," said Armor.

"Come here.  Sit down.  Tell me."

Thrower hoped that perhaps it was a sign from God that Armor had come
just now.  A member of the congregation, coming to him for help, right
after he prayed-surely the Lord was letting him know that he was
accepted after all.

"It's my wife's brother," said Armor.  "The boy, Alvin Junior."

Thrower felt a thrill of dread run through him, freezing him to the
bone.  "I know him.  What about him?"

"You know he got his leg mashed."

"I heard of it."

"You didn't happen to go visit and see him afore it healed up?"

"I've been given to believe that I'm not welcome in that house."

"Well, let me tell you, it was bad.  A whole patch of skin tore off.

Bones broke.  But two days later, it was healed right up.

Couldn't even see no scar.  Three days later he was walking.

"It must not have been as bad as you thought."

"I'm telling you, that leg was broke and the wound was bad The whole
family figured the boy was bound to die.  They asked me about buying
nails for a coffin.  And they looked so bad from grieving that I wasn't
sure but what we'd bury the boy's ma and pa, too."

"Then it can't be as fully healed as you say."

"Well, it ain't fully healed, and that's why I come to you.  I know you
don't believe in such things, but I tell you they witched the boy's leg
to heal somehow.  Elly says the boy did the witching himself.

He was even walking on the leg for a few days, no splint even. But the
pain never let up, and now he says there's a sick place on his bone.

He's got a fever, too' "

"There's a perfectly natural explanation for everything," said Thrower.

"Well, be that as you like, the way I see it the boy invited the devil
with his witchery, and now the devil's eating him alive inside.

And seeing how you're an ordained minister of God, I thought maybe you
could cast out that devil in the name of the Lord Jesus."

Superstitions and sorceries were nonsense, of course, but when Armor
brought up the possibility of a devil being in the boy, it made sense,
it fit with what he knew from the Visitor.  Maybe the Lord wanted him to
exorcise the child, to purge the evil from him, not to kill the boy at
all.  It was a chance for him to redeem himself from his failure of will
a few minutes before.

"I'll go," he said.  He reached for his heavy cloak and whipped it
around his shoulders.

"I better warn you, nobody up at their house asked me to bring you. "I'm
prepared to deal with the anger of the unfaithful," said Thrower.  "It's
the victim of deviltry that concerns me, not his foolish and
superstitious family."

Alvin lay on his bed, burning with the heat of his fever.  Now, in the
daylight, they kept his shutters closed, so the light wouldn't hurt his
eyes.  At night, though, he made them open things up, let some of the
cold air in.  He would breathe it in relief.  During the few days when
he could walk, he had seen the snow covering the meadow.  Now he tried
to imagine himself lying under that blanket of snow.  Relief from the
fire burning through his body.

He just couldn't see small enough inside himself.  What he did with the
bone, with the strands of muscle and layers of skin, it was harder than
ever it was to find the cracks in the quarry stone.  But he could feel
his way through the labyrinth of his body, find the large wounds, help
them to close.  Most of what went on, though, was too small and fast for
him to comprehend.  He could see the result, but he couldn't see the
pieces, couldn't make out how it happened.

That's how it was with the bad place in his bone.  Just a patch of it
that was weakening, rotting away.  He could feel the difference between
the bad place and the good healthy bone, he could find the borders of
the sickness.  But he couldn't actually see what was happening.  He
couldn't undo it.  He was going to die.

He wasn't alone in the room, he knew.  Someone always sat at his
bedside.  He would open his eyes and see Mama, or Papa, or one of the
girls.  Sometimes even one of the brothers, even though it meant he had
left his wife and his chores.  It was a comfort to Alvin, but it was
also a burden.  He kept thinking he ought to hurry up and die so they
could all get back to their regular lives.

This afternoon it was Measure sitting there.  Alvin said howdy to him
when he first came, but there wasn't much to talk about.  Howdy do?

I'm dying, thanks, and you?  Kind of hard to keep chatting. Measure
talked about how he and the twins had tried to cut a grindstone.

They chose a softer stone than what Alvin worked with, and still they
had a devil of a time cutting.  "We finally gave right up," said Miller.
sure.  "It's just going to have to wait till you can go up the mountain
and get us a stone yourself."

Alvin didn't answer that, and they neither one said a word since then.
Alvin just lay there, sweating, feeling the rot in his bone as it
slowly, steadily grew.  Measure sat there, lightly holding his hand.

Measure started to whistle.

The sound of it startled Alvin.  He'd been so caught up inside himself
that the music seemed to come from a great distance, and he had to
travel some distance to discover where it was coming from.

"Measure," he cried; but the sound of his voice was a whisper.

The whistling stopped.  "Sorry," said Measure.  "Does it bother you?"

"No," said Alvin.

Measure started in whistling again.  It was a strange tune, one that
Alvin didn't recollect he ever heard before.  In fact it didn't sound
like any kind of tune at all.  It never did repeat itself, just went on
with new patterns all the time, like as if Measure was making it up on
the way.  As Alvin lay there and listened, the melody seemed like it was
a map, winding through a wilderness, and he started to follow it.  Not
that he saw anything, the way he would following a real map.  It just
seemed always to show him the center of things, and everything he
thought about, he thought about as if he was standing in that place.

Almost like he could see all the thinking he had done before, trying to
figure out a way to fix the bad place on his bone, only now he was
looking from a ways off, maybe higher up a mountain or in a clearing,
somewhere that he could see more.

Now he thought of something he never thought of before.  When his leg
was first broke, with the skin all tore up, everybody could see how bad
off he was, but nobody could help him, only himself.  He had to fix it
all from inside.  Now, though, nobody else could see the wound that was
killing him.  And even though he could see it, he couldn't do a blame
thing to make it better.

So maybe this time, somebody else could fix him up.  Not using any kind
of hidden power at all.  Just plain old bloody-handed surgery.

"Measure," he whispered.

"I'm here," said Measure.

"I know a way to fix my leg," he said.

Measure leaned in close.  Alvin didn't open his eyes, but he could feel
his brother's breath on his cheek.

"The bad place on my bone, it's growing, but it ain't spread all over
yet," Alvin said.  "I can't make it better, but I reckon if somebody cut
off that part of my bone and took it right out of my leg, I could heal
it up the rest of the way."

"Cut it out?"

"Pa's bone saw that he uses when he's cutting up meat, that'd do the
trick I think."

"But there ain't a surgeon in three hundred mile."

"Then I reckon somebody better learn how real quick, or I'm dead."

Measure was breathing quicker now.  "You think cutting your bone would
save your life?"

"It's the best I can think of."

"It might mess up your leg real bad," said Measure.

"If I'm dead, I won't care.  And if I live, it'll be worth a messed-up
leg."

"I'm going to fetch Pa." Measure scuffed back his chair and thumped out
of the room.

Thrower let Armor lead the way onto the Millers' porch.  They couldn't
very well turn away their daughter's husband.  His concern was
unfounded, however.  It was Goody Faith who opened the door, not her
pagan husband.

"Why, Reverend Thrower, if you ain't being too kind to us, stopping up
here," she said.  The cheerfulness of her voice was a lie, though, if
her haggard face was telling the truth.  There hadn't been much good
sleep in this house lately.

"I brought him along, Mother Faith," said Armor.  "He come only cause I
asked him."

"The pastor of our church is welcome in my home whenever it pleases him
to come by," said Faith.

She ushered them into the great room.  A group of girls making quilt
squares looked up at him from their chairs near the hearth.  The little
boy, Cally, was doing his letters on a board, writing with charcoal from
the fire.

"I'm glad to see you doing your letters," said Thrower.

Cally just looked at him.  There was a hint of hostility in his eyes.

Apparently the boy resented having his teacher look at his work here at
home, which he had supposed was a sanctuary.

"You're doing them well," said Thrower, trying to put the boy at ease.
Cally said nothing, just looked down again at his makeshift slate and
kept on scrawling out words.

Armor brought up their business right away.  "Mother Faith, we come
cause of Alvin.  You know how I feel about witchery, but I never before
said a word against what you folks do in your house.  I always reckoned
that was your business and none of mine.  But that boy is paying the
price for the evil ways that you've let go on here.  He witched his leg,
and now there's a devil in him, g him off, and I brought Reverend
Thrower here to wring that devil on out of him."

Goody Faith looked puzzled.  "There ain't no devil in this house."

Ah, poor woman, said Thrower silently.  If you only knew how long a
devil has dwelt here.  "It is possible to become so accustomed to the
presence of a devil as not to recognize that it is present."

A door by the stairs opened up, and Mr.  Miller stepped backward through
the doorway.  "Not me," he said, talking to whoever was in that room.
"I'll not lay a knife to the boy."

Cally jumped up at the sound of his father's voice and ran to him.

"Armor brung old Thrower here, Papa, to kill the devil."

Mr.  Miller turned around, his face twisted with unidentified emotion,
and looked at the visitors as if he hardly recognized them.

"I've got good strong hexes on this house," said Goody Faith.

"Those hexes are a summons for the devil," said Armor.  "You think they
protect your house, but they drive away the Lord."

"No devil ever came in here," she insisted.

"Not by itself," said Armor.  "You called it in with all your conjuring.
You forced the Holy Spirit to leave your house by your witchery and
idolatry, and having swept goodness from your home, the devils naturally
come right in.  They always come in, where they see a fair chance to do
mischief."

Thrower became a little concerned that Armor was saying too much about
things he didn't really understand.  It would have been better had he
simply asked if Thrower could pray for the boy at Alvin's bedside.  Now
Armor was drawing battle lines that should never have been drawn.

And whatever was going on in Mr.  Miller's head right now, it was plain
to see that this wasn't the best of times to provoke the man.  He slowly
walked toward Armor.  "You telling me that what comes into a man's house
to do mischief is the devil?"

"I bear you my witness as one who loves the Lord Jesus," Armor began,
but before he could get any further into his testimony, NUer had him by
the shoulder of his coat and the waist of his pants, and he turned him
right toward the door.

"Somebody better open this door!" roared Miller.  "Or there's going to
be a powerful big hole right in the middle of it!"

"What do you think you're doing, Alvin Miller!" shouted his wife.

"Casting out devils!" cried Miller.  Cally had swung the door open by
then, and Miller walked his son-in-law to the edge of the porch and sent
him flying.  Armor's cry of outrage ended up muffled by the snow on the
ground, and there wasn't much chance to hear his yelling after that
because Miller closed and barred the door.

"Ain't you a big man," said Goody Faith, "throwing out your own
daughter's husband."

"I didn't do but what he said the Lord wanted done," said Miller.

Then he turned his gaze upon the pastor.

"Armor didn't speak for me," said Thrower mildly.

"If you lay a hand on a man of the cloth," said Goody Faith, you'll
sleep in a cold bed for the rest of your life."

"Wouldn't think of touching the man," said Miller.  "But the way I
figure it, I stay out of his place, and he ought to stay out of mine."

"You may not believe in the power of prayer," said Thrower.

"I reckon it depends on who's doing the praying, and who's doing the
listening," said Miller.

"Even so," said Thrower, "your wife believes in the religion of Jesus
Christ, in the which I have been called and ordained a minister.

It is her belief, and my belief, that for me to pray at the boy's
bedside might be efficacious in his cure."

"If you use words like that in your praying," said Miller, "it's a
wonder the Lord even knows what you're talking about."

"Though you don't believe such prayer will help," Thrower went on, "it
certainly can't hurt, can it?"

Miller looked from Thrower to his wife and back again.  Thrower had no
doubt that if Faith had not been there, he would have been eating snow
alongside Armor-of-God.  But Faith was there and had already uttered the
threat of Lysistrata.  A man does not have fourteen children if his
wife's bed holds no attraction to him.  Miller gave in.

"Go on in," he said.  "But don't pester the boy too long."

Thrower nodded graciously.  "No more than a few hours," he said.

"Minutes!" Miller insisted.  But Thrower was already headed for the door
by the stairs, and Miller made no move to stop him.  He could have hours
with the boy, if he wanted to.  He closed the door behind him.  No sense
in letting any of the pagans interfere with this.

"Alvin," he said.

The boy was stretched out under a blanket, his forehead beaded with
sweat.  His eyes were closed.  After a while, though, he opened his
mouth a little.  "Reverend Thrower," he whispered.

"The very same," said Thrower.  "Alvin, I've come to pray for you, so
the Lord will free your body of the devil that is making you sick."

Again a pause, as if it took a while for Thrower's words to reach Alvin
and just as long again for his answer to return.  "Ain't no devil," he
said.

"One can hardly expect a child to be well-versed in matters of
religion," said Thrower.  "But I must tell you that healing comes only
to those who have the faith to be healed." He then devoted several
minutes to recounting the story of the centurion's daughter and the tale
of the woman who had an issue of blood and merely touched the Savior's
robe.  "You recall what he said to her.  Thy faith hath made thee whole,
he said.  So it is, Alvin Miller, that your faith must be strong before
the Lord can make you whole."

The boy didn't answer.  Since Thrower had used his considerable
eloquence in the telling of both stories, it offended him a bit that the
boy might have fallen asleep.  He reached out a long finger and poked
Alvin's shoulder.

Alvin flinched away.  "I heard you," he muttered.

It wasn't good that the boy could still be sullen, after hearing the
light-giving word of the Lord.  "Well?" asked Thrower.  "Do you
believe?"

"In what," murmured the boy.

"In the gospel!  In the God who would heal you, if you only soften your
heart!"

"Believe," he whispered.  "In God."

That should have been enough.  But Thrower knew too much of the history
of religion not to press for more detail.  It was not enough to confess
faith in a deity.  There were so many deities, and all but one was
false.  "Which God do you believe in, Al Junior?"

"God," said the boy.

"Even the heathen Moor prays toward the black stone of Mecca and calls
it God!  Do you believe in the true God, and do you believe in Him
correctly?  No, I understand, you're too weak and fevered to explain
your faith.  I will help you, young Alvin.  I'll ask you questions, and
you tell me, yes or no, whether you believe."

Alvin lay still, waiting.

"Alvin Miller, do you believe in a God without body, parts, or passions?
The great Uncreated Creator, Whose center is everywhere, yet Whose
circumference can never be found?"

The boy seemed to ponder this for a while before he spoke.  "That don't
make a bit of sense to me," he said.

"He isn't supposed to make sense to the carnal mind," Thrower said.

"I merely ask if you believe in the One who sits atop the Topless
Throne; the self-existing Being who is so large He fills the universe,
yet so penetrating that He lives in your heart."

"How can he sit on the top of something that ain't got no top?"

the boy asked.  "How can something that big fit inside my heart?"

The boy was obviously too uneducated and simple-minded to grasp
sophisticated theological paradox.  Still, it was more than a life or
even a soul at stake here-it was all the souls that the Visitor had said
this boy would ruin if he could not be converted to the true faith.

"That's the beauty of it," said Thrower, letting emotion fill his voice.

"God is beyond our comprehension; yet in His infinite love He
condescends to save us, despite our ignorance and foolishness."

"Ain't love a passion?" asked the boy.

"If you have trouble with the idea of God," said Thrower, "then let me
pose another question, which may be more to the point.  Do you believe
in the bottomless pit of hell, where the wicked writhe in flames, yet
are never burned up?  Do you believe in Satan, the enemy of God, who
wishes to steal your soul and take you captive into his kingdom, to
torment you through all eternity?"

The boy seemed to perk up a little, turning his head toward Thrower,
though he still didn't open his eyes.  "I might believe in something
like that," he said.

Ah, yes, thought Thrower.  The boy has had some experience with the
devil.  "Have you seen him?"

"What's your devil look like?" whispered the boy.

"He is not my devil," said Thrower.  "And if you had listened in
services, you would have known, for I have described him many times.

Where a man has hair on his head, the devil has the horns of a bull.

Where a man has hands, the devil has the claws of a bear.  He has the
hooves of a goat, and his voice is the roar of a ravening lion."

To Thrower's amazement, the boy smiled, and his chest bounced silently
with laughter.  "And you call us superstitious," he said.

Thrower would never have believed how firm a grip the devil could have
on a child's soul, had he not seen the boy laugh with pleasure at the
description of the monster Lucifer.  That laughter must be stopped!

It was an offense against God!

Thrower slapped his Bible down on the boy's chest, causing Alvin to
wheeze out his breath.  Then, with his hand pressing on the book,
Thrower felt himself fill up with inspired words, and he cried out with
more passion than he had ever felt before in his life: "Satan, in the
name of the Lord I rebuke you!  I command you to depart from this boy,
from this room, from this house forever!  Never again seek to possess a
soul in this place, or the power of God will wreak destruction unto the
uttermost bounds of hell!"

Then silence.  Except for the boy's breathing, which seemed labored.
There was such peace in the room, such exhausted righteousness in
Thrower's own heart, that he felt convinced the devil had heeded his
peroration and retreated forthwith.

"Reverend Thrower," said the boy.

"Yes, my son?"

"Can you take that Bible off my chest now?  I reckon if there was any
devils here, they're all gone now."

Then the boy began to laugh again, causing the Bible to jump up and down
under Thrower's hand.

In that moment Thrower's exultation turned to bitter disappointment.
Indeed, the fact that the boy could laugh so devilishly with the Bible
itself resting on his body was proof that no power could purge him of
evil.  The Visitor had been right.  Thrower should never have refused
the mighty work that the Visitor had called him to do.  It had been in
his power to be the slayer of the Beast of the Apocalypse, and he had
been too weak, too sentimental to accept the divine calling.  I could
have been a Samuel, hewing to death the enemy of God.  Instead I am a
Saul, a weakling, who cannot kill what the Lord commands must die.  Now
I will see this boy rise up with the power of Satan in him, and I will
know that he thrives only because I was weak.

Now the room was stifling hot, choking him.  He had not realized until
now how his clothing sogged with sweat.  It was hard to breathe.

But what should he expect?  The hot breath of hell was in this room.

Gasping, he took the Bible, held it out between him and the satanic
child who lay giggling feverishly under the blanket, and fled.

In the great room he stopped, breathing heavily.  He had interrupted a
conversation, but he scarcely took notice of it.  What did the
conversations of these benighted people amount to, compared to what he
had just experienced?  I have stood in the presence of Satan's minion,
masquing it as a young boy; but his mockery revealed him to me.

I should have known what the boy was years ago, when I felt his head and
found it to be so perfectly balanced.  Only a counterfeit would be so
perfect.  The child was never real Ah, that I had the strength of the
great prophets of old, so I could confound the enemy and bear the trophy
back to my Lord!

Someone was tugging at his sleeve.  "Are you well, Reverend?" It was
Goody Faith, but Reverend Thrower did not think to answer her.

Her tugging pulled him around, though, so he faced the fireplace.

There on the mantel he saw a carven image, and in his distracted state
he could not at once determine what it was.  It seemed to be the face of
a soul in torment, surrounded by writhing tendrils.  Flames, that's what
they are, he thought, and that is a soul drowning in brimstone, burning
in hellfire.  The image was a torment to him, and yet it was also
satisfying, for its presence in this house signified how closely bound
this family was to hell.  He stood in the midst of his enemies.  A
phrase from the Psalmist came to his mind: Bulls of Bashan stare upon
me, and I can tell all my bones.  My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken
me?

"Here," said Goody Faith.  "Sit down."

"Is the boy all right?" demanded Miller.

"The boy?" asked Thrower.  Words could hardly come to his mouth.

The boy is a fiend from Sheol, and you ask how he is?  "As well as can
be expected," said Thrower.

They turned away from him then, back to their conversation.

Gradually he came to understand what they were discussing.  It seemed
that Alvin wanted someone to cut away the diseased portion of his bone.
Measure had even brought a fine-toothed bone saw from the butchery shed.
The argument was between Faith and Measure, because Faith didn't want
anyone cutting her son, and between Miller and the other two, because
Miller refused to do it, and Faith would only consent if Alvin's father
did the cutting.

"If you think it ought to be done," said Faith, "then I don't see how
you'd be willing to have anyone but yourself cut into him."

"Not me," said Miller.

It struck Thrower that the man was afraid.  Afraid to lay the knife
against his own son's flesh.

"He asked for you, Pa.  He said he'd draw the marks for cutting, right
on his own leg.  You just cut a flap of skin and peel it back, and right
under it there's the bone, and you just cut a wedge in the bone that
takes out the whole bad place."

"I'm not the fainting kind," said Faith, "but my head is getting light."

"If Al Junior says it's got to be done, then do it!" said Miller.

"But not me!"

Then, like a rush of light into a dark room, Reverend Thrower saw his
redemption.  The Lord was clearly offering him exactly the opportunity
that the Visitor had prophesied.  A chance to hold a knife in his hand,
to cut into the boy's leg, and accidently sever the artery and spill the
blood until the life was gone.  What he had shrunk to do in the church,
thinking of Alvin as a mere boy, he would do gladly, now that he had
seen the evil that disguised itself in child-shape.

"I'm here," he said.

They looked at him.

"I'm no surgeon," he said, "but I have some knowledge of anatomy.

I am a scientist."

"Head bumps," said Miller.

"You ever butchered cattle or pigs?" asked Measure.

"Measure!" said his mother, horrified.  "Your brother is not a beast."

"I just wanted to know if he was going to throw up when he saw blood."

"I've seen blood," said Thrower.  "And I have no fear, when the cutting
is for salvation."

"Oh, Reverend Thrower, it's too much to ask of you," said Goody Faith.

"Now I see that perhaps it was inspiration that brought me up here
today, after so long being away from this house."

"It was my pebble-headed son-in-law brought you here," said Miller.

"Well," said Thrower, "it was just a thought.  I can see that you don't
want me to do it, and I can't say that I blame you.  Even if it means
saving your son's life, it's still a dangerous thing to let a stranger
cut into your own child's body."

"You're no stranger," insisted Faith.

"What if something went wrone.  I might slip.  His previous injury might
have changed the path of certain blood vessels.  I might cut an artery,
and he could bleed to death in moments.  Then I'd have the blood of your
child on my hands."

"Reverend Thrower," said Faith, "we can't blame you for chance.

All we can do is try."

"It's sure that if we don't do something he'll die," said Measure.

"He says we got to cut right away, before the bad place spreads too far.

"Perhaps one of your older sons," said Thrower.

"We got no time to fetch them!" cried Faith.  "Oh, Alvin, he's the boy
you chose to have your name.  Are you set to let him die, just cause you
can't abide the preacher here?"

Miller shook his head miserably.  "Do it, then."

"He'd rather you did, Pa," said Measure.

"No!" said Miller vehemently.  "Better anyone than me.  Better even him
than me."

Thrower saw disappointment, even contempt, on Measure's face.

He stood and walked to where Measure sat, holding a knife and the bone
saw in his hands.  "Young man," he said, "do not ajudge any man to be a
coward.  You cannot guess what reasons he hides in his heart."

Thrower turned to Miller and saw a look of surprise and gratitude on the
man's face.  "Give him them cutting tools," Miller said.

Measure held out the knife and the bone saw.  Thrower pulled out a
handkerchief, and had Measure lay the implements carefully within it.

It had been so easy to do.  In just a few moments he had them all asking
him to take the knife, absolving him in advance of any accident that
might happen.  He had even won the first scrap of friendship from Alvin
Miller.  Ah, I have deceived you all, he thought triumphantly.  I am a
match for your master the devil.  I have deceived the great deceiver,
and will send his corrupt progeny back to hell within the hour.

"Who will hold the boy?" asked Thrower.  "Even with wine in him, the
pain will make him jump if he isn't held down."

"I'll hold him," said Measure.

"He won't take no wine," said Faith.  "He says he has to have his head
clear."

"He's a ten-year-old boy," said Thrower.  "If you insist that he drink
it, he's bound to obey you."

Faith shook her head.  "He knows what's best.  He bears up right smart
under pain.  You never seen the like."

I imagine not, said Thrower silently.  The devil within the boy no doubt
revels in the pain, and doesn't want the wine to dim the ecstasy.

"Very well, then," he said.  "There's no reason to delay further."

He led the way into the bedroom and boldly pulled the blanket off
Alvin's body.  The boy immediately began trembling in the sudden cold,
though he continued sweating from the fever.  "You say that he has
marked the place to cut?"

"Al," said Measure.  "Reverend Thrower here is going to do the cutting."

"Papa," said Alvin.

"It's no use asking him,' said Measure.  "He just plain won't."

"Are you sure you won't have some wine?" asked Faith.

Alvin started to cry.  "No," he said.  "I'll be all right if Pa holds
me.

"That does it," said Faith.  "He may not do the cutting, but he'll be
here with the boy or he'll be stuffed up the chimney, one or the other."
She stormed out of the room.

"You said the boy would mark the place," Thrower said.

"Here, Al, let me set you up here.  I got some charcoal, and you mark
right on your leg here just exactly where you want that flap of skin
took up."

Alvin moaned as Measure lifted him to a sitting position, but his hand
was steady as he marked a large rectangle on his shin.  "Cut it from the
bottom, and leave the top attached," he said.  His voice was thick and
slow, each word an effort.  "Measure, you hold that flap back out of the
way while he cuts."

"Ma'll have to do that," said Measure.  "I got to hold you down so you
don't jump."

"I won't jump," said Alvin.  "If Pa's holding me."

Miller came slowly into the room, his wife right behind.  "I'll be
holding you," he said.  He took Measure's place, sitting behind the boy
with his arms wrapped clear around him.  "I'm holding you," he said
again.

"Very well, then," said Thrower.  He stood there, waiting for the next
step.

He waited for a good little while.

"Ain't you forgetting something, Reverend?" asked Measure.

"What?" asked Thrower.

"The knife and the saw," he said.

Thrower looked at his handkerchief, wadded in his left hand.

Empty.  "Why, they were right here."

"You set them down on the table on the way in," said Measure.

"I'll fetch them," said Goody Faith.  She hurried out of the room.

They waited and waited and waited.  Finally Measure got up.  "I can't
guess what's keeping her."

Thrower followed him out of the room.  They found Goody Faith in the
great room, piecing together quilt squares with the girls.

"Ma," said Measure.  "What about the saw and the knife?"

"Good laws," said Faith, "I can't imagine what's got into me.  I clean
forgot why I come out here." She picked up the knife and saw and marched
back to the room.  Measure shrugged at Thrower and followed her.  Now,
thought Thrower.  Now I'll do all that the Lord ever expected of me. The
Visitor will see that I am a true friend to my Savior, and my place in
heaven will be assured.  Not like this poor, miserable sinner caught up
in the flames of hell.

"Reverend," said Measure.  "What are you doing?"

"This drawing," said Thrower.

"What about it?"

Thrower looked closely at the drawing over the hearth.  it wasn't a soul
in hell at all.  It was a depiction of the family's oldest boy, Vigor,
drowning.  He had heard the story at least a dozen times.  But why was
he standing here looking at it, when he had a great and terrible mission
to perform in the other room?

"Are you all right?"

"Perfectly all right," said Thrower.  "I just needed a moment of silent
prayer and meditation before I undertook this task.  He strode boldly
into the room and sat down on the chair beside the bed where Satan's
child lay trembling, waiting for the knife.

Thrower looked around for his tools of holy murder.  They were nowhere
in sight.  "Where is the knife?" he asked.

Faith looked at Measure.  "Didn't you bring them back in with you?" she
asked.

"You're the one brought them in here," said Measure.

"But when you went back out to get the preacher, you took them," she
said.

"Did I?" Measure looked confused.  "I must have set them down out
there." He got up and left the room.

Thrower began to realize that something strange was going on here,
though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.  He walked to the door
and waited for Measure to return.

Cally was standing there, holding his slate, looking up at the minister.
"You going to kill my brother?" he asked.

"Don't even think of such a thing," Thrower answered.

Measure looked sheepish as he handed the implements to Thrower.

"I can't believe I just set them on the mantel like that." Then the
young man pushed past Thrower into the room.

A moment later, Thrower followed him into Alvin's room and took his
place beside the exposed leg, with the box drawn in black.

"Well where'd you put them?" asked Faith.

Thrower realized that he didn't have the knife or the saw.  He was
completely confused.  Measure handed them to him just outside the door.
How could he have lost them?

Cally stood in the doorway.  "Why'd you give me these?" he asked.

He was, in fact, holding both blades.

"That's a good question," said Measure, eyeing the pastor with a frown.
"Why'd you give them to Cally?"

"I didn't," said Thrower.  "You must have given them to him."

"I put them right in your hands," said Measure.

"The preacher give them to me," said Cally.

"Well, bring them here," said his mother.

Cally obediently started into the room, brandishing the blades like
trophies of war.  Like the attack of a great army.  Ah, yes, a great
army, like the army of the Israelites that Joshua led into the promised
land.  This is how they held their weapons, high above their heads, as
they marched around and around the city of Jericho.  Marched and
marched.  Marched and marched.  And on the seventh day they stopped and
blew their trumpets and gave a great shout, and down came the walls, and
they held their swords and knives high over their heads and charged into
the city, hacking men, women, and children, all the enemies of God, so
the promised land would be purged of their filthiness and be ready to
receive the people of the Lord.  They were spattered in blood by the end
of the day, and Joshua stood in their midst, the great prophet of God,
holding a bloody sword above his head, and he shouted.  What did he
shout?

I can't remember what he shouted.  If I could only remember what he
shouted, I'd understand why I'm standing here on the road, surrounded by
snow-covered trees.

Reverend Thrower looked at his hands, and looked at the trees.  He had
somehow walked half a mile away from the Millers' house.  He wasn't even
wearing his heavy cloak.

Then the truth came clear.  He hadn't fooled the devil at all.

Satan had transported him here, in the twinkling of an eye, rather than
let him kill the Beast.  Thrower had faded in his one opportunity for
greatness.  He leaned against a cold black trunk and cried bitterly.

Cally walked into the room, holding the blades above his head.

Measure was all set to get a grip on the leg, when all of a sudden old
Thrower stood right up and walked out of the room just as quick as if he
was trotting to the privy.

"Reverend Thrower," cried Ma.  "Where are you going?"

But Measure understood now.  "Let him go, Ma," he said.

They heard the front door of the house open, and the minister's heavy
steps on the porch.

"Go shut the front door, Cally," said Measure.

For once Cally obeyed without a speck of backsass.  Ma looked at
Measure, then at Pa, then at Measure again.  "I don't understand why he
left like that," she said.

Measure gave her a little half-smile and looked at Pa.  "You know, don't
you, Pa?"

"Maybe," he said.

Measure explained to his mother.  "Them knives and that preacher, they
can't be in this room with Al Junior at the same time."

"But why not!" she said.  "He was going to do the surgery!"

"Well, he sure ain't going to do it now," said Measure.

The knife and the bone saw lay on the blanket.

"Pa," said Measure.

"Not me," said Pa.

"Ma," said Measure.

"I can't," Faith said.

"Well then," said Measure, "I reckon I just turned surgeon." He looked
at Alvin.

The boy's face had a deathly pallor to it that was even worse than the
ruddiness of the fever.  But he managed a sort of smile, and whispered,
"Reckon so."

"Ma, you're going to have to hold back that flap of skin."

She nodded.

Measure picked up the knife and brought the blade to rest against the
bottom line.

"Measure," Al Junior whispered.

"Yes, Alvin?" Measure asked.

"I can stand the pain and hold right still, iffen you whistle."

"I can't keep no tune, if I'm trying to cut straight at the same time,"
said Measure.

"Don't want no tune," said Alvin.

Measure looked into the boy's eyes and had no choice but to do as he
asked.  It was Al's leg, after all, and if he wanted a whistling
surgeon, he'd get one.  Measure took a deep breath and started in
whistling, no kind of tune at all, just notes.  He put the knife on the
black line again and began to cut.  Shallow at first, cause he heard Al
take a gasp of air.

"Keep whistling," Alvin whispered.  "Right to the bone."

Measure whistled again, and this time he cut fast and deep.  Right to
the bone in the middle of the line.  A deep slit up both sides.

Then he worked the knife under the two corners and peeled the skin and
muscle right back.  At first it bled more than a little bit, but almost
right away the bleeding stopped.  Measure figured it must be something
Alvin did inside himself, to stop the bleeding like that.

"Faith," said Pa.

Ma reached over and laid her hand on the bloody flap of skin.  Al
reached out a trembling hand and traced a wedge on the red-streaked bone
of his own leg.  Measure laid down the knife and picked up the saw.  It
made an awful, squeaky sound as he cut.  But Measure just whistled and
sawed, sawed and whistled.  And pretty soon he had a wedge of bone in
his hand.  It didn't look no different from the rest of the bone.

"You sure that was the right place?" he asked.

Al nodded slowly.

"Did I get it all?" Measure asked.

Al sat for a few moments, then nodded again.

"You want Ma to sew this back up?" Measure asked.

Al didn't say a thing.

"He fainted," said Pa.

The blood started to flow again, just a little, seeping into the wound.
Ma had a needle and thread on the pincushion she wore around her neck.
In no time she had that flap of skin right back down, and she was
stitching away at it, making a fine tight seam.

"You just keep on whistling, Measure," she said.

So he kept right on whistling and she kept right on sewing, till they
had the wound all bandaged up and Alvin was laying back sleeping like a
baby.  They all three stood up to go.  Pa laid a hand on the boy's
forehead, as gentle as you please.

"I think his fever's gone," he said.

Measure's tune got downright jaunty as they slipped on out the door.

chastise As soon as Elly saw him, she was sweet as could be, brushing
snow off him, helping with his cloak, and never so much as whispering a
question of how it happened.

Didn't make no difference how kindly she might be.  He was shamed afore
his own wife, cause sooner or later she'd hear the tale from one of
those children.  Soon enough the tale would be all up and down the
Wobbish.  How Armor-of-God Weaver, storekeeper for the western country,
future governor, got throwed right off a porch into the snow by his old
father-in-law.  They'd be laughing behind their hands, all right.

They'd laugh him up and down.  Never to his face, of course, cause there
was hardly a soul between Lake Canada and the Noisy River who didn't owe
him money or need his maps to prove their claims.  Come the time when
the Wobbish country was made a state, they'd tell that story at every
polling place.  They might like a man they laughed at, but they wouldn't
respect him, and they wouldn't vote for him.

It was the death of his plans he was facing, and his wife just had too
much of that Miller family look about her.  She was pretty enough, for a
frontier woman, but he didn't care about pretty right now.  He didn't
care about sweet nights and gentle mornings.  He didn't care about her
working alongside him in the store.  All he cared about was shame and
rage.

"Don't do that."

"You got to get that wet shirt off.  How'd you get snow clear down your
shirt?"

"I said get your hands off me!"

She stepped back, surprised.  "I was just"

"I know what you 'was just." Poor little Armor, you just pat him like a
little boy and he'll feel better."

"You could catch your death-"

"Tell that to your pa!  If I cough my guts out, you tell him what it
means to throw a man in the snow!"

"Oh no!" she cried.  "I can't believe Papa would-"

"See?  You don't even believe your own husband."

"I do believe you, it just ain't like Pa-"

"No ma'am, it's like the devil himself, that's what it's like!  That's
what fills that house of yours up there!  The spirit of evil!  And when
a body tries to speak the words of God in that house, they throw him
right out in the snow!"

"What were you doing up at the house?"

"Trying to save your brother's life.  He's no doubt dead by now."

"How could you save him?"

Maybe she didn't mean to sound so contemptuous.  It didn't matter.

He knew what she meant.  That him having no hidden power, there wasn't a
thing he could do to help anybody.  After years of being married, she
still put her faith in witchery, just like her kin.  He hadn't changed
her a bit.  "You're just the same," he said.  "Evil's in you so deep
that I can't pray it out of you, and I can't preach it out of you, and I
can't love it out of you, and I can't yell it out of you!" When he said
"Pray," he shoved her a little, just to make his point.  When he said
"Preach," he shoved her harder, and she stumbled back.  When he said
"love," he took her by the shoulders and gave her such a shake her hair
broke right out of the bun she'd made of it, and fluttered around her
head.  When he said "yell," he knocked her back so far she stumbled down
on the floor.

Seeing her falling, even before she hit the floor, he felt such a shame
go through him, even worse than when her father threw him in the snow. A
strong man makes me feel weak, so I go home and shove around my wife,
what a big man that makes me.  Here I been a Christian who never hit or
hurt a man or woman, and I knock my own wife, flesh of my flesh, right
down on the floor.

That was his thinking, and he was about to throw himself on his knees
and bawl like a baby and beg forgiveness.  He would've done it, too,
except that when she saw the look on his face, all twisted up with shame
and rage, she didn't know that he was angry at himself, she just knew
that he was hurting her, and so she did what come natural to a woman who
grew up like she did.  She moved her fingers to make a fending, and
whispered a word to hold him back.

He couldn't fall on his knees before her.  He couldn't take one step
toward her.  He couldn't even think of taking a step toward her.

Her fending was so strong he staggered back, he headed for the door, he
opened it and ran outside in just his shirt.  Everything he'd been
afraid of came true today.  He probably lost his future in politics, but
that was nothing compared to this: his own wife did witchery in his own
home, and she did it against him, and he had no defense against it.

She was a witch.  She was a witch.  And his house was unclean.

It was cold.  He had no coat, not even his waistcoat.  His shirt was
already wet, and now it clung to him and froze him to the bone.  He had
to get indoors, but he couldn't bear to knock on anybody's door.

There was only one place he could go.  Up the hill to the church.

Thrower had firewood there, so he'd be warm.  And in the church he could
pray and try to understand why the Lord didn't help him.

Haven't I served you, Lord?

Reverend Thrower opened the door of the church and walked slowly,
fearfully inside.  He could not bear to face the Visitor, knowing how he
had failed.  For it had been his own failure, he knew that now.

Satan should have had no power over him, to drive him from the house
that way.  An ordained minister, acting as the emissary of the Lord,
following instructions given to him by an angel-Satan should not have
been able to thrust him out of the house like that, before he even knew
what was happening.

He stripped off his cloak, and his topcoat as well.  The church was hot.
The fire in the stove must have burned longer than he expected.

Or maybe he felt the heat of shame.

It could not be that Satan was stronger than the Lord.  The only
possible explanation was that Thrower himself was too weak.  It was his
own faith that faltered.

Thrower knelt at the altar and cried out the name of the Lord.

"Forgive thou my unbelief!" he cried.  "I held the knife, but Satan
stood against me, and I had no strength!" He recited a litany of
selfexcoriation, he rehearsed all his failures of the day, until at last
he was exhausted.

Only then, with his eyes sore from crying, his voice feeble and hoarse,
did he realize the moment when his faith was undermined.  It was when he
stood in Alvin's room, asking the boy to confess his faith, and the boy
scoffed at the mysteries of God.  "How can he be on top of something
that ain't got no top?" Even though Thrower had rejected the questions
as the result of ignorance and evil, the question had nevertheless
pierced his heart and penetrated to the core of his belief.  Certainties
that had sustained him most of his life were suddenly split through by
the questions of an ignorant boy.  "He stole my faith," said Thrower. "I
went into his room a man of God, and came out as a doubter."

"Indeed," said a voice behind him.  A voice he knew.

A voice that now, in his moment of failure, he both feared and longed
for.  Oh, forgive me, comfort me, my Visitor, my friend!  Yet do not
fail also to chastise me with the terrible wrath of a jealous God.

"Chastise you?" asked the Visitor.  "How could I chastise you, such a
glorious specimen of humanity?"

"I am not glorious," said Thrower miserably.

"You're barely human, for that matter," said the Visitor.  "In whose
image were you made?  I sent you to bring my word into that house, and
instead they have nearly converted you.  What do I call you now?  A
heretic?  Or merely a skeptic?"

"A Christian!" cried Thrower.  "Forgive me and call me once again a
Christian."

"You had the knife in your hand, but you set it down."

"I didn't mean to!"

"Weak, weak, weak, weak, weak Each time the Visitor repeated the word,
he stretched it longer and longer, until each repetition became a song
in itself As he sang, he began to walk around the church.  He did not
run, but he walked quickly, far faster than any man could walk.

"Weak, weak - - ." He was moving so fast that Thrower had to turn
constantly just to keep him in sight.  The Visitor was no longer walking
on the floor.  He was skittering along the walls, as smooth and fast in
his motion as a cockroach, then even faster, until he became a blur, and
Thrower could not keep up with him by turning.  Thrower leaned on the
altar, facing the empty pews, watching the Visitor race by again and
again and again.

Gradually Thrower realized that the Visitor had changed shape, that he
had stretched himself, like a long slender beast, a lizard, an
alligator, bright-scaled and shining, longer and longer, until finally
the Visitor's body was so long that it circled the room, a vast worm
that gripped its own tail between its teeth.

And in his mind Thrower realized how very small and worthless he was,
compared to this glorious being that sparkled with a thousand different
colors, that glowed with inner fire, that breathed in darkness and
exhaled light.  I worship thee!  he shouted inside himself.  Thou art
all that I desire!  Kiss me with your love, so I may taste your glory!

Suddenly the Visitor stopped, and the great jaws came toward him.

Not to devour, for Thrower knew he was unworthy even to be consumed.  He
saw now the terrible predicament of man: he saw that he dangled over the
pit of hell like a spider on a slender thread, and the only reason God
did not let him fall was because he was not even worthy of destruction.
God did not hate him.  He was so vile that God disdained him.

Thrower looked into the Visitor's eyes and despaired.  For there was
neither love, nor forgiveness, nor anger, nor contempt.  The eyes were
utterly empty.  The scales dazzled, scattering the light of an inner
fire.  But that fire did not shine through the eyes.  They were not even
black.  They simply were not there at all, a terrible emptiness that
trembled, that would not hold still, and Thrower knew that this was his
own reflection, that he was nothing, that for him to continue to exist
was a cruel waste of precious space, that the only choice left to him
was to be annihilated, uncreated, to restore the world to the greater
glory it would have had if Philadelphia Thrower had never been born.

It was Thrower's praying that woke Armor up.  He was curled up by the
Franklin stove.  Maybe he stoked that stove a mite too hot, but that's
what it took to beat back the cold.  Why, by the time he got to the
church his shirt was solid ice.  He'd get more charcoal to pay back the
parson.

Armor meant to speak right up and let Thrower know he was there, but
when he heard the words that Thrower was praying, he couldn't find no
words to say.  Thrower was talking about knives and arteries, and how he
should've cut up the enemies of God.  After a minute it came clear:
Thrower hadn't gone up there to save that boy, he'd gone up to kill him'
What's wrong around here, thought Armor, when a Christian man beats his
wife, and a Christian wife witches her husband, and a Christian minister
plots murder and prays for forgiveness cause he failed to commit the
crime!

All of a sudden, though, Thrower stopped praying.  He was so hoarse and
his face so red that Armor thought he might have had the apoplexy.  But
no.  Thrower lifted his head like he was listening to somebody.  Armor
listened, too, and he could hear something, like people talking in a
windstorm, so you couldn't never hear what they were saying.

"I know what this is, thought Armor.  Reverend Thrower's having himself
a vision.

Sure enough, Thrower talked, and the faint voice answered, and pretty
soon Thrower started turning around and around, faster and faster, like
he was watching something on the walls.  Armor tried to see what it was
he was watching, but he couldn't never make it out.  It was like a
shadow passing across the sun-you couldn't see it coming and you
couldn't see it go, but for a second it was darker and colder.

That's what Armor saw.

Then it stopped.  Armor saw a shimmering in the air, a dazzle here and
there like when a pane of glass catches the sunlight.  Was Thrower
seeing the glory of God, like Moses saw?  Not likely, looking at the
parson's face.  Armor never did see such a face as that before.  Like a
man's face might look if he had to watch his own baby being killed.

The shimmering and dazzle went away.  The church was quiet.

Armor wanted to run to Thrower and ask him, What did you see!

What was your vision!  Was it a prophecy?

But Thrower didn't look much like he wanted to answer questions.

That look of wishing to die was still on his face.  The preacher walked
real slow away from the altar.  He wandered around among the pews,
bumping into them sometimes, not watching or caring where his body went.
Finally he ended up by the window, facing the glass, but Armor knew he
didn't see nothing, he was just standing there, his eyes wide open,
looking like death.

Reverend Thrower lifted up his right hand, the fingers spread, and he
laid his palm on a plane of glass.  He pressed.  He pressed and pushed
so hard that Armor could see the glass bowing outward.

"Stop it!" shouted Armor.  "You'll cut yourself!"

Thrower didn't even make a sign that he heard.  Just kept pressing.

Armor started walking toward him.  Got to make that man stop before he
breaks the glass and cuts up his arm.

With a crash the glass shattered.  Thrower's arm went right through, up
to the shoulder.  The preacher smiled.  He pulled his arm partway back
into the church.  Then he began to slide his arm around the frame,
jamming it right into the shards of glass that hung there in the putty.

Armor tried to pull Thrower away from the window, but the man had a
strength on him like Armor never seen before.  Finally Armor had to take
a run at him and knock him right down to the floor.

Blood was spattered everywhere Armor grabbed at Thrower's arm, which was
dripping all over with blood.  Thrower tried to roll away from him.
Armor didn't have no choice.  For the first time since he became a
Christian man he made his hand into a fist and popped Thrower right on
the chin.  It slammed the preacher's head back into the floor and
knocked him silly.

Got to stop the bleeding, Armor thought.  But first he had to get the
glass out.  Some of the big pieces were only stuck in a little way, and
he could brush them right off.  But other pieces, some of the little
pieces, were in deep, only a bit of their top showing, and that was
slimy with blood so he couldn't get much of a grip on it.  Finally,
though, he got all the glass he could find.  Lucky enough there wasn't a
single cut a-pumping blood, which told Armor that the big veins hadn't
been cut.  He stripped off his shirt, which left him naked to the waist
with that cold draft coming in from the broken window, but he didn't
hardly notice.  He just ripped up the shirt and made bandages.

He bound up the wounds and stopped the bleeding.  Then he sat there and
waited for Thrower to wake up.

Thrower was surprised to find he wasn't dead.  He was lying on his back
on a hard floor, covered up with heavy cloth.  His head hurt.  His arm
hurt worse.  He remembered trying to cut up that arm, and he knew he
ought to try again, but he just couldn't work up the same wish for death
that he had felt before.  Even remembering the Visitor in the form of a
great lizard, even remembering those empty eyes, Thrower just couldn't
remember how it felt.  He only knew that it was the worst feeling in the
world.

His arm was bandaged tight.  Who had bandaged him?

He heard the sloshing of water.  Then the flopping sound of wet rags
slapping against wood.  In the winter twilight coming through the
window, he could make out somebody washing the wall.  One of the window
panes was covered over with a piece of wood.

"Who is it?" asked Thrower.  "Who are you?"

"Just me."

"Armor-of-God."

"Washing down the walls.  This is a church, not a butcher shed."

Of course there'd be blood all over.  "Sorry," said Thrower.

"I don't mind cleaning up," said Armor.  "I think I got all the glass
out of your arm."

"You're naked," said Thrower.

"Your arm is wearing my shirt."

"You must be cold."

"Maybe I was, but I got the window covered and the stove heated up.

You're the one with a face so white you look like you been dead a week."

Thrower tried to sit up, but he couldn't.  He was too weak; his arm hurt
too bad.

Armor pushed him back down.  "Now, you just lay back, Reverend Thrower.
You just lay back.  You been through a lot."

"Yes.  "I hope you don't mind, but I was here in the church when you
come in.  I was asleep by the stove-my wife threw me out of the house. I
been thrown out twice today." He laughed, but there was no mirth in it.
"So I saw you."

"Saw?"

"You were having a vision, weren't you?"

"Did you see him?"

"I didn't see much.  I mostly saw you, but there was a few glimpses, if
you know what I mean.  Running around the walls."

"You saw," said Thrower.  "Oh, Armor, it was terrible, it was
beautiful."

"Did you see God?"

"See God?  God has no body to be seen, Armor.  No, I saw an angel, an
angel of chastisement.  Surely this was what Pharaoh saw, the angel of
death that came through the cities of Egypt and took the firstborn."

"Oh," said Armor, sounding puzzled.  "Was I spose to let you die, then?"

"If I were supposed to die, you could not have saved me," said Thrower.
"Because you saved me, because you were here at the moment of my
despair, it is a sure sign that I am meant to live.  I was chastised,
but not destroyed.  Armor-of-God, I have another chance."

Armor nodded, but Thrower could see that he was worried about something.
"What is it?" Thrower asked.  "What is it that you want to ask me?"

Armor's eyes widened.  "Can you hear what I'm thinking?"

"If I could, I wouldn't have to ask you."

Armor smiled.  "Reckon not."

"I'll tell you what you want to know, if I can."

"I heard you praying," said Armor.  He waited, as if that were the
question.

Since Thrower didn't know what the question was, he wasn't sure what to
answer.  "I was in despair, because I failed the Lord.  I was given a
mission to perform, but at the crucial moment my heart was filled with
doubt." With his good hand he reached out and clutched at Armor.  All he
could touch was the cloth of Armor's trousers, where he knelt beside
him.  "Armor-of-God," he said, "never let doubt enter your heart.  Never
question what you know is true.  It's the doorway to let Satan have
power over you."

But that wasn't the answer to Armor's question.

"Ask me what you want to ask me," said Thrower.  "I'll tell you the
truth, if I can."

"You prayed about killing," said Armor.

Thrower had not thought to tell anyone about the burden the Lord had
placed upon him.  Yet if the Lord had wanted the secret kept from Armor,
He would not have allowed the man to be there in the church to overhear.
"I believe," said Thrower, "that it was the Lord God that brought you to
me.  I am weak, Armor, and I failed at what the Lord required.  But now
I see that you, a man of faith, have been given to me as a friend and
helper."

"What did the Lord require?" asked Armor.

"Not murder, my brother.  The Lord never asked me to kill a man.

It was a devil I was sent to kill.  A devil in man-shape.  Living in
that house."

Armor pursed his lips, deep in thought.  "The boy ain't just possessed,
is that what you're saying?  It ain't something you can cast right out?"

"I tried, but he laughed at the Holy Book and mocked my words of
exorcism.  He is not possessed, Armor-of-God.  He is the devil's own
kin.  Armor shook his head.  "My wife ain't a devil, and she's his own
sister.  "

"She has given up witchcraft, and so she has been made pure," said
Thrower.

Armor gave one bitter laugh.  "I thought so."

Thrower understood, now, why Armor had taken refuge in the church, in
the house of God: His own house had been polluted.

"Armor-of-God, will you help me purge this country, this town, that
house, that family, of the evil influence that has corrupted them?"

"Will it save my wife?" asked Armor.  "Will it end her love of
witchery?"

"It may," said Thrower.  "Perhaps the Lord has brought us together so we
can purify both our houses."

"Whatever it takes," said Armor.  "I'm with you against the devil."

Peggy

The blacksmith listened as Taleswapper read the letter from beginning to
end.

"Do you remember the family?" asked Taleswapper.

"I do," said Makepeace Smith.  "The graveyard almost began with their
oldest boy.  I pulled his body from the river with my own hands."

"Well then, will you take him as your prentice?"

A youth, perhaps sixteen years old, walked into the forge carrying a
bucket of snow.  He glanced at the visitor, ducked his head, and walked
to the cooling barrel that stood near the hearth.

"You see I have a prentice," said the smith.

"He looks like a big one," said Taleswapper.

"Getting on," the smith agreed.  "Ain't that right, Bosey?  You ready to
go on your own?"

Bosey smiled a bit, stifled it, nodded.  "Yes, sir," he said.

"I'm not an easy master," said the smith.

"Alvin's a good-hearted boy.  He'll work hard for you."

"But will he obey me?  I like to be obeyed."

Taleswapper looked again at Bosey.  He was busy scooping snow into the
barrel.

"I said he's a good-hearted boy," said Taleswapper.  "He'll obey you if
you're fair with him."

The smith met his gaze.  "I give honest measure.  I don't beat the boys
I take on.  Have I ever laid hand on you, Bosey?"

"Never, sir."

"You see, Taleswapper, a prentice can obey out of fear, and he can obey
out of greed.  But if I'm a good master, he'll obey me cause he knows
that's how he'll learn."

Taleswapper grinned at the smith.  "There's no fee," said Taleswapper.
"The boy will earn it out.  And he gets his schooling."

"No need for a smith to have letters, as I should know."

"Won't be long before Ohio's part of the United States," said
Taleswapper.  "The boy's got to vote, I think, and read the newspapers.

A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him."

Makepeace Smith looked at Taleswapper with a grin half-hid on his face.
"That so?  And ain't it you telling me?  So don't I only know this cause
other folks, namely you, is telling me so?"

Taleswapper laughed and nodded.  The smith had shot the head clean off
the turkey with that one.  "I make my way in the world telling tales,"
said Taleswapper, "so I know you can get much with just the sound of a
man's voice.  He already reads above his years, so it won't do him harm
to miss a bit of school.  But his ma is set on him having letters and
ciphering like a scholar.  So just promise me you won't stand between
him and schooling, if he wants it, and we'll leave it at that.  "Got my
word on that," said Makepeace Smith.  "And you don't have to write it
down.  A man who keeps his word doesn't have to read and write.  But a
man who has to write down his promises, you got to watch him all
morning.  I know that for a fact.  We got lawyers in Hatrack these
days."

"The curse of civilized man," said Taleswapper.  "When a man can't get
folks to believe his lies anymore, then he hires him a professional to
lie in his place."

They laughed together over that one, setting there on two stout stumps
just inside the door of the forge, the fire smoldering in its brick
chimney place behind them, the sun shining on half-melted snow outside.
A redbird flew across the grassy, trampled, dunged-up ground in front of
the forge.  It dazzled Taleswapper's eyes for a moment, it was such a
startlement against the whites and greys and browns of late winter.

In that moment of amazement at the redbird's flight, Taleswapper knew
for certain, though he couldn't say why, that it would be a while yet
before the Unmaker let'young Alvin come to this place.

And when he came he'd be like a redbird out of season, to dazzle folks
all hereabouts, them thinking he was just as natural as a bird flying,
not knowing what a miracle it was every minute that the bird stayed in
the air.

Taleswapper shook himself, and the moment's clear vision passed.

"Then it's done, and I'll write to them to send the boy."

"I'll look for him the first of April.  No later!"

"Unless you expect the boy to control the weather, you'd best be
flexible about the date."

The smith grumbled and waved him away.  All in all, a successful
meeting.  Taleswapper left feeling good-he had discharged his duty.

It'd be easy to send a letter with a westbound wagon-several groups
passed through the town of Hatrack every week.

Though it had been a long time since he passed through this place, he
still knew the way from the forge to the inn.  It was a well-traveled
road, and not a long one.  The inn was much larger now than it had been,
and there were several shops a bit farther up the road.  An outfitter, a
saddler, a cobbler.  The kind of service traveling folk could use.

He hardly set foot on the porch when the door opened and Old Peg Guester
came out, her arms spread wide to embrace him.  "Ah, Taleswapper, you've
been away too long, come in, come in!"

"It's good to see you again, Peg," he said.

Horace Guester growled at him from behind the bar in the common room,
where he was serving several thirsty visitors.  "What I don't need here
is another teetotaling man!"

"Good news, then, Horace," Taleswapper answered cheerfully.  "I gave up
tea as well."

"What do you drink, water?"

"Water and the blood of greasy old men," said Taleswapper.

Horace gestured to his wife.  "You keep that man away from me, Old Peg,
you hear?"

Old Peg helped him strip off a few layers of clothing.  "Look at you,"
said Old Peg, sizing him up.  "There ain't enough meat on you to make a
stew."

"The bears and panthers pass me by in the night, looking for richer
fare," said Taleswapper.

"Come in and tell me stories while I fix up a mess of supper for the
company."

There was talk and chatter, especially once Oldpappy came in to help. He
was getting feeble now, but he still had a hand in the kitchen, which
was all to the benefit of those who ate here; Old Peg meant well and
worked hard, but some folks had the knack and some folks didn't.  But it
wasn't food that Taleswapper came for, nor conversation either, and
after a while he realized he'd have to bring it up himself "Where's your
daughter?"

To his surprise, Old Peg stiffened, and her voice went cold and hard.
"She ain't so little no more.  She's got a mind of her own, she's the
first to tell you."

And you don't much like it, thought Taleswapper.  But his business with
the daughter was more important than any family squabbles.  "Is she
still a-"

"A torch?  Oh, yes, she does her duty, but it's no pleasure for folks to
come for her.  Snippy and cold, that's what she is.  It's got her a name
for being sharp-tongued." For a moment Old Peg's face softened.  "She
used to be such a soft-hearted child."

"I've never seen a soft heart turn hard," said Taleswapper.  "At least
not without good reason."

"Well, whatever her reason, she's one whose heart has crusted up like a
waterbucket on a winter's night."

Taleswapper held his tongue and didn't sermonize, didn't talk about how
if you chip the ice it'll freeze up again right away, but if you take it
inside, it'll warm up fresh as you please.  No use stepping in the
middle of a family squabble.  Taleswapper knew enough of the way people
lived that he took this particular quarrel as a natural event, like cold
winds and short days in autumn, like thunder after lightning.

Most parents didn't have much use for a half-grown child.

"I have a matter to discuss with her," said Taleswapper.  "I'll take the
risk of having my head bitten off."

He found her in Dr.  Whitley Physicker's office, working on his
accounts.  "I didn't know you were a bookkeeper," he said.

"I didn't know you held much with physicking," she answered.

"Or did you just come to see the miracle of a girl who does sums and
ciphers?"

Oh, yes, she was as sharp as could be.  Taleswapper could see how a wit
like that might discommode a few folks who expected a young woman to
cast down her eyes and speak softly, glancing upward only now and then
under heavy-lidded eyes.  There was none of that young ladyness about
Peggy.  She looked Taleswapper in the face, plain as could be.

"I didn't come to be healed," said Taleswapper.  "Or to have my future
told.  Or even to have my accounts added up."

And there it was.  The moment a man answered her right back instead of
getting his dander up, why, she flashed a smile fit to charm the warts
off a toad.  "I don't recollect you having much to add or subtract
anyhow," she said.  "Naught plus naught is naught, I think."

"You've got it wrong, Peggy," said Taleswapper.  "I own this whole
world, and folks haven't been keeping up too well on the payments."

She smiled again, and set aside the doctor's account book.  "I keep his
records for him, once a month, and he brings me things to read from
Dekane." She talked about the things she read, and Taleswapper began to
see that her heart yearned for places far beyond Hatrack River.  He also
saw other things-that she, being a torch, knew the folks around here too
well, and thought that in faraway places she'd find people with
jewel-like souls that would never disappoint a girl who could see clean
into their heart.

She's young, that's all.  Give her time, and she'll learn to love such
goodness as she finds, and forgive the rest.

After a while the doctor came in, and they chatted a bit, and it was
well into the afternoon by the time Taleswapper was alone with Peggy
again and could ask her what he came to ask.

"How far off can you see, Peggy?"

He could almost see wariness fall across her face like a thick velvet
curtain.  "I don't reckon you're asking me whether I need spectacles,"
she said.

"I just wonder about a girl who once wrote in my book, A Maker is born.
I wonder if she still keeps an eye on that Maker, now and then, so she
can see how he fares."

She looked away from him, gazing at the high window above where the
curtain gave privacy.  The sun was low and the sky outside was grey, but
her face was full of light, Taleswapper saw that right enough. Sometimes
you didn't have to be a torch to know full well what was in a person's
heart.

"I wonder if that torch saw a ridgebeam falling on him one time," said
Taleswapper.

"I wonder," she said.

"Or a millstone."

"Could be."

"And I wonder if somehow she didn't have some way to split that
ridgebeam clean in twain, and crack that millstone so a certain old
taleswapper could see lantern light right through the middle of that
stone."

Tears glistened in her eyes, not like she was about to cry, but like she
was looking into the sun straight on, and it made her water up.

"A scrap of his birth caul, rubbed into dust, and a body can use the
boy's own power to work a few clumsy makings," she said softly.

"But now he knows something of his own knack, and he undid what you did
for him."

She nodded.

"Must be lonely, watching out for him from so far away," said
Taleswapper.

She shook her head.  "Not to me.  I got folks all around me, all the
time." She looked at Taleswapper and smiled wanly.  "It's almost a
relief to spend time with that one boy who doesn't want a thing from me,
because he doesn't even know that I exist."

"I know, though," said Taleswapper.  "And I don't want a thing from you,
either."

She smiled.  "You old fraud," she said.

"All right, I do want something from you, but not something for myself.
I've met that boy, and even if I can't see into his heart the way you
can, I think I know him.  I think I know what he might be, what he might
do, and I want you to know that if you ever need my help for anything,
just send me word, just tell me what to do, and if it's in my power I'll
do it."

She didn't answer, nor did she look at him.

"So far you didn't need help," said Taleswapper, "but now he has a mind
of his own, and you can't always do for him the things he'll need.

The dangers won't come just from things that fan on him or hurt him in
the flesh.  He's in as much danger from what he decides to do himself.

I'm just telling you that if you see such danger and you need me to
help, I'll come no matter what."

"That's a comfort," she said.  That was honest enough, Taleswapper knew;
but she was feeling more than she said, he knew that too.

"And I wanted to tell you he was coming here, lint of April, to prentice
with the smith."

"I know he's coming," she said, "but it won't be the first of April."

"Or even this year at all."

Fear for the boy stabbed at Taleswapper's heart.  "I guess I did come to
hear the future after all.  What's in store for him?  What's to come?"

"All kinds of things might happen," she said, "and I'd be a fool to
guess which one.  I see it open like a thousand roads before him, all
the time.  But there's precious few of those roads that bring him here
by April, and a whole lot more that leave him dead with a Red man's
hatchet in his head."

Taleswapper leaned across the doctor's writing table and rested his hand
on hers.  "Will he live?"

"As long as I have breath in my body," she said.

"Or I in mine," he answered.

They sat in silence for a moment, hand on hand, eye to eye, until she
burst into laughter and looked away.

"Usually when folks laugh I get the joke," said Taleswapper.

"I was just thinking we're a poor excuse for a conspiracy, the two of
us, against the enemies that boy will face."

"True," said Taleswapper, "but then, our cause is good, and so all
nature will conspire with us, don't you think?"

"And God, too," she added firmly.

"I can't say about that," said Taleswapper.  "The preachers and priests
seem to have him so fenced up with doctrine that the poor old Father
hardly has room to act anymore.  Now that they've got the Bible safely
interpreted, the last thing they ever want is for hijrn to speak another
word, or show his hand of power in this world."

"I saw his hand of power in the birth of a seventh son of a seventh son,
some years back," she said.  "Call it nature if you want to, since
you've got all kinds of learning from philosophers and wizards.  I just
know that he's tied as tight to my life as if we was born from the same
womb."

Taleswapper didn't plan his next question, it just came unthoughtof from
his lips.  "Are you glad of it?"

She looked at him with terrible sadness in her eyes.  "Not often," she
said.  She looked so weary then that Taleswapper couldn't help himself,
he walked around the table and stood beside her chair and held her tight
like a father holds his daughter, held her for a good long while.  If
she was crying or just holding on, he couldn't say.  They spoke not a
word.  Finally she let go of him and turned back to the account book. He
left without breaking the silence.

Taleswapper wandered on over to the inn to take his supper.  There were
tales to tell and chores to do in order to earn his keep.  Yet all the
stories seemed to pale beside the one story that he could not tell, the
one story whose end he didn't know.

On the meadow around the millhouse were a half dozen farm wagons,
watched over by farmers who had come a good long way to get high-quality
flour.  No more would their wives sweat over a mortar and pestle to make
coarse meal for hard and lumpy bread.  The mill was in business, and
everyone for miles around would bring their grain to the town of Vigor
Church.

The water poured through the millrace, and the great wheel turned.

Inside the millhouse, the force of the wheel was carried by interlocking
gears, to make the grindstone roll around and around, riding on the face
of a quarter dress millstone.

The miller poured out the wheat upon the stone.  The grindstone passed
over it, crushing it to flour.  The miller swept it smooth for a second
pass, then brushed it off into a basket held by his son, a ten-year-old
boy.  His son poured the flour into a sieve, and shook-the good flour
into a cloth sack.  He emptied what stayed in the sieve into a silage
barrel.  Then he returned to his father's side for the next basket of
wheat.

Their thoughts were remarkably alike, as they worked silently together.
This is what I want to do forever, each one thought.  Rise in the
morning, come to the mill, and work all day with him beside me.

Never mind that the wish was impossible.  Never mind that they might
never see each other again, once the boy left for his apprenticeship
back in the place of his birth.  That only added to the sweetness of the
moment, which would soon become a memory, would soon become a dream.

Red PROPHET

The Tales of Alvin Maker: Part Two

BY Orson Scott Card

Hooch

Not many flatboats were getting down the Ohio these days, not with
pioneers aboard, anyway, not with families and tools and furniture and
seed and a few shoats to start a pig herd.  It took only a couple of
fire arrows and pretty soon some tribe of Reds would have themselves a
string of half-charred scalps to sell to the French in Detroit.

But Hooch Palmer had no such trouble.  The Reds all knew the look of his
flatboat, stacked high with kegs.  Most of those kegs sloshed with
whisky, which was about the only musical sound them Reds understood. But
in the middle of the vast heap ofCarthage there was one keg that didn't
slosh.  It was filled with gunpowder, and it had a fuse attached.

How did he use that gunpowder?  They'd be floating along with the
current, poling on round a bend, and all of a sudden there'd be a
halfdozen canoes filled with painted-up Reds of the Kicky-Poo
persuasion.  Or they'd see a fire burning near shore, and some ShawNee
devils dancing around with arrows ready to set alight.

For most folks that meant it was time to pray, fight, and die.

Not Hooch, though.  He'd stand right up in the middle of that flatboat,
a torch in one hand and the fuse in the other, and shout, "Blow up
whisky!  Blow up whisky!"

Well, most Reds didn't talk much English, but they sure knew what "blow
up" and "whisky" meant.  And instead of arrows flying or canoes
overtaking them, pretty soon them canoes passed by him on the far side
of the river.  Some Red yelled, "Carthage City!" and Hooch hollered
back, "That's right!" and the canoes just zipped on down the Ohio,
heading for where that likker would soon be sold.

The poleboys, of course, it was their first trip down river, and they
didn't know all that Hooch Palmer knew, so they about filled their
trousers first time they saw them Reds with fire arrows.  And when they
saw Hooch holding his torch by that fuse, they like to jumped right in
the river.  Hooch just laughed and laughed.  "You boys don't know about
Reds and likker," he said.  "They won't do nothing that might cause a
single drop from these kegs to spill into the Ohio.

They'd kill their own mother and not think twice, if she stood between
them and a keg, but they won't touch us as long as I got the gunpowder
ready to blow if they lay one hand on me."

Privately the poleboys might wonder if Hooch really would blow the whole
raft, crew and all, but the fact is Hooch would.  He wasn't much of a
thinker, nor did he spend much time brooding about death and the
hereafter or such philosophical questions, but this much he had decided:
when he died, he supposed he wouldn't die alone.  He also supposed that
if somebody killed him, they'd get no profit from the deed, none at all.
Specially not some half-drunk weak-sister cowardly Red with a scalping
knife.

The best secret of all was, Hooch wouldn't need no torch and he wouldn't
need no fuse, neither.  Why, that fuse didn't even go right into the
gunpowder keg, if the truth be known-Hooch didn't want a chance of that
powder going off by accident.  No, if Hooch ever needed to blow up his
flatboat, he could just set down and think about it for a while.  And
pretty soon that powder would start to hotten up right smart, and maybe
a little smoke would come off it, and then pow!  it goes off.

That's right.  Old Hooch was a spark.  Oh, there's some folks says
there's no such thing as a spark, and for proof they say, "Have you ever
met a spark, or knowed anybody who did?" but that's no proof at all.
Cause if you happen to be a spark, you don't go around telling
everybody, do you?  It's not as if anybody's hoping to hire your
services-it's too easy to use flint and steel, or even them alchemical
matches.  No, the only value there is to being a spark is if you want to
start a fire from a distance, and the only time you want to do that is
if it's a bad fire, meant to hurt somebody, burn down a building, blow
something up.  And if you hire out that kind of service, you don't
exactly put up a sign that says Spark For Hire.

Worst of it is that if word once gets around that you're a spark, every
little fire gets blamed on you.  Somebody's boy lights up a pipe out in
the barn, and the barn burns downoes that boy ever say, "Yep, Pa, it was
me all right." No sir, that boy says, "Must've been some spark set that
fire, Pa!" and then they go looking for you, the neighborhood scapegoat.
No, Hooch was no fool.  He didn't ever tell nobody about how he could
get things bet up and flaming.

There was another reason Hooch didn't use his sparking ability too much.
It was a reason so secret that Hooch didn't rightly know it himself.
Thing was, fire scared him.  Scared him deep.  The way some folks is
scared of water, and so they go to sea; and some folks is scared of
death, and so they take up gravedigging; and some folks is scared of
God, and so they set to preaching.  Well Hooch feared the fire like he
feared no other thing, and so he was always drawn to it, with that sick
feeling in his stomach; but when it was time for him to lay a fire
himself, why, he'd back off, he'd delay, he'd think of reasons why he
shouldn't do it at all.  Hooch had a knack, but he was powerful
reluctant to make much use of it.

But he would have done it.  He would have blown up that powder and
himself and his poleboys and all his likker, before he'd let a Red take
it by murder.  Hooch might have his bad fear of fire, but he'd overcome
it right quick if he got mad enough.

Good thing, then, that the Reds loved hkker so much they didn't want to
risk spilling a drop.  No canoe came too close, no arrow whizzed in to
thud and twang against a keg, and Hooch and his kegs and casks and
firkins and barrels all slipped along the top of the water peaceful as
you please, clear to Carthage City, which was Governor Harrison's
highfalutin name for a stockade with a hundred soldiers right smack
where the Little My-Ammy River met the Ohio.  But Bill Harrison was the
kind of man who gave the name first, then worked hard to make the place
live up to the name.  And sure enough, there was about fifty chimney
fires outside the stockade this time, which meant Carthage City was
almost up to being a village.

He could hear them yelling before he floated into view of the wharf
there must be Reds who spent half their life just setting on the
riverbank waiting for the likker boat to come in.  And Hooch knew they
were specially eager this time, seeing as how some money changed hands
back in Fort Dekane, so the other huer dealers got held up this way and
that until old Carthage City must be dry as the inside of a bull's tit.

Now here comes Hooch with his flatboat loaded up heavier than they ever
saw, and he'd get a price this time, that's for sure.

Bill Harrison might be vain as a partridge, taking on airs and calling
himself governor when nobody elected him and nobody appointed him but
his own self, but he knew his business.  He had those boys of his in
smart-looking uniforms, lined up at the wharf just as neat as you
please, their muskets loaded and ready to shoot down the first Red who
so much as took a step toward the shore.  It was no formality,
neither-them Reds looked mighty eager, Hooch could see.  Not jumping up
and down like children, of course, but just standing there, just
standing and watching, right out in the open, not caring who saw them,
half-naked the way they mostly were in summertime.  Standing there all
humble, all ready to bow and scrape, to beg and plead, to say, Please
Mr.  Hooch one keg for thirty deerskins, oh that would sound sweet, oh
indeed it would; Please Mr.  Hooch one tin cup of likker for these ten
muskrat hides.  "Whee-haw!" cried Hooch.  The poleboys looked at him
like he was crazy, cause they didn't know, they never saw how these Reds
used to look, back before Governor Harrison set up shop here, the way
they never deigned to look at White man, the way you had to crawl into
their wicky-ups and choke half to death on smoke and steam and sit there
making signs and talking their jub-jub until you got permission to
trade.  Used to be the Reds would be standing there with bows and
spears, and you'd be scared to death they'd decide your scalp was worth
more than your trade goods.

Not anymore.  Now they didn't have a single weapon among them.

Now their tongues just hung out waiting for hkker.  And they'd drink and
drink and drink and drink and drink and whee-bawl They'd drop down dead
before they'd ever stop drinking, which was the best thing of all, best
thing of all.  Only good Red's a dead Red, Hooch always said, and the
way he and Bill Harrison had things going now, they had them Reds dying
of likker at a good clip, and paying for the privilege along the way.

So Hooch was about as happy a man as you ever saw when they tied up at
the Carthage City Wharf.  The sergeant even saluted him, if you could
believe it!  A far cry from the way U.S.  Marshalls treated him back in
Suskwahenny, acting like he was scum they just scraped off the privy
seat.  Out here in this new country, free-spirited men like Hooch were
treated most like gentlemen, and that suited Hooch just fine.  Let them
pioneers with their tough ugly wives and wiry little brats go hack down
trees and cut up the dirt and raise corn and hogs just to live.

Not Hooch.  He'd come in after, after the fields were all nice and neat
looking and the houses were all in fine rows on squaredoff streets, and
then he'd take his money and buy him the biggest house in town, and the
banker would step off the sidewalk into the mud to make way for him, and
the mayor would call him sir-if he didn't decide to be mayor himself by
then.

This was the message of the sergeant's salute, telling his future for
him, when he stepped ashore.

"We'll unload here, Mr.  Hooch," said the sergeant.

"I've got a bill of lading," said Hooch, 16 so let's have no
privateering by your boys.  Though I'd allow as how there's probably one
keg of good rye whisky that somehow didn't exactly get counted on here.

I'd bet that one keg wouldn't be missed."

"We'll be as careful as you please, sir," said the sergeant, but he had
a grin so wide it showed his hind teeth, and Hooch knew he'd find a way
to keep a good half of that extra keg for himself.  If he was stupid,
he'd sell his half-keg bit by bit to the Reds.  You don't get rich off a
half keg of whisky.  No, if that sergeant was smart, he'd share that
half keg, shot by shot, with the officers that seemed most likely to
give him advancement, and if he kept that up, someday that sergeant
wouldn't be out greeting flatboats, no sir, he'd be sitting in officers'
quarters with a pretty wife in his bedroom and a good steel sword at his
hip.

Not that Hooch would ever tell this to the sergeant.  The way Hooch
figured, if a man had to be told, he didn't have brains enough to do the
job anyway.  And if he had the brains to bring it off, he didn't need no
flatboat likker dealer telling him what to do.

"Governor Harrison wants to see you," said the sergeant.

"And I want to see him, " said Hooch.  "But I need a bath and a shave
and clean clothes first."

"Governor says for you to stay in the old mansion."

"Old one?" said Hooch.  Harrison had built the official mansion only
four years before.  Hooch could think of only one reason why Bin might
have upped and built another so soon.  "Well, now, has Governor Bill
gone and got hisself a new wife?"

"He has," said the sergeant.  "Pretty as you please, and only fifteen
years old, if you like that!  She's from Manhattan, though, so she don't
talk much English or anyway it don't sound like English when she does."

That was all right with Hooch.  He talked Dutch real good, almost as
good as he talked English and a lot better than he talked ShawNee.

He'd make friends with Bill Harrison's wife in no time.  He even toyed
with the idea of-but no, no, it wasn't no good to mess with another
man's woman.  Hooch had the desire often enough, but he knew things got
way too complicated once you set foot on that road.

Besides, he didn't really need no White woman, not with all these
thirsty squaws around.

Would Bill Harrison bring his children out here, now he had a second
wife?  Hooch wasn't too sure how old them boys would be now, but old
enough they might relish the frontier life.  Still, Hooch had a vague
feeling that the boys'd be a lot better off staying in Philadelphia with
their aunt.  Not because they shouldn't be out in wild country, but
because they shouldn't be near their father.  Hooch liked Bill Harrison
just fine, but he wouldn't pick him as the ideal guardian for
childrenyen for Bill's own.

Hooch stopped at the gate of the stockade.  Now, there was a nice touch.
Right along with the standard hexes and tokens that were supposed to
ward off enemies and fire and other such things, Governor Bill had put
up a sign, the width of the gate.  In big letters it said

CARTHAGE CITY

and in smaller letters it said

CAPITAL OF THE STATE OF WOBBISH

which was just the sort of thing old Bill would think of In a way, he
expected that sign was more powerful than any of the hexes.  As a spark,
for instance, Hooch knew that the hex against fire wouldn't stop him,
it'd just make it harder to start a fire up right near the hex.

If he got a good blaze going somewhere else, that hex would burn up just
like anything else.  But that sign, naming Wobbish a state and Carthage
its capital, why, that might actually have some power in it, power over
the way folks thought.  If you say a thing often enough, people come to
expect it to be true, and pretty soon it becomes true.

Oh, not something like "The moon is going to stop in its tracks and go
backward tonight," cause for that to work the moon'd have to hear your
words.  But if you say things like "That girl's easy" or "That man's a
thief," it doesn't much matter whether the person you're talking about
believes you or not everybody else comes to believe it, and treats them
like it was true.  So Hooch figured that if Harrison got enough people
to see a sign that named Carthage as the capital of the state of
Wobbish, someday it'd plumb come to be.

Fact is, though, Hooch didn't much care whether it was Harrison who got
to be governor and put his capital in Carthage City, or whether it was
that teetotaling self-righteous prig Armor-of-God Weaver up north, where
Tippy-Canoe Creek flowed into the Wobbish River, who got to be governor
and make Vigor Church the capital.

Let those two fight it out; whoever won, Hooch intended to be a rich man
and do as he liked.  Either that or see the whole place go up in flames.
If Hooch ever got completely beat down and broken, he'd make sure nobody
else profited.  When a spark had no hope left, he could still get even,
which is about all the good Hooch figured he got out of being a spark.

Well, of course, as a spark he made sure his bath-water was always hot,
so it wasn't a total loss.  Sure was a nice change, getting off the
river and back into civilized life.  The clothes laid out for him were
clean, and it felt good to get that prickly beard off his face.

Not to mention the fact that the squaw who bathed him was real eager to
get an extra dose of hkker, and if Harrison hadn't sent a soldier
knocking on his door telling him to hurry it up, Hooch might have
collected the first installment of her trade goods.  Instead, though, he
dried and dressed.

She looked real concerned when he started for the door.  "You be back?"
she asked.

"Look here, of course I will," he said.  "And I'll have a keg with me.
"Before dark though," she said.

"Well maybe yes and maybe no," he answered.  "Who cares?"

"After dark, all Reds like me, outside fort."

"Is that so," murmured Hooch.  "Well, I'll try to be back before dark.
And if I don't, I'll remember you.  May forget your face, but I won't
forget your hands, hey?  That was a real nice bath."

She smiled, but it was a grotesque imitation of a real smile.

Hooch just couldn't figure out why the Reds didn't die out years ago,
their women were so ugly.  But if you kind of closed your eyes, a squaw
would do well enough until you could get back to real women.

It wasn't just a new mansion Harrison had built-he had added a whole new
section of stockade, so the fort was about twice the size it used to be.
And a good solid parapet ran the whole length of the stockade.  Harrison
was ready for war.  That made Hooch pretty uneasy.

The likker trade didn't thrive too good in wartime.  The kind of Reds
who fought battles weren't the kind of Reds who drank likker.

Hooch saw so much of the latter kind that he pretty much forgot the
former kind existed.  There was even a cannon.  No, two cannons.

This didn't look good at all.

Harrison's office wasn't in the mansion, though.  It was in another
building entirely, a new headquarters building, and Harrison's office
was in the southwest corner, with lots of light.  Hooch noticed that
besides the normal complement of soldiers on guard and officers doing
paperwork, there were several Reds sprawling or sitting in the
headquarters building.  Harrison's tame Reds, of course-he always kept a
few around.

But there were more tame Reds than usual, and the only one Hooch
recognized was Lolla-Wossiky, a one-eyed ShawNee who was always about
the drunkest Red who wasn't dead yet.  Even the other Reds made fun of
him, he was so bad, a real lickspittle.

What made it even funnier was the fact that Harrison himself was the man
who shot Lolla-Wossiky's father, some fifteen years ago, when
Lolla-Wossiky was just a little tyke, standing right there watching.

Harrison even told the story sometimes right in front of LollaWossiky,
and the one-eyed drunk just nodded and laughed and grinned and acted
like he had no brains at all, no human dignity, just about the lowest,
crawliest Red that Hooch ever seen.  He didn't even care about revenge
for his dead papa, just so long as he got his likker.

No, Hooch wasn't a bit surprised to see that Lolla-Wossiky was lying
right on the floor outside Harrison's office, so every time the door
opened, it bumped him right in the butt.  Incredibly, even now, when
there hadn't been new likker in Carthage City in four months,
LollaWossiky was pickled.  He saw Hooch come in, sat up on one elbow,
waved an arm in greeting, and then rocked back onto the floor without a
sound.  The handkerchief he kept tied over his missing eye was out of
place, so the empty socket with the sucked-in eyelids was plainly
visible.  Hooch felt like that empty eye was looking at him.  He didn't
like that feeling.  He didn't like Lolla-Wossiky.  Harrison was the kind
of man who liked having such squalid creatures aroundmade him feel real
good about himself, by contrast, Hooch figuredbut Hooch didn't like
seeing such miserable specimens of humanity.

Why hadn't Lolla-Wossiky died yet?

Just as he was about to open Harrison's door, Hooch looked up from the
drunken one-eyed Red into the eyes of another man, and here's the funny
thing: He thought for a second it was Lolla-Wossiky again, they looked
so much alike.  Only it was Lolla-Wossiky with both eyes, and not drunk
at all, no sir.  This Red must be six feet from sole to scalp, leaning
against the wall, his head shaved except his scalplock, his clothing
clean.  He stood straight, like a soldier at attention, and he didn't so
much as look at Hooch.  His eyes stared straight into space.  Yet Hooch
knew that this boy saw everything, even though he focused on nothing. It
had been a long time since Hooch saw a Red who looked like that, all
cold and in control of things.

Dangerous, dangerous, is Harrison getting careless, to let a Red into
his own headquarters with eyes like those?  With a bearing like a king,
and arms so strong he looks like he could pull a bow made from the trunk
of a six-year-old oak?  Lolla-Wossiky was so contemptible it made Hooch
sick.  But this Red who looked like Lolla-Wossiky, he was the opposite.
And instead of making Hooch sick, he made Hooch mad, to be so proud and
defiant as if he thought he was as good a man as any White.  No, better.
That's how he looked-like he thought he was better.

Then he realized he was just standing there, his hand on the latch pull,
staring at the Red.  Hadn't moved in how long?  That was no good, to let
folks see how this Red made him uncomfortable.  He pulled the door open
and stepped inside.

But he didn't talk about that Red, no sir, that wouldn't do at all.  It
wouldn't do to let Harrison know how much that one proud ShawNee
bothered him, made him angry.  Because there sat Governor Bill behind a
big old table, like God on his throne, and Hooch realized things had
changed around here.  It wasn't just the fort that had got bigger-so had
Bill Harrison's vanity.  And if Hooch was going to make the profit he
expected to on this trip, he'd have to make sure Governor Bill came down
a peg or two, so they could deal as equals instead of dealing as a
tradesman and a governor.

"Noticed your cannon," said Hooch, not bothering even to say howdy.
"What's the artillery for, French from Detroit, Spanish from orida, or
Reds?"

"No matter who's buying the scalps, it's always Reds, one way or
another," said Harrison.  "Now sit down, relax, Hooch.  When my door is
closed there's no ceremony between us." Oh, yes, Governor Bill liked to
play his games, just like a politician.  Make a man feel like you're
doing him a favor just to let him sit in your presence, flatter him
by'making him feel like a real chum before you pick his pocket.

Well, thought Hooch, I have some games of my own to play, and we'll see
who comes out on top.

Hooch sat down and put his feet up on Governor Bill's desk.  He took out
a pinch of tobacco and tucked it into his cheek.  He could see Bill
flinch a little.  It was a sure sip that his wife had broke him of some
manly habits.  "Care for a pinch?" asked Hooch.

It took a minute before Harrison allowed as how he wouldn't mind a bit
of it.  "I mostly swore off this stuff," he said ruefully.

So Harrison still missed his bachelor ways.  Well, that was good news to
Hooch.  Gave him a handle to get the Guy off balance.  "Hear you got
yourself a white bedwarmer from Manhattan," said Hooch.

It worked: Harrison's face flushed.  "I married a lady from New
Amsterdam," he said.  His voice was quiet and cold.  Didn't bother Hooch
a bit-that's just what he wanted.

"A wife!" said Hooch.  "Well, I'll be!  I beg your pardon, Governor,
that wasn't what I heard, you'll have to forgive me, I was only going by
what the-what the rumors said."

"Rumors?" asked Harrison "Oh, no, you just never mind.  You know how
soldiers talk.  I'm ashamed I listened to them in the first place.

Why, you've kept the memory of your first wife sacred all these years,
and if I was any kind of friend of yours, I would've known any woman you
took into your house would be a lady, and a properly married wife."

"What I want to know," said Harrison, "is who told you she was anything
else?"

"Now, Bill, it was just loose soldiers' talk; I don't want any man to
get in trouble because he can't keep his tongue.  A er shipment just
came in, for heaven's sake, Bill!  You won't hold it against them, what
they said with their minds on whisky.  No, you just take a pinch of this
tobacky and remember that your boys all like you fine."

Harrison took a good-sized chaw from the offered tobacco pouch and
tucked it into his cheek.  "Oh, I know, Hooch, they don't bother me."

But Hooch knew that it did bother him, that Harrison was so angry he
couldn't spit straight, which he proved by missing the spittoon.  A
spittoon, Hooch noticed, which had been sparkling clean.

Didn't anybody spit around here anymore, except Hooch?

"You're getting civilized," said Hooch.  "Next thing you know you'll
have lace curtains."

"Oh, I do," said Harrison.  "In my house."

"And little china chamber pots?"

"Hooch, you got a mind like a snake and a mouth like a hog."

"That's why you love me, Bill-cause you got a mind like a hog and a
mouth like a snake."

I'll "Keep that in mind," said Harrison.  "You just keep that in mind,
how I might bite, and bite deep, and bite with poison in it.  You keep
that in mind before you try to play your diddly games with me."

"Diddly games!" cried Hooch.  "What do you mean, Bill Harrison!

What do you accuse me of!"

"I accuse you of arranging for us to have no likker at all for four long
months of springtime, till I had to hang three Reds for breaking into
military stores, and even my soldiers ran out!"

"Me!  I brought this load here as fast as I could!"

Harrison just smiled.

Hooch kept his look of pained outrage-it was one of his best
expressions, and besides it was even partly true.  If even one of the
other whisky traders had half a head on him, he'd have found a way down
river despite Hooch's efforts.  It wasn't Hooch's fault if he just
happened to be the sneakiest, most malicious, lowdown, competent skunk
in a business that wasn't none too clean and none too bright to start
with.

Hooch's look of injured innocence lasted longer than Harrison's smile,
which was about what Hooch figured would happen.

"Look here, Hooch," said Harrison.

"Maybe you better start calling me Mr.  Ulysses Palmer," said Hooch.
"Only my friends call me Hooch."

But Harrison did not take the bait.  He did not start to make protests
of his undying friendship.  "Look here, Mr.  Palmer," said Harrison,
"You know and I know that this hasn't got a thing to do with friendship.
You want to be rich, and I want to be governor of a real state.  I need
your likker to be governor, and you need my protection to be rich.  But
this time you pushed too far.  You understand me?  You can have a
monopoly for all I care, but if I don't get a steady supply of whisky
from you, I'll get it from someone else."

"Now Governor Harrison, I can understand you might've started fretting
along in there sometime, and I can make it right with you.

What if you had six kegs of the best whisky all on your own-" But
Harrison wasn't in the mood to be bribed, either.  "What you forget, Mr.
Palmer, is that I can have all this whisky, if I want it."

Well, if Harrison could be blunt, so could Hooch, though he made it a
practice to say things like this with a smile.  "Mr.  Governor, you can
take all my whisky once.  But then what trader will want to deal with
you?"

Harrison laughed and laughed.  "Any trader at all, Hooch Palmer, and you
know it!"

Hooch knew when he'd been beat.  He joined right in with the laughing.

Somebody knocked on the door.  "Come in," said Harrison.  At the same
time he waved Hooch to stay in his chair.  A soldier stepped in,
saluted, and said, "Mr.  Andrew Jackson here to see you, sir.  From the
Tennizy country, he says."

"Days before I looked for him," said Harrison.  "But I'm delighted,
couldn't be more pleased, show him in, show him in."

Andrew Jackson.  Had to be that lawyer fellow they called Mr.  Hickory.
Back in the days when Hooch was working the Tennizy country, Hickory
Jackson was a real country boy-killed a man in a duel, put his fists
into a few faces now and then, had a name for keeping his word, and the
story was that he wasn't exactly completely married to his wife, who
might well have another husband in her past who wasn't even dead.  That
was the difference between Hickory and Hooch-Hooch would've made sure
the husband was dead and buried long since.  So Hooch was a little
surprised that this Jackson was big enough now to have business that
would take him clear from Tennizy up to Carthage City.

But that was nothing to his surprise when Jackson stepped through the
door, ramrod straight with eyes like fire.  He strode across the room
and offered his hand to Governor Harrison.  Called him Mr.  Harrison,
though.  Which meant he was either a fool, or he didn't figure he needed
Harrison as much as Harrison needed him.

"You got too many Reds around here," said Jackson.  "That oneeyed drunk
by the door is enough to make a body puke."

"Well," said Harrison, "I think of him as kind of a pet.  My own pet
Red."

"Lolla-Wossiky," said Hooch helpfully.  Well, not really helpfully.

He just didn't like how Jackson hadn't noticed him, and Harrison hadn't
bothered to introduce him.

Jackson turned to look at him.  "What did you say?"

"Lolla-Wossiky," said Hooch.

"The one-eyed Red's name," said Harrison.

Jackson eyed Hooch coldly.  "The only time I need to know the name of a
horse," he said, "is when I plan to ride it."

"My name's Hooch Palmer," said Hooch.  He offered his hand.

Jackson didn't take it.  "Your name is Ulysses Brock," said Jackson,
"and you owe more than ten pounds in unpaid debts back in Nashville. Now
that Appalachee has adopted U.S.  currency, that means you owe two
hundred and twenty dollars in gold.  I bought those debts and it happens
that I have the papers with me, since I heard you were trading whisky up
in these parts, and so I think I'll place you under arrest."

It never occurred to Hooch that Jackson would have that kind of memory,
or be such a skunk as to buy a man's paper, especially seven-year-old
paper, which by now should be pretty much forgot.

But sure enough, Jackson took a warrant out of his coat pocket and laid
it on Governor Harrison's desk.

"Since I appreciate your already having this man in custody when I
arrived," said Jackson, "I am glad to tell you that under Appalachee law
the apprehending officer is entitled to ten percent of the funds
collected."

Harrison leaned back in his chair and grinned at Hooch.  "Well, Hooch,
maybe you better set down and let's all get better acquainted.

Or I guess maybe we don't have to, since Mr.  Jackson here seems to know
you better than I did."

"Oh, I know Ulysses Brock all right," said Jackson.  "He's just the sort
of skunk we had to get rid of in Tennizy before we could lay claim to
being civilized.  And I expect you'll be rid of his sort soon enough
here, too, as you get the Wobbish country ready to apply for admission
to the United States."

"You take a lot for granted," said Harrison.  "We might try to go it
alone out here, you know."

"If Appalachee couldn't make a go of it alone, with Tom Jefferson as
President, you won't do any better here, I reckon."

"Well maybe," said Harrison, "just maybe we've got to do something that
Tom Jefferson didn't have the guts to do.  And maybe we've got a need
for men like Hooch here."

"What you have need for is soldiers," said Jackson.  "Not rummers."

Harrison shook his head.  "You're a man who forces me to come to the
point, Mr.  Jackson, and I can calculate right enough why the folks in
Tennizy sent you on up here to meet with me.  So I'll come to the point.
We've got the same trouble up here that you've got down there, and that
trouble can be summed up in one word: Reds."

"Which is why I'm perplexed that you let drunken Reds sit around here in
your own headquarters.  They all belong west of the Mizzipy, and that's
as plain as day.  We won't have peace and we won't have civilization
until that's done.  And since Appalachee and the U.S. alike are
convinced that Reds can be treated like human beings, we've got to solve
our Red problem before we join the Union.  It's as simple as that."

"Well, you see?" said Harrison.  "We already agree completely."

"Then why is it that you keep your headquarters as full of Reds as
Independence Street in Washington City?  They have Cherriky men acting
as clerks and even holding government offices in Appalachee, right in
the capital, jobs that White men ought to have, and then-I come here and
find you keep Reds around you, too."

"Cool down, Mr.  Jackson, cool right down.  Don't the King keep his
Blacks there in his palace in Virginia?"

"His Blacks are slaves.  Everybody knows you can't make slaves out of
Reds.  They aren't intelligent enough to be properly trained."

"Well, you just set yourself there in that chair, Mr.  Jackson, and I'll
make my point the best way I know how, by showing you two prime ShawNee
specimens.  Just set down."

Jackson picked up the chair and moved it to the opposite side of the
room from Hooch.  It made something gnaw in Hooch's gut, the way Jackson
acted.  Men like Jackson were so upright and honestseeming, but Hooch
knew that there wasn't no such thing as a good man, just a man who
wasn't bought yet, or wasn't in deep enough trouble, or didn't have the
guts to reach out and take what he wanted.

That's all that virtue ever boiled down to, so far as Hooch ever saw in
his life.  But here was Jackson, putting on airs and calling for Bill
Harrison to arrest him!  Think of that, a stranger from Tennizy country
coming up here and waving around a warrant from an Appalachee judge, of
all things, which didn't have no more force in Wobbish country than if
it was written by the King of Ethiopia.  Well, Mr.  Jackson, it's a long
way home from here, and we'll just see if you don't have some kind of
accident along the way.

No, no, no, Hooch told himself silently.  Getting even don't amount to
nothing in this world.  Getting even only gets you behind.

The best revenge is to get rich enough to make them all call you sir,
that's how you get even with these boys.  No bushwhacking.  If you ever
get a name for bushwhacking, that's the end of you, Hooch Palmer.

So Hooch sat there and smiled, as Harrison called for his aide.

"Why don't you invite Lolla-Wossiky in here?  And while you're at it,
tell his brother he can come in, too."

Loila-Wossiky's brother-had to be the defiant Red who was standing up
against the wall.  Funny, how two peas from the same pod could grow up
so different.  .

Lolla-Wossiky came in fawning, smiling, looking quickly from one White
face to the next, wondering what they wanted, how he could make them
happy enough to reward him with whisky.  It was written all over him,
how thirsty he was, even though he was already so drunk he didn't walk
straight.  Or had he already drunk so much likker that he couldn't walk
straight even when he was sober?  Hooch wondered-but soon enough he knew
the answer.  Harrison reached into the bureau behind him and took out a
jug and a cup.  LollaWossiky watched the brown liquid splash into the
cup, his one eye so intense it was like he could taste the likker by
vision alone.  But he didn't take even a single step toward the cup.
Harrison reached out and set the cup on the table near the Red, but
still the man stood there, smiling, looking now at the cup, now at
Harrison, waiting, waiting.

Harrison turned to Jackson and smiled.  "Lolla-Wossiky is just about the
most civilized Red in the whole Wobbish country, Mr.  Jackson.  He never
takes things that don't belong to him.  He never speaks except when
spoken to.  He obeys and does whatever I tell him.

And all he ever asks in return is just a cup of liquid.  Doesn't even
have to be good likker.  Corn whisky or bad Spanish rum are just fine
with him, isn't that right, Lolla-Wossiky?"

"Very so right, Mr.  Excellency," said Lolla-Wossiky.  His speech was
surprisingly clear, for a Red.  Especially a drunken Red.

Hooch saw Jackson study the one-eyed Red with disgust.  Then the Tennizy
lawyer's gaze shifted to the door, where the tall, strong, defiant Red
was standing.  Hooch enjoyed watching Jackson's face.

From disgust, his expression plainly changed to anger.  Anger and, yes,
fear.  Oh, yes, you aren't fearless, Mr.  Jackson.  You know what
Lolia-Wossiky's brother is.  He's your enemy, and my enemy, the enemy of
every White man who ever wants to have this land, because sometime this
uppity Red is going to put his tommy-hawk in your head and peel off your
scalp real slow, and he won't sell it to no Frenchman, neither, Mr.
Jackson, he'll keep it and give it to his children, and say to them,
"This is the only good White man.  This is the only White man who
doesn't break his word.  This is what you do to White men."

Hooch knew it, Harrison knew it, and Jackson knew it.

That young buck by the door was death.  That young buck was White men
forced to live east of the mountains, all crammed into the old towns
with all their lawyers and professors and high-toned people who never
gave you room to breathe.  People like Jackson himself, in fact.

Hooch gave one snort of laughter at that idea.  Jackson was exactly the
sort of man that folks moved west to get away from.  How far west will I
have to go before the lawyers lose the trail and get left behind?

"I see you've noticed Ta-Kumsaw.  Lolia-Wossiky's older brother, and my
very, very dear friend.  Why, I've known that lad since before his
father died.  Look what a strong buck he's grown into!"

If Ta-Kumsaw noticed how he was being ridiculed, he showed no sign of
it. He looked at no person in the room.  Instead he looked out the
window on the wall behind the governor.  Didn't fool Hooch, though.

Hooch knew what he was watching, and had a pretty good idea what
Ta-Kumsaw was feeling, too.  These Reds, they took family real serious.

Ta-Kumsaw was secretly watching his brother, and if Lolla-Wossiky was
too likkered up to feel any shame, that just meant Ta-Kumsaw would feel
it all the more.

"Ta-Kumsaw," said Harrison.  "You see I've poured a drink for you.

Come, sit down and drink, and we can talk."

At Harrison's words, Lolla-Wossiky went rigid.  Was it possible that the
drink wasn't for him, after all?  But Ta-Kumsaw did not twitch, did not
show any sign that he heard.

"You see?" said Harrison to Jackson.  "Ta-Kumsaw isn't even civilized
enough to sit down and have a convivial drink with friends.

But his younger brother is civilized, isn't he?  Aren't you, Lolly?

I'm sorry I don't have a chair for you, my friend, but you can sit on
the floor under my table here, sit right at my feet, and drink this
rum."

"You are remarkable kind," said Lolla-Wossiky in that clear, precise
speech of his.  To Hooch's surprise, the one-eyed Red did not scramble
for the cup.  Instead he walked carefully, each step a labor of
precision, and took the cup between only slightly trembling hands.

Then he knelt down before Harrison's table and, still balancing the cup,
sank into a seated position, his legs crossed.

But he was still out in front of the table, not under it, and Harrison
pointed this out to him.  "I'd like you to sit under my table," said the
governor.  "I'd regard it as a great courtesy to me if you would."

So Lolla-Wossiky bent his head almost down into his lap and waddled on
his buttocks until he was under the table.  It was very hard for him to
drink in that position, since he couldn't lift his head straight up, let
alone tip it back to drain the cup.  But he managed anyway, drinking
carefully, rocking from one side to the other.

All this time, Ta-Kumsaw said nary a word.  Didn't even show that he saw
how his brother was being humiliated.  Oh, thought Hooch, oh, the fire
that burns in that boy's heart.  Harrison's taking a real risk here.
Besides, if he's Lolla-Wossiky's brother, he must know Harrison shot his
daddy during the Red uprisings back in the nineties sometime, when
General Wayne was fighting the French.  A man doesn't forget that kind
of thing, especially a Red man, and here Harrison was testing him,
testing him right to the limit.

"Now that everybody's comfortable," said Harrison, why don't you set
down and tell us what you came for, Ta-Kumsaw."

Ta-Kumsaw didn't sit.  Didn't close the door, didn't take a step farther
into the room.  "I speaking for ShawNee, Caska-Skeeaw, PeeOrawa,
Winny-Baygo."

"Now, Ta-Kumsaw, you know that you don't even speak for all the ShawNee,
and you sure don't speak for the others."

"All tribes who sign General Wayne's treaty." Ta-Kumsaw went on as if
Harrison hadn't said a thing.  "Treaty says Whites don't sell whisky to
Reds."

"That's right," said Harrison.  "And we're keeping that treaty."

Ta-Kumsaw didn't look at Hooch, but he lifted his hand and pointed at
him.  Hooch felt the gesture as if Ta-Kumsaw had actually touched him
with that finger.  It didn't make him mad this time, it plain scared
him.  He heard that some Reds had a come-hither so strong that didn't no
hex protect you, so they could lure you off into the woods alone and
slice you to bits with their knives, just to hear you scream.

That's what Hooch thought of, when he felt Ta-Kumsaw point to him with
hatred.

"Why are you pointing at my old friend Hooch Palmer?" asked Harrison.

"Oh, I reckon nobody likes me today," Hooch said.  He laughed, but it
didn't dispel his fear after all.

"He bring his flatboat of whisky," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Well, he brought a lot of things," said Harrison.  "But if he brought
whisky, it'll be delivered to the sutler here in the fort and not a drop
of it will be sold to the Reds, you can be sure.  We uphold that treaty,
Ta-Kumsaw, even though you Reds aren't keeping it too good lately.  It's
got so flatboats can't travel alone down the Ohio no more, my friend,
and if things don't let up, I reckon the army's going to have to take
some action."

"Burn a village?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.  "Shoot down our babies?

Our old people?  Our women?"

"Where do you get these ideas?" said Harrison.  He sounded downright
offended, even though Hooch knew right well that Ta-Kumsaw was
describing the typical army operation.

Hooch spoke right up, in fact.  "You Reds burn out helpless farmers in
their cabins and pioneers on their flatboats, don't you?  So why do you
figure your villages should be any safer, you tell me that!"

Ta-Kums aw still didn't look at him.  "English law says, Kill the man
who steals your land, you are not bad.  Kill a man to steal his land,
and you are very bad.  When we kill White farmers, we are not bad.

When you kill Red people who live here a thousand years, you are very
bad.  Treaty says, stay all east of My-Ammy River, but they don't stay,
and you help them."

"Mr.  Palmer here spoke out of turn," said Harrison.  "No matter what
you savages do to our people-torturing the men, raping the women,
carrying off the children to be slaves-we don't make war on the
helpless.  We are civilized, and so we behave in a civilized manner.

"This man will sell his whisky to Red men.  Make them lie in dirt like
worms.  He will give his whisky to Red women.  Make them weak like
bleeding deer, do all things he says."

"If he does, we will arrest him," said Harrison.  "We will try him and
punish him for breaking the law."

"If he does, you not will arrest him." said Ta-Kumsaw.  "You will share
pelts with him.  You will keep him safe."

"Don't call me a liar," said Harrison.

"Don't he," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"If you go around talking to White men like this, Ta-Kumsaw, old boy,
one of them's going to get real mad at you and blast your head off."

"Then I know you will arrest him.  I know you will try him and punish
him for breaking the law." Ta-Kumsaw said it without cracking a smile,
but Hooch had traded with the Reds enough to know their kind of joke.

Harrison nodded gravely.  It occurred to Hooch that Harrison might not
realize it was a joke.  He might think Ta-Kumsaw actually believed it.
But no, Harrison knew he and Ta-Kumsaw was lying to each other; and it
came into Hooch's mind that when both parties are lying and they both
know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same
as telling the truth.

What was really hilarious was that Jackson actually did believe all this
stuff.  "That's right," said the Tennizy lawyer.  "Rule of law is what
separates civilized men from savages.  Red men just aren't advanced
enough yet, and if you aren't willing to be subject to White man's law,
you'll just have to make way."

For the first time, Ta-Kumsaw looked one of them in the eye.  He stared
coldly at Jackson and said, "These men are hats.  They know what is
true, but they say it is not true.  You are not a liar.  You believe
what you say."

Jackson nodded gravely.  He looked so vain and upright and godly that
Hooch couldn't resist it, he hottened up the chair under Jackson just a
little, just enough that Jackson had to wiggle his butt.  That took off
a few layers of dignity.  But Jackson still kept his airs.  "I believe
what I say because I tell the truth."

"You say what you believe.  But still it is not true.  "What is your
name?"

"Andrew Jackson."

Ta-Kumsaw nodded.  "Hickory."

Jackson looked downright surprised and pleased that Ta-Kumsaw had heard
of him.  "Some folks call me that." Hooch hottened up his chair a little
more.

"Blue Jacket says, Hickory is a good man."

Jackson still had no idea why his chair was so uncomfortable, but it was
too much for him.  He popped right up, stepped away from the chair, kind
of shaking his legs with each step to cool himself off.

But still he kept talking with all the dignity in the world.  "I'm glad
Blue Jacket feels that way.  He's chief of the ShawNee down in Tennizy
country, isn't he?"

"Sometimes," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"What do you mean sometimes?" said Harrison.  "Either he's a chief or he
isn't."

"When he talks straight, he is chief," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Well, I'm glad to know he trusts me," said Jackson.  But his smile was
a little wan, because Hooch was busy hotting up the floor under his
feet, and unless old Hickory could fly, he wasn't going to be able to
get away from that.  Hooch didn't plan to torment him long.

Just until he saw Jackson take a couple of little hops, and then try to
explain why he was dancing right there in front of a young ShawNee
warrior and Governor William Henry Harrison.

Hooch's little game got spoiled, though, cause at that very moment,
Lolla-Wossiky toppled forward and rolled out from under the table.  He
had an idiotic grin on his face, and his eyes were closed.

"Blue Jacket!" he cried.  Hooch took note that drink had finally slurred
his speech.  "Hickory!" shouted the one-eyed Red.

"You are my enemy," said Ta-Kumsaw, ignoring his brother.

"You're wrong," said Harrison.  "I'm your friend.  Your enemy is up
north of here, in the town of Vigor Church.  Your enemy is- that
renegade Armor-of-God Weaver."

"Armor-of-God Weaver sells no whisky to Reds."

"Neither do I," said Harrison.  "But he's the one making maps of all the
country west of the Wobbish.  So he can parcel it up and sell it after
he's killed all the Reds."

Ta-Kumsaw paid no attention to Harrison's attempt to turn him against
his rival to the north.  "I come to warn you," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Warn me?" said Harrison.  "You, a ShawNee who doesn't speak for
anybody, you warn me, right here in my stockade, with a hundred soldiers
ready to shoot you down if I say the word?"

"Keep the treaty," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"We do keep the treaty!  It's you who always break the treaties!"

"Keep the treaty," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Or what?" asked Jackson.

"Or every Red west of the mountains will come together and cut you to
pieces."

Harrison leaned back his head and laughed and laughed.  Ta-Kumsaw showed
no expression.

"Every Red, Ta-Kumsaw?" asked Harrison.  "You mean, even Lolly here?
Even my pet ShawNee, my tame Red, even him?"

For the first time Ta-Kumsaw looked at his brother, who lay snoring on
the floor.  "The sun comes'up every day, White man.  But is it tame?
Rain falls down every time.  But is it tame?"

"Excuse meTa-Kumsaw, but this one-eyed drunk here is as tame as my
horse."

"Oh yes," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Put on the saddle.  Put on the bridle.

Get on and ride.  See where this tame Red goes.  Not where you want."

"Exactly where I want," said Harrison.  "Keep that in mind.  Your
brother is always within my reach.  And if you ever get out of line,
boy, I'll arrest him as your conspirator and hang him high.  Ta-Kumsaw
smiled thinly.  "You think so.  Lolla-Wossiky thinks so.

But he will learn to see with his other eye before you ever lay a hand
on him."

Then Ta-Kumsaw turned around and left the room.  Quietly, smoothly, not
stalking, not angry, not even closing the door behind him.  He moved
with grace, like an animal, like a very dangerous animal.  Hooch saw a
cougar once, years ago, when he was alone in the mountains.  That's what
Ta-Kumsaw was.  A killer cat.

Harrison's aide closed the door.

Harrison turned to Jackson and smiled.  "You see?" he said.

"What am I supposed to see, Mr.  Harrison?"

"Do I have to spell it out for you, Mr.  Jackson?

"I'm a lawyer.  I like things spelled out.  If you can spell."

"I Can't even read, " said Hooch cheerfully.

"YOU also can't keep your mouth shut," said Harrison.  "I'll spell it
out for you, Jackson.  You and your Tennizy boys, you talk about moving
the Reds west of the Mizzipy.  Now let's say we do that.  What are you
going to do, keep soldiers all the way up and down the river, watching
all day and all night?  They'll be back across this river whenever they
want, raiding, robbing, torturing, killing."

"I'm not a fool," said Jackson.  "It will take a great bloody war, but
when we get them across the river, they'll be broken.  And men like that
Ta-Kumsaw-they'll be dead or discredited."

"You think so?  Well, during that great bloody war you talk about, a lot
of White boys will die, and White women and children, too.  But I have a
better idea.  These Reds suck down likker like a calf sucks down milk
from his mama's tit.  Two years ago there was a thousand Pee-Ankashaw
living east of the My-Ammy River.  Then they started getting likkered
up, They stopped working, they stopped eating, they got so weak that the
first little sickness came through here, it wiped them out.  Just wiped
them out.  If there's a Pee-Ankashaw left alive here, I don't know about
it.  Same thing happened up north, to the Chippy-Wa, only it was French
traders done it to them.  And the best thing about likker is, it kills
off the Reds and not a White man dies."

Jackson rose slowly to his feet.  "I reckon I'll have to take three
baths when I get home," he said, "and even then I still won't feel
clean."

Hooch was delighted to see that Harrison was really mad.  He rose to his
feet and shouted at Jackson so loud that Hooch could feel his chair
shake.  "Don't get high and mighty with me, you hypocrite!  You want
them all dead, just like I do!  There's no difference between us."

Jackson stopped at the door and eyed the governor with disgust.

"The assassin, Mr.  Harrison, the poisoner, he can't see the difference
between himself and a soldier.  But the soldier can."

Unlike Ta-Kumsaw, Jackson was not above slamming the door.

Harrison sank back down onto his chair.  "Hooch, I've got to say, I
don't much like that fellow."

"Never mind," said Hooch.  "He's with you."

Harrison smiled slowly.  "I know.  When it comes to war, we'll all be
together.  Except for maybe that Redkisser up in Vigor Church."

"Even him," said Hooch.  "Once a war starts, the Reds won't be able to
tell one White man from another.  Then his people will start dying just
like ours.  Then Armor-of-God Weaver will fight."

"Yeah, well, if Jackson and Weaver would hkker up their Reds the way
we're doing ours, there wouldn't have to be a war."

Hooch aimed a mouthful at the spittoon and didn't miss by much.

"That Red, that Ta-Kumsaw."

What about him?" asked Harrison.

"He worries me."

"Not me," said Harrison.  "I've got his brother here passed out on my
floor.  Ta-Kumsaw won't do nothing."

"When he pointed at me, I felt his finger touch me from across the room.
I think he's maybe got a come-hither.  Or a far-touch.  I think he's
dangerous."

"You don't believe in all that hexery, do you, Hooch?  You're such an
educated man, I thought you were above that kind of superstition,"

"I'm not and neither are you, Bill Harrison.  You had a doodlebiqg tell
you where firm ground was so you could build this stockade, and when
your first wife had her babies, you had a torch in to see how the baby
was laying in the womb."

"I warn you," said Harrison, "to make no more comment about my wife."

"Which one? The hot or the cold?"

Harrison swore a good long string of oaths at that.  Oh, Hooch was
delighted, Hooch was pleased.  He had such knack for hotting things up,
yes sir, and it was more fun hotting up a man's temper, because there
wasn't no flame then, just a lot of steam, a lot of hot air.

Well, Hooch let old Bill Harrison jaw on for a while.  Then he smiled
and raised his hands like he was surrendering.  '4Now, you know I didn't
mean no harm, Bill.  I just didn't know as how you got so prissy these
days.  I figured we both know where babies grow, how they got in there,
and how they come out, and your women don't do it any different than
mine.  And when she's lying there screaming, you know you've got a
midwife there who knows how to cast a sleep on her, or do a pain-away,
and when the baby's slow to come you've got a torch telling where it
lays.  And so you listen to me, Bill Harrison.

That Ta-Kumsaw, he's got some kind of knack in him, some kind of power.
He's more than he seems."

"Is he now, Hooch?  Well maybe he is and maybe he ain't.  But he said
Lolla-Wossiky would see with his other eye before I laid a hand on him,
and it won't be long before I prove that he's no prophet "Speaking of
old one-eye, here, he's starting to fart something dreadful."

Harrison called for his aide.  "Send in Corporal Withers and four
soldiers, at once."

Hooch admired the way Harrison kept military discipline.  It wasn't
thirty seconds before the soldiers were there, Corporal Withers saluting
and saying, "Yes, sir, General Harrison."

"Have three of your men carry this animal Out to the stable for me.

Corporal Withers obeyed instantly, pausing only to say, "Yes sir,
General Harrison.  General Harrison.  Hooch smiled.  He knew that
Harrison's only CommiSsion was as a colonel under General Wayne during
the last French war, and he didn't amount to much even then.  General.

Governor.  What a pompousBut Harrison was talking to Withers again, and
looking at Hooch as he did so.  "And now you and Private Dickey will
kindly arrest Mr.  Palmer here and lock him up."

"Arrest me!" shouted Hooch.  "What are you talking about!"

i "He carries several weapons, so you'll have to search him thoroughly,"
said Harrison.  "I suggest stripping him here before you take him to the
lock-up, and leave him stripped.  Don't want this slippery old boy to
get away."

"What are you arresting me for!"

"Why, we have a warrant for your arrest for unpaid debts," said
Harrison.  "And you've also been accused of selling whisky to Reds.

We'll naturally have to seize all your assets-those suspicious-looking
kegs my boys've been hauling into the stockade all day-and selling  them
for enough, and we them to make good the debt.  If we can se can clear
you of those ugly charges of likkering up the Reds, why, we'll let you
go."

Then Harrison walked on out of his office.  Hooch cussed and spit and
mother, but Private and made remarks about Harrison's wife Dickey was
holding real tight to a musket, and that musket had a bayonet attached
to the business end; so Hooch submitted to the stripping and the search.
It got worse, though, and he cussed again when Withers marched him right
across the stockade, stark naked, and didn't give him so much as a
blanket when he locked him into a storage room.  A storage room filled
with empty kegs from the last shipment of likker.

He sat in that lock-up room for two days before his trial, and for the
first while there was murder in his heart.  He had a lot of ideas for
revenge, you can bet.  He thought of setting fire to the lace curtains
in Harrison's house, or burning the shed where the whisky was kept,
starting all kinds of fire.  Cause what good is it to be a spark if you
can't use it to get even with folks who pretend to be your friends and
then lock you into jail?

But he didn't start no fires, because Hooch was no fool.  Partly, he
knew that if a fire once got started anywhere in the stockade, there was
a good chance it'd spread from one end to the other inside half an hour.
And there was a good chance that while everybody's rushing around to
save their wives and children and gunpowder and likker, they might not
remember about one whisky trader locked up in a storage room.

Hooch didn't hanker to die in a fire of his own setting -that wasn't no
kind of vengeance.  Time enough to start fires when he had a noose
around his neck someday, but he wasn't going to risk burning to death
just to get even over something like this.

But the main reason he didn't start a fire wasn't fear, it was plain
business sense.  Harrison was doing this to show Hooch that he didn't
like the way Hooch delayed shipments of likker to jack up the price.

Harrison was showing him that he had real power, and all Hooch had was
money.  Well, let Harrison play at being a powerful man.  Hooch knew
some things, too.  He knew that someday the Wobbish country would
petition the U.S.  Congress in Philadelphia to become a state.

And when it did, a certain William Henry Harrison would have his little
heart set on being governor.  And Hooch had seen enough elections back
in Suskwahenny and Pennsylvania and Appalachee to know that you can't
get votes without silver dollars to pass around.

Hooch would have those silver dollars.  And when the time came, he might
pass around those silver dollars to Harrison voters; and then again he
might not.  He just might not.  He might help another man sit in the
governor's mansion, someday when Carthage was a real city and Wobbish
was a real state, and then Harrison would have to sit there the rest of
his life and remember what it was like to be able to lock people up, and
he would grind his teeth in anger at how men like Hooch took all that
away from him.

That's how Hooch kept himself entertained, sitting in that lock-up room
for two long days and nights.

Then they hauled him out and brought him into court-unshaven, dirty, his
hair wild, and his clothes all wrinkled up.  General Harrison was the
judge, the jury was all in uniform, and the defense attorney was-Andrew
Jackson!  It was plain Governor Bill was trying to make Hooch get mad
and start in ranting, but Hooch wasn't born yesterday.  He knew that
whatever Harrison had in mind, it wouldn't do no good to yell about it.
Just sit tight and Put up with it.

It took only a few minutes.

Hooch listened with a straight face as a young lieutenant testified that
all Hooch's whisky had been sold to the sutler at exactly the price it
sold for last time.  According to the legal papers, Hooch didn't make a
penny more from having kept them waiting four months between shipments.
Well, thought Hooch, that's fair enough, Harrison's letting me know how
he wants things run.  So he didn't say a word.  Harrison looked as merry
as you please, behind his magisterial solemnity.  Enjoy yourself,
thought Hooch.  You can't make me mad.

But he could, after all.  They took 220 dollars right off the top and
handed it over to Andrew Jackson right there in court.  Counted out
eleven gold twenty-dollar coins.  That caused Hooch physical pain, to
see that fiery metal dropping into Jackson's hands.  He couldn't keep
his silence then.  But he did manage to keep his voice low and
mildsounding.  "It don't seem regular to me," he said, "to have the
plaintiff acting as defense attorney."

"Oh, he's not your defense attorney on the debt charges," said His Honor
Judge Harrison.  "He's just your defense attorney on the likker
charges." Then Harrison grinned and gaveled that matter closed.

The likker business didn't take much longer.  Jackson carefully
presented all the same invoices and receipts to prove that every keg of
whisky was sold to the sutler of Carthage Fort, and not a speck of it to
any Reds.  "Though I will say," said Jackson, "that the amount of whisky
represented by these receipts seems like enough for three years for an
army ten times this size."

"We've got a bunch of hard-drinking soldiers," said Judge Harrison. "And
I reckon that likker won't last six months.  But not a drop to the Reds,
Mr.  Jackson, you may be sure!"

Then he dismissed all charges against Hooch Palmer, alias Ulysses Brock.
"But let this be a lesson to you, Mr.  Pahner," said Harrison in his
best judicial voice.  "Justice on the frontier is swift and sure.  Se e
to it you pay your debts.  And avoid even the appearance of evil."

"Sure enough," said Hooch cheerfully.  Harrison had rolled him over
good, but everything had worked out fine.  Oh, the 220 dollars bothered
him, and so did the two days in jail, but Harrison didn't mean for Hooch
to suffer much.  Because what Jackson didn't know, and no one else saw
fit to mention, was that Hooch Palmer happened to have the contract as
sutler for the U.S.  Army in Wobbish Territory.

All those documents that proved he hadn't sold the likker to the Reds
really showed that he sold the likker to himself-and at a profit, too.

Now Jackson would head on home and Hooch would settle down in the
sutler's store, selling likker to the Reds at extortionate prices,
splitting the profits with Governor Bill and watching the Reds die like
flies.  Harrison had played his little joke on Hooch, right enough, but
he'd played an even bigger one on old Hickory.

Hooch made sure to be at the wharf when they ferried Jackson back across
the Ohio.  Jackson had brought along two big old mountain boys with
rifles, no less.  Hooch took note that one of them looked to be half Red
himself, probably a Cherriky half-breed-there was lots of that kind of
thing in Appalachee, White men actually marrying squaws like as if they
was real women.  And both those rifles had "Eli Whitney" stamped on the
barrel, which meant they was made in the state of Irrakwa, where this
Whitney fellow set up shop making guns so fast he made the price drop;
and the story was that all his workmen was women, Irrakwa squaws, if you
can believe it.  Jackson could talk all he wanted about pushing the Reds
west of the Mizzipy, but it was already too late.  Ben Franklin did it,
by letting the Irrakwa have their own state up north, and Tom Jefferson
made it worse by letting the Cherriky be full voting citizens in
Appalachee when they fought their revolution against the King.  Treat
them Reds like citizens and they start to figure they got the same
rights as a White man.  There was no way to have an Orderly society if
that sort of thing caught on.  Why, next thing you know them Blacks'd
start trying to get out of being slaves, and first thing you know you'd
sit down at the bar in a saloon and you'd look to your left and there'd
be a Red, and you'd look to your right and there'd be a Black, and that
was just plain against nature.

There went Jackson, thinking he was going to save the White man from the
Red, when he was traveling with a half-breed and toting Red-made rifles.
Worst of all, Jackson had eleven gold coins in his saddle pouch, coins
that properly belonged to Hooch Palmer.  It made Hooch so mad he
couldn't think straight.

So Hooch hotted up that saddle pouch, right where the metal pin held it
onto the saddle.  He could feel it from here, the leather charring,
turning ash-black and stiff around that pin.  Pretty soon, as the horse
walked along, that bag would drop right off.  But since they was likely
to notice it, Hooch figured he wouldn't stop with the pouch.

He hotted up a whole lot of other places on that saddle, and on the
other men's saddles, too.  When they reached the other shore they
mounted up and rode off, but Hooch knew they'd be riding bareback before
they got back to Nashville.  He most sincerely hoped that Jackson's
saddle would break in such a way and at such a time that old Hickory
would land on his butt or maybe even break his arm.  Just thinking about
the prospect made Hooch pretty cheerful.  Every now and then it was kind
of fun to be a spark.  Take some Pompous holy-faced lawyer down a peg.

Truth is, an honest man like Andrew Jackson just wasn't no match for a
couple of scoundrels like Bill Harrison and Hooch Palmer.  it was just a
crying shame that the army didn't give no medals to soldiers who
likkered their enemies to death instead of shooting them.

Cause if they did, Harrison and Palmer would both be heroes, Hooch knew
that for sure.

As it was, Hooch reckoned Harrison would find a way to make himself a
hero out of all this anyway, while Hooch would end up with nothing but
money.  Well, that's how it goes, thought Hooch.  Some people get the
fame, and some people get the money.  But I don't mind, as long as I'm
not one of the people who end up with nothing at all.  I sure never want
to be one of them.  And if I am, they're sure going to be sorry.

Ta-KUmsaw

While Hooch was watching Jackson cross the river, Ta-KUmsaw watched the
White whisky trader and knew what he did.  So did any other Red man who
cared to watch-sober Red man, anyway.  White man does a lot of things
Red man don't understand, but when he fiddle with fire, water, earth,
and air, he can't hide it from a Red manTa -Kumsaw didn't see the saddle
leather burn on Jackson's horse.

He didn't feel the heat.  What he saw was like a stirring, a tiny whirl
wind, sucking his attention out across the water.  A twisting in the
smoothness of the land.  Most Red men couldn't feel such things as keen
asTa-Kumsaw.  Ta-Kumsaw's little brother, Lolla-Wossiky, was the only
one Ta-Kumsaw ever knew who felt it more.  Very much more.  He knew all
those whirlpools, those eddies in the stream.  TaKumsaw remembered their
father, Pucky-Shinwa, he spoke of LollaWossiky, that he would be shaman,
and Ta-Kumsaw would be warleader.

That was before Lying-Mouth Harrison shot Pucky-Shinwa right before
Lolla-Wossiky's eyes.  Ta-Kumsaw was off hunting that day, four-hands
walk to the north, but he felt the murder like a gun fired right behind
him.  When a White man laid a hex or a curse or cast a doodlebug, it
felt toTa-Kumsaw like an itch under his skin, but when a White man
killed, it was like a knife stabbing.

He was with another brother, Methowa-Tasky, and he called to him.

"Did you feel it?"

Methowa-Tasky's eyes went wide.  He had not.  But even then, even at
that age-not yet thirteen-Ta-Kumsaw had no doubt of himself.

He felt it.  It was true.  A murder had been done, and he must go to the
dying man.

He led the way, running through the forest.  Like all Red men in the old
days, his harmony with the woodland was complete.  He did not have to
think about where he placed his feet; he knew that the twigs under his
feet would soften and bend, the leaves would moisten and not rustle, the
branches he brushed aside would go back quick to their right place and
leave no sign he passed.  Some White men prided themselves that they
could move as quiet as a Red, and in truth some of them could-but they
did it by moving slow, careful, watching the ground, stepping around
bushes.  They never knew how little thought a Red man took for making no
sound, for leaving no trace.

What Ta-Kumsaw thought of was not his steps, not himself at all.

It was the green life of the woodland all around him, and in the heart
of it, before his face, the black whirlpool sucking him downward,
stronger, faster, toward the place where the living green was torn open
like a wound to let a murder through.  Long before they got there, even
Methowa -Tasky could feel it.  There on the ground lies their father, a
bullet through his face.  And by him, silent and unseeing, stands
Lolla-Wossiky, ten years old.

Ta-Kumsaw carried his father's body home across his shoulders, like a
deer.  Methowa-Tasky led Lolla-Wossiky by the hand, for otherwise the
boy would not move.  Mother greeted them with great wails of grief, for
she also felt the death, but did not know it was her own husband until
her sons brought him back.  Mother tied her husband's corpse
toTa-Kumsaw's back; then Ta-Kumsaw climbed the tallest tree, untied his
father's corpse from his back, and bound it to the highest branch he
could reach.

It would have been very bad if he had climbed beyond his strength, and
his father's body had fallen from his grasp.  But Ta-Kumsaw did not
climb beyond his strength.  He tied his father to a branch so high the
sun touched his father's face all day.  The birds and insects would eat
of him; the sun and air would dry him; the rain would wash the last of
him downward to the earth.  This was how Ta-Kumsaw gave his father back
to the land.

But what could they do with Lolla-Wossiky?  He said nothing, he wouldn't
eat unless someone fed him, and if you didn't take his hand and lead
him, he would stay in one place forever.  Mother was frightened at what
had happened to her son.  Mother loved Ta-Kumsaw very much, more than
any other mother in the tribe loved any other son; but even so, she
loved Lolla-Wossiky more.  Many times she told them all how baby
Lolla-Wossiky cried the first time the air grew bitter cold each winter.
She could never get him to stop, no matter how she covered him with
bearskins and buffalo robes.  Then one winter he was old enough to talk,
and he told her why he cried.  "All the bees are dying," he said.  That
was Loila-Wossiky, the only ShawNee who ever felt the death of bees.

That was the boy standing beside his father when Colonel Bill Harrison
shot him dead.  If Ta-Kumsaw felt that murder like a knife wound, half a
day's journey away, what did Lolla-Wossiky feel, standing so close, and
already so sensitive?  If he cried for the death of bees in winter, what
did he feel when a White man murdered his father before his eyes?

After a few years, Lolla-Wossiky finally began to speak again, but the
fire was gone from his eyes, and he was careless.  He put his own eye
out by accident, because he tripped and fell on the short jagged stump
of a broken bush.  Tripped and fell!  What Red man ever did that?

It was like Loila-Wossiky lost all feeling for the land; he was dull as
a White man.

Or maybe, Ta-Kumsaw thought, maybe the sound of that ancient gunshot
still rings in his head so loud he can't hear anything else now; maybe
that old pain is still so sharp that he can't feel the tickling of the
living world.  Pain all the time till the first taste of whisky showed
Lolla-Wossiky how to take away the sharp edge of it.

That was why Ta-Kumsaw never beat Lolla-Wossiky for ering, though he
would beat any other ShawNee, even his brothers, even an old man, if he
found him with the White man's poison in his hand.

But the White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and
felt.  The White man brought death and emptiness to this place.

The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings
with many lifetimes of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will
you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe?  Hack and cut and
chop and burn, that was the White man's way.  Take from the forest, take
from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man
killed animals he didn't need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a
bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig,
the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge.  He never felt
the balance of the land at all.

No wonder the land hated the White man!  No wonder all the natural
things of the land rebelled against his step: crackling underfoot,
bending the wrong way, shouting out to the Red man, Here was where the
enemy stood!  Here came the intruder, through these bushes, up this
hill!  The White man joked that Reds could even track a man on water,
then laughed as if it wasn't true.  But it was true, for when a White
man passed along a river or a lake, it bubbled and foamed and rippled
loud for hours after he had passed.

Now Hooch Palmer, poison-seller, sly killer, now he stands making his
silly fire on another White man's saddles, thinking no one knows.

These White men with their weak little knacks.  These White men with
their hexes and their wardings.  Didn't they know their hexes only
fended off unnatural things?  If a thief comes, knowing he does wrong,
then a good strong fending hex makes his fear grow till he cries out and
runs away.  But the Red man never is a thief.  The Red man belongs
wherever he is in this land.  To him the hex is just a cold place, a
stirring in the air, and nothing more.  To him a knack is like a fly,
buzz buzz buzz.  Far above this fly, the power of the living land is a
hundred hawks, watching, circling.

Ta-Kumsaw watched Hooch turn away, return to the fort.  Soon Hooch sells
his poison in earnest.  Most of the Red men gathered here will be drunk.
Ta-Kumsaw will stay, keeping watch.  He does not have to speak to
anyone.  They only see him, and those with any pride left will turn away
without likkering.  Ta-Kumsaw is not a chief yet.

But Ta-Kumsaw is not to be ignored.  Ta-Kumsaw is the pride of the
ShawNee.  All other Red men of every tribe must measure themselves
against him.  Whisky-Reds are very small inside when they see this tall
strong Red man.

He walked to the place where Hooch had stood, and let his calm replace
the twisting Hooch put there.  Soon the buzzing, furious insects
quieted.  The smell of the likkery man settled.  Again the water lapped
the shore with accidental song.

How easy to heal the land after the White man passes.  If all the White
men left today, by tomorrow the land would be at rest, and in a year it
would not show any sign the White man ever came.  Even the ruins of the
White man's buildings would be part of the land again, making homes for
small animals, crumbling in the grip of the hungering yin es.  White
man's metal would be rust; White man's stone work would be low hills and
small caves; White man's murders would be wistful, beautiful notes in
the song of the redbird-for the redbird remembered everything, turning
it into goodness when it could.

All day Ta-Kumsaw stood outside the fort, watching Red men go in to buy
their poison.  Men and women from every tribe-Wee-Aw and Kicky-Poo,
Potty-Wottamee and Chippy-Wa, Winny-Baygo and Pee-Orawa-they went in
carrying pelts or baskets and came out with no more than cups or jugs of
likker, and sometimes with nothing more than what they already had in
their bellies.  Ta-Kumsaw said nothing, but he could feel how the Reds
who drank this poison were cut off from the land.

They did not twist the green of life the way the White man did; rather
it was as if they did not exist at all.  The Red man who drank whisky
was already dead, as far as the land knew.

No, not even dead, for they give nothing back to the land at all.

I stand here to watch them be ghosts, thought Ta-Kumsaw, not dead and
not alive.  He said this only inside his head, but the land felt his
grief, and the breeze answered him by weeping through the leaves.

Come dusk, a redbird walks on the dirt in front of Ta-Kumsaw.

Tell me a story, says the redbird in its silent way, its eyes cocked
upward at the silent Red man.

You know my story before I tell it, says Ta-Kumsaw silently.  You feel
my tears before I shed them.  You taste my blood before it is spilled.

Why do you grieve for Red men who are not of the ShawNee?

Before the White man came, says Ta-Kumsaw silently, we did not see that
all Red men were alike, brothers of the land, because we thought all
creatures were this way; so we quarreled with other Red men the way the
bear quarrels with the cougar, the way the muskrat scolds the beaver.
Then the White man came, and I saw that all Red men are like twins
compared to the White man.

What is the White man?  What does he do?

The White man is like a human being, but he crushes all other living
things under his feet.

Then why, Ta-Kumsaw, when I look into your heart, why is it that you do
not wish to hurt the White man, that you do not wish to kill the White
man?

The White man doesn't know the evil that he does.  The White man doesn't
feel the peace of the land, so how can he tell the little deaths he
makes?  I can't blame the White man.  But I can't let him stay.  So when
I make him leave this land, I won't hate him.

If you are free of hate, Ta-Kumsaw, you will surely drive the White man
out.

I'll cause him no more pain than it takes to make him go away.

The redbird nods.  Once, twice, three times, four.  It flutters up to a
branch as high asTa-Kumsaw's head.  It sings a new song.  In this song
Ta-kumsaw hears no words; but he hears his own story being told.

From now on, his story is in the song of every redbird in the land, for
what one redbird knows, all remember.

Whoever watched Ta-Kumsaw all that time had no idea of what he said and
saw and heard.  Ta-Kumsaw's face showed nothing.  He stood where he had
been standing; a redbird landed near him, stayed aw i e, sang, and went
away.

Yet this moment turned Ta-Kumsaw's life; he knew it right away.

Until this day he had been a young man.  His strength and calm and
courage were admired, but he spoke only as any ShawNee could speak, and
having spoken, he then kept still and older men decided.

Now he would decide for himself, like a true chief, like a war chief.

Not a chief of the ShawNee, or even a chief of the Red men of this north
country, but rather the chief of all Red tribes in the war against the
White man.  He knew for many years that such a war must come; but until
this moment he had thought that it would be another man, a chief like
Cornstalk, Blackfish, or even a Cree-Ek or Chok-Taw from the south.  But
the redbird came to him, Ta-Kumsaw, and put him in the song.  Now
wherever Ta-Kumsaw went throughout the land that knew the redbird song,
his name would be well known to the wisest Red men.

He was war chief of all Red men who loved the land; the land had chosen
him.

As he stood there near the bank of the Ohio, he felt like he was the
face of the land.  The fire of the sun, the breath of the air, the
strength of the earth, the speed of the water, all reached into him and
looked out on the world through his eyes.  I am the land; I am the hands
and feet and mouth and voice of the land as it struggles to rid itself
of the White man.

These were his thoughts.

He stood there until it was fully dark.  The other Red men had returned
to their lodges or their cabins to sleep-or to lie drunken and as good
as dead till morning.  Ta-Kumsaw came out of his redbird trance and
heard laughter from the Red village, laughter and singing from the White
soldiers inside the fort.

Ta-Kumsaw walked away from the place where he had stood so many hours.
His legs were stiff, but he did not stagger; he forced his legs to move
smoothly, and the ground yielded gently under his feet.

The White man had to wear rough heavy boots to walk far in this land,
because the dirt scuffed and tore at his feet; the Red man could wear
the same moccasins for years, because the land was gentle and welcomed
his step.  As he moved, Ta-Kumsaw felt soil, wind, river, and lightning
all moving with him; the land within him, all things living, and he the
hands and feet and face of the land.

There was a shout inside the fort.  And more shouts: "Thief!

Thief!"

"Stop him!"

"He's got a keg!"

Curses, howls.  Then the worst sound: a gunshot.  Ta-Kumsaw waited for
the sting of death.  It didn't come.

A shadowy man rose above the parapet.  Whatever man it was, he balanced
a keg on his shoulders.  For a moment he teetered on the very peak of
the stockade poles, then jumped down.  Ta-Kumsaw knew it was a Red man
because he could jump from three manheights, holding a heavy keg, and
make almost no sound upon landing.

On purpose maybe, or maybe not, the fleeing thief ran straight to
Ta-Kumsaw and stopped before him.  Ta-Kumsaw looked down.  By starlight
he knew the man.

"Lolla-Wossiky," he said.

"Got a keg," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"I should break that keg," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Lolla-Wossiky cocked his head like the redbird and regarded his brother.
"Then I'd have to take another."

The White men chasing LoUa-Wossiky came to the gate, clamoring for the
guard to open it.  I have to remember this, thought Ta-Kumsaw.

This is a way to get them to open the gate for me.  Even as he thought
that, however, he also put his arm around his brother, keg and all.

Ta-Kumsaw felt the green land like a second heartbeat, strong within
him, and as he held his brother, the same power of the land flowed into
Lolla-Wossiky.  Ta-Kumsaw heard him gasp.

The Whites ran out of the fort.  Even though Ta-Kumsaw and Lolla-Wossiky
stood in the open, in plain sight, the White soldiers didn't see them.
Or no, they saw,- they simply did not notice the two ShawNee.  They ran
past, shouting and firing randomly into the woods.

They gathered near the brothers, so close they could have lifted an arm
and touched them.  But they did not lift their arms; they did not touch
the Red men.

After a while the Whites gave up the search and returned to the fort,
cursing and muttering.

"It was that one-eye Red."

"The ShawNee drunk."

"Lolla-Wossiky."

"If I find him, I'll kill him."

"Hang the thieving devil."

They said these things, and there was Lolla-Wossiky, not a stone's throw
from them, holding the keg on his shoulder.

When the last White man was inside the fort, Lolla-Wossiky giggled.

"You laugh with the White man's poison on your shoulders," said
Ta-Kumsaw.

"I laugh with my brother's arm across my back," answered LoilaWossiky.

"Leave that whisky, Brother, and come with me," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"The redbird heard my story, and remembers me in her song."

"Then I will listen to that song and be glad all my life," said
LollaWossiky.

"The land is with me, Brother.  I'm the face of the land, the land is my
breath and blood."

"Then I will hear your heartbeat in the pulse of the wind," said
Lolia-Wossiky.

"I will drive the White man back into the sea," said Ta-Kumsaw.

In answer, Lolla-Wossiky began to weep; not drunken weeping, but the
dry, heavy sobs of a man burdened down with grief.  Ta-Kumsaw tried to
tighten his embrace, but his brother pushed him away and staggered off,
still carrying the keg, into the darkness and the trees.

Ta-Kumsaw did not follow him.  He knew why his brother was grieving:
because the land had filled Ta-Kumsaw with power, power enough to stand
among the drunken Whites and seem as invisible as a tree.  And
Lolla-Wossiky knew that by rights whatever power TaKumsaw had,
Lolla-Wossiky should have had ten times that power.

But the White man had stolen it from Lolla-Wossiky with murders and
likker, until Lolia-Wossiky wasn't man enough to have the redbird learn
his song or the land fill up his heart.

Never mind, never mind, never mind.

The land has chosen me to be its voice, and so I must begin to speak.  I
will no longer stay here, trying to shame the wretched drunks who have
already been killed by their thirst for the White man's poison.  I will
give no more warnings to White liars.  I will go to the Reds who are
still alive, still men, and gather them together.  As one great people
we will drive the White'man back across the sea.

De Maurepas

Frederic, the young Comte de Maurepas, and Gilbert, the aging Marquis de
La Fayette, stood together at the railing of the canal barge, looking
out across Lake Irrakwa.  The sail of the Marie-Philippe was plainly
visible now; they had been watching for hours as it came closer across
this least and lowest of the Great Lakes.

Frederic could not remember when he had last been so humiliated on
behalf of his nation.  Perhaps the time when Cardinal What's-hisname had
tried to bribe Queen Marie-Antoinette.  Oh but of course Frederic had
only been a boy, then, a mere twenty-five years old, callow and young,
without experience of the world.  He had thought that no greater
humiliation could come to France than to have it known that a cardinal
would actually believe that the Queen could be bribed with a diamond
necklace.  Or bribed at all, for that matter.

Now, of course, he understood that the real humiliation was that a
French cardinal would be so stupid as to suppose that bribing the Queen
was worth doing; the most she could do was influence the King, and since
old King Louis never influenced anybody, there you were.

Personal humiliation was painful.  Humiliation of one's family was much
worse.  Humiliation of one's social standing was agony to bear.

But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human
misenes.

Now here he stood on a miserable canal barge, an American canal barge,
tied at the verge of an American canal, waiting to greet a French
general.  Why wasn't it a French canal?  Why hadn't the French been the
first to engineer those clever locks and build a canal around the
Canadian side of the falls?

"Don't fume, my dear Frederic," murmured La Fayette.

"I'm not fuming, my dear Gilbert."

"Snorting, then.  You keep snorting."

"Sniffing.  I have a cold." Canada certainly was a repository for the
dregs of French society, Frederic thought for the thousandth time.

Even the nobility that ended up here was embarrassing.  This Marquis de
La Fayette, a member of the-no, a founder of the Club of the Feuillants,
which was almost the same as saying he was a declared traitor to King
Charles.  Democratic twaddle.  Might as well be a Jacobin like that
terrorist Robespierre.  Of course they exiled La Fayette to Canada,
where he could do little harm.  Little harm, that is, except to
humiliate France in this unseemly manner"Our new general has brought
several staff officers with him," said La Fayette, "and all their
luggage.  It makes no sense to disembark and make the miserable portage
in wagons and carriages, when it can all be carried by water.

It will give us a chance to become acquainted."

Since La Fayette, in his normal crude way (disgrace to the
aristocracy!), insisted on being blunt about the matter at hand,
Frederic would have to stoop to his level and speak just as plainly.

"A French general should not have to travel on foreign soil to reach his
posting!"

"But my dear Frederic, he'll never set foot on American soil, now, will
he!  Just boat to boat, on water all the way."

La Fayette's simper was maddening.  To make light of this smudge on the
honor of France.  Why, oh, why couldn't Frederic's father have remained
in favor with the king just a little longer, so Frederic could have
stayed in France long enough to win promotion to some elegant posting,
like Lord of the Italian March or somethingid they have such a
posting?-anyway, somewhere with decent food and music and dancing and
theatre-ah, Moliere!  In Europe, where he could face a civilized enemy
like the Austrians or the Prussians or eventhough it stretched the
meaning of the word civilized-the English.

Instead here he was, trapped forever-unless Father wormed his way back
into the King's favor-facing a constant ragtag invasion of miserable
uneducated Englishmen, the worst, the utter dregs of English society,
not to mention the Dutch and Swedes and Germansh, it did not bear
thinking about.  And even worse were the allies!  Tribes of Reds who
weren't even heretics, let alone Christians-they were heathen, and half
the military operation in Detroit consisted of buying those hideous
bloody trophies"Why, my dear Frederic, you really are taking a chill,"
said La Fayette.

"Not a bit."

"You shivered."

"I shuddered."

"You must stop pouting and make the best of this.  The Irrakwa have been
very cooperative.  They provided us with the governor's own barge, free
of charge, as a gesture of goodwill."

"The governor!  The governor?  You mean that fat hideous redskinned
heathen woman?"

"She can't help her red skin, and she isn't heathen.  In fact she's a
Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder."

"Who can keep track of these English heresies?"

"I think there's something quite elegant about it.  A woman as governor
of the state of Irrakwa, and a Red at that, accepted as the equal of the
governors of Suskwahenny, Pennsylvania, New Amsterdam, New Sweden, New
Orange, New Holland-"

"I think sometimes you prefer those nasty little United States to your
own native land."

"I am a Frenchman to the heart," said La Fayette mildly.  "But I admire
the American spirit of egalitarianism."

Egalitarianism again.  The Marquis de La Fayette was like a pianoforte
that had but a single key.  "You forget that our enemy in Detroit is
American."

"You forget that our enemy is the horde of illegal squatters, no matter
what nation they come from, who have settled in the Red Reserve."

"That's a quibble.  They're all Americans.  They all pass through New
Amsterdam or Philadelphia on their way west.  So you encourage them here
in the east-they all know how much you admire their anti-monarchist
philosophy-and then I have to pay for their scalps when the Reds
massacre them out west."

"Now, now, Frederic.  Even in humor, you mustn't accuse me of being
anti-monarchist.  M.  Guillotin's clever meat-slicing machine awaits
anyone convicted of that.  "

"Oh, do be serious, Gilbert.

They'd never use it against a marquis.

They don't cut off the heads of aristocrats who propound these insane
democratic ideas.  They just send them to Quebec." Frederic smiled. He
couldn't resist driving home the nail.  "The ones they really despise,
they send to Niagara."

"Then what in the world did you do-to get sent to Detroit?" murmured La
Fayette.

More humiliation.  Would it never end?

The Marie-Philippe was near enough for them to see individual sailors
and hear them shouting as the ship made its final tack into Port
Irrakwa.  The lowest of the Great Lakes, Irrakwa was the only one that
could be visited by oceangoing vessels-the Niagara Falls saw to that. In
the last three years, since the Irrakwa finished their canal, almost all
the shipping that needed to be transported past the falls into Lake
Canada came to the American shore and was taken up the Niagara Canal.
The French portage towns were dying; an embarrassing number of Frenchmen
had moved across the lake to live on the American side, where the
Irrakwa were only too happy to put them to work.  And the Marquis de La
Fayette, supposedly the supreme governor of all Canada south and west of
Quebec, didn't seem to mind at all.  If Frederic's father ever got back
into King Charles's good graces, Frederic would see to it that La
Fayette was the first aristocrat to feel the Guillotin knife.  What he
had done here in Canada was plain treason.

As if he could read Frederic's mind, La Fayette patted his shoulder and
said, "Very soon, now, just be patient." For a moment Frederic thought,
insanely, that La Fayette was calmly prophesying his own execution for
treason.

But La Fayette was merely talking about the fact that at last the
Marie-Philippe was near enough to heave a line to the wharf.  The
Irrakwa stevedores caught the line and affixed it to the windlass, and
then chanted in their unspeakable language as they towed the ship close
in.  As soon as it was in place, they began unloading cargo on the one
side, and passengers on the other.

"Isn't that ingenious, how they speed the transfer of cargo," said La
Fayette.  "Unload it on those heavy cars, which sit on rails-rails, just
like mining carts!-and then the horses tow it right up here, smooth and
easy as you please.  On rails you can carry a much heavier load than on
regular wagons, you know.  Stephenson explained it to me the last time I
was here.  It's because you don't have to steer." On and on he
blathered.  Sure enough, within moments he was talking again about
Stephenson's steam engine, which La Fayette was convinced would replace
the horse.  He had built some in England or Scotland or somewhere, but
now he was in America, and do you think La Fayette would invite
Stephenson to build his steam wagons in Canada?  Oh, no-La Fayette was
quite content to let him build them for the Irrakwa, mumbling some
idiotic excuse like: The Irrakwa are already using steam engines for
their spinning wheels, and all the coal is on the American side-but
Frederic de Maurepas knew the truth.  La Fayette believed that the steam
engine, pug cars on railed roads, would make commerce and travel
infinitely faster and cheaper-and he thought it would be better for the
world if it were built within the borders of a democracy!  Of course
Frederic did not believe the engines would ever be as fast as horses,
but that didn't matter-La Fayette did believe in them, and so the fact
that he didn't bring them to Canada was pure treason.

He must have been forming the word with his lips.  Either that or La
Fayette could hear other men's thoughts-Frederic had heard rumors that
La Fayette had a knack for that.  Or perhaps La Fayette merely guessed.
Or perhaps the devil told him-there's a thought!

Anyway, La Fayette laughed aloud and said, "Frederic, if I had
Stephenson build his railroad in Canada, you'd have me cashiered for
wasting money on nonsense.  As it is, if you made a report accusing me
of treason for encouraging Stephenson to remain in Irrakwa, they'd call
you home and lock you up in a padded room!"

"Treason?  I accuse you?" said Frederic.  "It's the farthest thought
from my mind." Still, he crossed himself, on the off-chance that it was
the devil who had told La Fayette.  "Now, haven't we had enough of
watching the stevedores loading cargo?  I believe we have an officer to
greet."

"Why are you so eager to meet him now?" asked La Fayette.

"Yesterday you kept reminding me that he is a commoner.  He even entered
the service as a corporal, I think you said."

"He's a general now, and His Majesty has seen fit to send him to us."
Frederic spoke with stiff propriety.  Still La Fayette insisted on
smiling with amusement.  Someday, Gilbert, someday.

Several officers in full army dress uniform were milling about on the
wharf, but none was of general rank.  The hero of the battle of Madrid
was obviously waiting to make a grand entrance.  Or did he expect a
Marquis and the son of a Comte to come and meet him in his cabin?
Unthinkable.

And, in fact, he did not think it.,The officers stepped back, and from
their position by the railing of the canal barge de Maurepas and La
Fayette could see him step off the MaHe-Phillippe onto the wharf.

"Why, he's not a very large man, is he," said Frederic.

"They aren't very tall in the south of France."

"South of France!" said Frederic scornfully.  "He's from Corsica, my
dear Gilbert.  That's hardly even French at all.  More like Italian."

"He defeated the Spanish army in three weeks, while his superior officer
was indisposed with dysentery," La Fayette reminded him.

"An act of subordination for which he should have been cashiered," said
Frederic.

"Oh, I quite agree with You," said La Fayette.  "Only, You see, he did
win the war, and as long as King Charles was adding the crown of Spain
to his collection of headgear, he thought it would be churlish to
court-martial the soldier who won it for him."

"Discipline above all.  Everybody must know his place and stay in it, or
there will be chaos."

"No doubt.  Well, they did punish him.  They made him a general, but
they sent him here.  Didn't want him involved with the Italian campaign.
His Majesty wouldn't mind being Doge of Venice, but this General
Bonaparte might get carried away, capture the College of Cardinals, and
make King Charles pope.

"Your sense of humor is a crime."

"Frederic, look at the man."

"I am looking at him.

"Then don't look at him.  Look at everyone else.  Look at his officers.
Have You ever seen soldiers show so much love for their commander?"

Frederic reluctantly tore his gaze from the Corsican genera and looked
at the underlings who walked quietly behind.  Not like courtiers-there
was no sense of jockeying for position.  It was like-it was
like-Frederic couldn't find words for it"It's as if each man knows that
Bonaparte loves him, and values him.  "A ridiculous system, if that's
what his System is," said Frederic.

You cannot control your underlings if you don't keep them in constant
fear of losing their position."

"Let's go meet him."  "Absurd!  He must come to us!"

But La Fayette, as usual, did not hesitate between the word and the
deed-he was already on the wharf, striding the last few yards to stand
before Bonaparte and receive his salute.  Frederic, however, knew his
station in life, and knew Bonaparte's as well, and Bonaparte would have
to come to him.  They might make Bonaparte a general, but they could
never make him a gentleman.

La Fayette was fawning, of course.  "General Bonaparte, we're honored to
have you here.  I only regret that we cannot offer you the amenities of
Paris-"

"My lord Governor," said Bonaparte-naturaRy getting the form of address
all wrong, "I have never known the amenities of Paris.  All my happiest
moments have been in the field."

"And the happiest moments, too, for France, are when you are in the
field.  Come, meet General de Maurepas.  He will be your superior
officer in Detroit."

Frederic heard the slight pause before La Fayette said the word
superior.  Frederic knew when he was being ridiculed.  I will remember
every slight, Gilbert, and I will repay.

The Irrakwa were very efficient at transferring cargo; it wasn't an hour
before the canal barge was under way.  Naturally, La Fayette spent the
first afternoon telling Bonaparte all about Stephenson's steam engine.
Bonaparte made a show of being interested, asking all about the
possibilities of troop transport, and how quickly track could be laid
behind an advancing army, and how easily these railed roads might be
disrupted by enemy action-but it was all so tedious and boring that
Frederic could not imagine how Bonaparte kept it up.

Of course an officer had to pretend to be interested in everything a
Governor said, but Bonaparte was taking it to extremes.

Before too long the conversation obviously excluded Frederic, but he
didn't mind.  He let his thoughts wander, remembering that actress,
What's-her-name, who did such an exquisite job of that part, whatever it
was, or was she a ballerina?  He remembered her legs, anyway, such
graceful legs, but she refused to come to Canada with him, even though
he assured her he loved her and promised to set her up in a house even
nicer than the one he would build for his wife.  If only she had come.

Of course, she might have died of fever, the way his wife did.  So
perhaps it was all for the best.  Was she still on the stage in Paris?

Bonaparte would not know, of course, but one of his junior officers
might have seen her.  He would have to inquire.

They supped at Governor Rainbow's table, of course, since that was the
only table on the canal boat.  The governor had sent her regrets that
she could not visit the distinguished French travelers, but she hoped
her staff would make them comfortable.  Frederic, supposing this meant
an Irrakwa chef, had braced himself for another tedious Red meal of
tough deer gristle-one could hardly call such fare venison-but instead
the chef was, of all things, a Frenchman!  A Huguenot, or rather the
grandson of Huguenots, but he didn't hold grudges, so the food was
superb.  Who would have imagined good French food in a place like
this-and not the spicy Acadian style, either.

Frederic did try to take a more active part in the conversation at
supper, once he had finished off every scrap of food on the table.  He
tried his best to explain to Bonaparte the almost impossible military
situation in the southwest.  He counted off the problems one by one. the
undisciplined Red allies, the unending flow of immigrants.  "Worst of
all is our own soldiers, though.  They are a determinedly superstitious
lot, as the lower classes always are.  They see omens in everything.

Some Dutch or German settler puts a hex on his door and you practically
have to beat our soldiers to get them to go in.  Bonaparte sipped his
coffee (barbaric fluid!  but he seemed to relish it exactly as the
Irrakwa did), then leaned back in his chair, regarding Frederic with his
steady, piercing eyes.  "Do you mean to Say that you accompany foot
soldiers in house-to-house searches?"

Bonaparte's condescending attitude was outrageous, but before Frederic
could utter the withering retort that was just on the tip of his tongue,
La Fayette laughed aloud.  "Napoleon," he said, "my dear friend, that is
the nature of our supposed enemy in this war.  When the largest city in
fifty miles consists of four houses and a smithy, you don't conduct
house-to-house searches.  Each house is the enemy fortress.

Napoleon's forehead wrinkled.  "They don't concentrate their forces into
armies?"

"They have never fielded an army, not since General Wayne put down Chief
Pontiac years ago, and that was an English army.  The U.S.  has a few
forts, but they're all along the Ohio."

"Then why are those forts still standing'., La Fayette chuckled again.
"Haven't on read reports of how the English king fared in his war
against the Appalachee rebels?"

"I was otherwise engaged," said Bonaparte.

"You needn't remind us you were fighting in Spain," said Frederic.

"We would all have gladly been there, too."

"Would you?" murmured Bonaparte.

"Let me summarize," said La Fayette, what happened to Lord Cornwallis's
army when he led it from Virginia to try to reach the Appalachee capital
of Franklin, on the upper Tennizy River."

"Let me, " said Frederic.  "Your summaries are usually longer than the
original, Gilbert."

La Fayette looked annoyed at Frederic's interruption, after all, La
Fayette was the one who had insisted they address each other as brother
generals, by first names.  If La Fayette wanted to be treated like a
marquis, he should insist on protocol.  "Go ahead," said La Fayette.

"Cornwallis went out in search of the Appalachee army.  He never found
it.  Lots of empty cabins, which he burned-but they can build new ones
in a day.  And every day a half-dozen of his soldiers would be killed or
wounded by musketry."

"Rifle fire," corrected La Fayette.

"Wellthese Americans prefer the rifled barrel," said Frederic.

"They can't volley properly, rifles are so slow to load," said
Bonaparte.

"They don't volley at all, unless they outnumber you," said La Fayette.

"I'm telling it," said Frederic.  "Cornwallis got to Franklin and
realized that half his army was dead, injured, or protecting his supply
lines.

Lord Cornwallis tried to lay a siege, but the Cherriky moved so silently
that the Cavalier pickets never heard them bringing in supplies during
the night.  Fiendish, the way those Appalachee Whites worked so closely
with the Reds-made them citizens, right from the start, if you can
imagine, and it certainly paid off for them this time.  Appalachee
troops also raided Comwalhs's supply lines so often that after less than
a month it became quite clear that Cornwallis was the besieged, not the
besieger.  He ended up surrendering his entire army, and the English
King had to grant Appalachee its independence."

Bonaparte nodded gravely.

"Here's the cleverest thing," said La Fayette.  "After he surrendered,
Cornwallis was brought into Franklin City and discovered that all the
families had been moved out long before he arrived.

That's the thing about these Americans on the frontier.  They can pick
up and move anywhere.  You can't pin them' down."

"But you can kill them," said Bonaparte.

"You have to catch them," said La Fayette.

"They have fields and farms," said Bonaparte.

"Well, yes, you could try to find every farm," said La Fayette.

"But when you get there, if anyone's at home you'll to find it's a
simple farm family.  Not a soldier among them.  There's no army.  But
the minute you leave, someone is shooting at you from the forest.  it
might be the same humble farmer, and it might not."

"An interesting problem," said Bonaparte.  "You never know your enemy.
He never concentrates his forces."

"Which is why we deal with the Reds," said Frederic.  "We can't very
well go about murdering innocent farm families ourselves, can we?"

"So you pay the Reds to kill them for you."

"Yes.  It works rather well," said Frederic, "and we have no plans to do
anything different."

"Well?  It works well?" said Bonaparte scornfully.  "Ten years ago there
weren't five hundred American households west of the Appalachee
Mountains.  Now there's ten thousand households between the Appalachees
and the My-Ammy, and more moving farther west all the time."

La Fayette winked at Frederic.  Frederic hated him when he did that.
"Napoleon read our dispatches," La Fayette said cheerfully.

"Memorized our estimates of American settlements in the Red Reserve.

"The King wants this American intrusion into French territory Stopped,
and stopped at once," said Bonaparte.

"Oh he does?" asked La Fayette.  "What an odd way he has of showing it."

"Odd?  He sent me," said Bonaparte.  "That means he expects victory.

"But you're a general," said La Fayette.  "We already have generals."

"Besides," said Frederic, "you're not in command.  I'm in command."

"The Marquis has the supreme military authority here," said Bonaparte.

Frederic understood completely: La Fayette also had the authority to put
Bonaparte in command over Frederic, if he desired.  He cast an anxious
look toward La Fayette, who was complacently spreading goose-liver paste
on his bread.  La Fayette smiled benignly.  "General Bonaparte is under
your command, Frederic.  That will not change.

Ever.  I hope that's clear, my dear Napoleon."

"Of course," said Napoleon.  "I would not dream of changing that.

You should know that the King is sending more than generals to Canada.
Another thousand soldiers will be here in the spring."

"Yes, well, I'm impressed to learn that he's promised to send more
troops again-haven't we heard a dozen such promises before, Frederic?

I'm always reassured to hear another promise from the King."

La Fayette took the last sip from his wineglass.  "But the fact is, my
dear Napoleon, we already have soldiers, too, who do nothing but sit in
garrison at Fort Detroit and Fort Chicago, paying for scalps with
bourbon.  Such a waste of bourbon.  The Reds drink it like water and it
kills them."

"If we don't need generals and we don't need soldiers," asked Bonaparte
condescendingly, "what do you think we need to win this war?"

Frederic couldn't decide if he hated Bonaparte for speaking so rudely to
an aristocrat, or loved him for speaking so rudely to the detestable
Marquis de La Fayette.

"To win?  Ten thousand French settlers," said La Fayette.  "Match the
Americans man for man, wife for wife, child for child.  Make it
impossible to do business in that part of the country without speaking
French.  Overwhelm them with numbers."

"No one would come to live in such wild country," said Frederic, as he
had said so many times before.

"Offer them free land and they'd come," said La Fayette.

"Riffraff," said Frederic.  "We hardly need more riffraff."

Bonaparte studied La Fayette's face a moment in silence.  "The
commercial value of these lands is the fur trade," said Bonaparte
quietly.  "The King was very clear on that point.  He wants no European
settlement at all outside the forts."

"Then the King will lose this war," said La Fayette cheerfully, "no
matter how many generals he sends.  And with that, gentlemen, I think we
have done with supper."

La Fayette arose and left the table immediately.

Bonaparte turned to face Frederic, who was already standing up to leave.
He reached out his hand and touched Frederic's wrist.  "Stay, please,"
he said.  Or no, actually he 'merely said, "Stay," but it felt to
Frederic that he was saying please, that he really wanted Frederic to
remain with him, that he loved and honored FredericBut he couldn't, no,
he couldn't, he was a commoner, and Frederic had nothing to say to
him"My lord de Maurepas," murmured the Corsican corporal.  Or did he say
merely "Maurepas," while Frederic simply imagined the rest?

Whatever his words, his voice was rich with respect, with trust, with
hopeSo Frederic stayed.

Bonaparte said almost nothing.  Just normal pleasantries.  We should
work well together.  We can serve the King properly.  I will help you
all I can.

But to Frederic, there was so much more than words.  A promise of future
honor, of returning to Paris covered with glory.  Victory over the
Americans, and above all putting La Fayette in his place, triumphing
over the democratic traitorous marquis.  He and this Bonaparte could do
it, together.  Patience for a few years, building up an army of Reds so
large that it provokes the Americans to raise an army, too; then we can
defeat that American army and go home.

That's all it will take.  It was almost a fever of hope and trust that
filled Frederic's heart, until Until Bonaparte took his hand away from
Frederic's wrist.

It was as if Bonaparte's hand had been his connection to a great source
of life and warmth; with the touch removed, he grew cold, weary.

But still there was Bonaparte's smile, and Frederic looked at him and
remembered the feeling of promise he had had a moment before.  How could
he have ever thought working with Bonaparte would be anything but
rewarding?  The man knew his place, that was certain.  Frederic would
merely use Bonaparte's undeniable military talents, and together they
would triumph and return to France in gloryBonaparte's smile faded, and
again Frederic felt a vague sense of loss.

"Good evening," said Bonaparte.  "I will see you in the morning, sir."

The Corsican left the room.

If Frederic could have seen his face, he might have recognized his own
expression: it was identical to the look of love and devotion that all
Bonaparte's junior officers had worn.  But he could not see his face.

That night he went to bed feeling more at peace, more confident, ore
hopeful and excited than he had felt in all his years in Canada.

He even felt-what, what is this feeling, he wondered-ah yes.

Intelligent.  He even felt intelligent.

It was deep night, but the canatmen were hard at work, using their noisy
steam engine to pump water into the lock.  It was an engineering marvel,
the steepest system of locks on any canal in the world.  The rest of the
world did not know it.  Europe still thought of America is a land of
savages.  But the enterprising United States of America.

inspired by the example of that old wizard Ben Franklin, was encouraging
invention and industry.  Rumor had it that a man named Fulton had a
working steam-powered boat plying up and down the Hudson -a steamboat
that King Charles had been offered, and refused to fund!

Coal mines were plunging into the earth in Suskwahenny and Appalachee.

And here in the state of Irrakwa, the Reds were outdoing the Whites at
their own game, building canals, steam-powertd cars to run on railed
roads, steam-powered spinning wheels that spat out the cotton of the
Crown Colonies and turned it into fine yams that rivaled anything in
Europe-at half the cost.  It was just beginning, just starting out, but
already more than half the boats that came up the St.  Lawrence River
were bound for Irrakwa, and not for Canda at all.

La Fayette stood at the rail until the lock was filled and the fires of
the steam engine were allowed to die.  Then the clop, clop, clop of the
canal horses and the boat slid forward again through the water.  La
Fayette left the rail and walked quietly up the stairs to his room.  By
dawn, they would be at Port Buffalo.  De Maurepas and Bonaparte would go
west to Detroit.  La Fayette would return to the Governor's mansion in
Niagara.  There he would sit, issuing orders and watching Parisian
policies kill any future for the French in Canada.

There was nothing La Fayette could do to keep the Americans, Red and
White together, from surpassing Canada and leaving it behind.  But he
could do a few things to help change France into the kind of nation that
could reach out to the future as boldly as America was doing.

In his own quarters, La Fayette lay on his bed, smiling.  He could
imagine what Bonaparte had done.tonight, alone in the room with poor
empty-headed Freddie.  The young Comte de Maurepas was doubtless
completely charmed.  The same thing might well have happened to La
Fayette, but he had been warned about what Bonaparte could do, about his
knack for making people trust their lives to him.

It was a good knack for a general to have, as long as he only used it on
his soldiers, so they'd be willing to die for him.  But Bonaparte used
it on everybody, if he thought he could get away with it.  So La
Fayette's good friend Robespierre had sent him a certain jeweled amulet.
The antidote to Bonaparte's charm.  And a vial of powder, too F the
final antidote to Bonaparte, if he could be controlled no other way.

Don't worry, Robespierre, my dear fellow, thought La Fayette.

Bonaparte will live.  He thinks he is manipulating Canada to serve his
nds, but I will manipulate him to serve the ends of democracy.

Bonaparte does not suspect it now, but when he returns to France he will
be ready to take command of a revolutionary army, and use his knack to
end the tyranny of the ruling class instead of using it to add
meaningless crowns to King Charles's most unworthy head.

For La Fayette's knack was not to read other men's thoughts, as de
Maurepas suspected, but it was nearly that.  La Fayette knew upon
meeting them what other men and women wanted most.  And knowing that,
everything else could be guessed at.  La Fayette already knew Napoleon
better than Napoleon knew himself.  He knew that Napoleon Bonaparte
wanted to rule the world.  And maybe he'd achieve it.

But for now, here in Canada, La Fayette would rule Napoleon Bonaparte

He fell asleep clutching the amulet that kept him safe.

Lolla- Wossiky

When Lolla-Wossiky left Ta-Kumsaw standing by the gate of Fort Carthage,
he knew what his brother thought.  Ta-Kumsaw thought he was going off
with his keg to drink and drink and drink.

But Ta-Kumsaw didn't know.  White Murderer Harrison didn't know.

Nobody knew about Lolla-Wossiky.  This keg would last him two months
maybe.  A little bit now, a little bit then.  Careful, careful, never
spill a drop, drink just this much, close it tight, make it last.

Maybe even three months.

Always before he had to stay close to White Murderer Harrison's fort, to
get the cups of dribbling likker from the dark brown jug.

Now, though, he had plenty to make his journey, his great north journey
to meet his dream beast.

Nobody knew that Lolia-Wossiky had a dream beast.  White man didn't know
cause White man had no dream beast, White man slept all the time and
never woke up.  Red man didn't know cause Red man saw Lolla-Wossiky and
thought he was a likker Red, going to die, had no dream beast, never
wake up.

Lolla-Wossiky knew though.  Lolla-Wossiky knew that light up north, he
saw it come five years back.  He knew it was his dream beast calling,
but he never could go.  He started five, six, twelve times north, but
then the likker would seep out of his blood and then the noise would
come back, terrible black noise that hurt him so bad all the time.  When
the black noise came it was like a hundred tiny knives in his head,
twisting, twisting, so he couldn't feel the land no more, couldn't even
see his dream beast light, had to go back, find the likker, still the
noise so he could think.

This last was the very worst time.  No likker came for a long, long
time, and for two months at the end even White Murderer Harrison didn't
have much for him, maybe one cup in a week, never enough to last more
than a few hours, maybe a day.  Two long months of black noise all the
time.

Black noise made it so Loila-Wossiky couldn't walk right.

Everything wiggles, ground bumps up and down, how can you walk when the
land looks like water?  So everybody thought Lolla-Wossiky was drunk,
stagger like a whisky-Red, fall down all the time.  Where does he get
the likker?  they all ask.  Nobody has likker but LoRa-Wossiky still
gets drunk, how does he do it?  Not one person has eyes to see that
Lolla-Wossiky isn't drunk at all.  Don't they hear how he talks, clear
g, not drunk-talk?  Don't they smell he got no rier-stink?

Nobody guesses, nobody reckons, nobody calcalates, nobody figures.

They know Lofla-Wossiky always needs likker.  Never nobody thinks maybe
Loila-Wossiky has pain so bad he hopes to die.

And when he closes his eye to stop the world from rippling like the
river, they all think he's asleep and they say things.  Oh, they say
things they don't want no Red to hear.  Lolla-Wossiky figured that out
very quick and so when the black noise got so bad he wanted to go lie
down on the bottom of the river to shut out the noise forever, instead
he staggered to White Murderer Harrison's office and fell down on the
floor by his door and listened.  Black noise was very loud, but it
wasn't ear noise, so he could still hear voices even with the roaring of
the black noise in his head.  He thought very hard to hear every word
under the door.  He knew all that White Murderer Harrison said to
everybody.

Lolla-Wossiky never told anybody what he heard.

Lolla-Wossiky never told anybody anything true.  They never believed him
anyway.  You're drunk, Lolla-Wossiky.  Shame on you, LoRa-Wossiky.  Even
when he wasn't drunk, even when he hurt so bad he wanted to kill
everything alive to make it go away, even then they said, Too bad to see
even a Red get so awful drunk.  And TaKumsaw, standing there never
saying anything or when he did, being so strong and right, when
Lolla-Wossiky was so weak and wrong.

North north north went Lolla-Wossiky, chanting to himself.  North a
thousand steps before I take a little drink.  North with the black noise
so loud I don't know where north is, but still north because I don't
dare to stop.

Very dark night.  Black noise so bad the land says nothing to
LollaWossiky.  Even the white light of the dream beast is far off and
seems to come from everywhere at the same time.  One eye sees night,
other eye sees black noise.  Have to stop.  Have to stop.

Very carefully Lofla-Wossiky found a tree, put down the keg, sat down
and leaned against the tree, keg between his legs.  Very slowly because
he couldn't see, he felt the keg all over to make sure of the bung.  Tap
tap tap with the tommy-hawk, tap, tap, tap till the bung was loose.
Slowly he wiggled it out with his fingers.  Then he leaned over and put
his mouth over the bunghole, tight as a kiss, tight as t baby on the
nipple, that's how tight; then up with the keg, very slow, very slow,
not very high, there's the taste, there's the likker, one swallow, two
swallows, three swallows, four.

Four is all.  Four is the end.  Four is the true number, the whole
number, the square number.  Four swallows.

He put the bung back into the keg and tapped it into place, tight.

Already the likker is getting to his head.  Already the black noise is
fading, fading.

Into silence.  Into beautiful green silence.

But the green also goes away, fading with the black.  Every time it goes
this way.  The land sense, the green vision that every Red has.

nobody ever saw it clearer than Lolla-Wossiky.  But now when it comes,
right behind it comes the black noise every time.  And when the black
noise goes, when the likker chases it off, right behind it goes away the
green living silence every time.

Loila-Wossiky is left like a White man then.  Cut off from the land.

Ground crunching underfoot.  Branches snagging.  Roots tripping.

Animals running away.

Lolla-Wossiky hoped, hoped for years to find just the right amount of
likker to drink, to still the black noise and still leave the green
vision.  Four swallows, that was as close as he ever came.  It left the
black noise just out of reach, just behind the nearest tree.  But it
also left the green where he could just touch it.  Just reach it.  So he
could pretend to be a true Red instead of a whisky-Red, which was really
a White.

Tonight, though, he had been without likker so long, two months except
for a cup now and then, that four swallows was too strong for him.  The
green was gone with the black.  But he didn't care, not today.  Didn't
care, had to sleep.

When he woke up in the morning, the black noise was just coming back. He
wasn't sure whether the sun or the noise woke him, and he didn't care.
Tap on the bung, four swallows, tap it closed.  This -time the land
sensed stayed close by, he could feel it a little.

Enough to find the rabbit in the hole.

Thick old stick.  Cut it here, slice it, slice it, so splintery burrs of
wood stuck out in every direction.

Lolla-Wossiky knelt down in front of the rabbit hole.

"I am very hungry," he whispered.  "And I am not very strong.

Will you give me meat?"

He strained to hear the answer, strained to know if it was right.

But it was too far off, and rabbits were very quiet in their land-voice.

Once, he remembered, he could hear all the voices, and from miles and
miles away.  Maybe if the black noise ever went away, he could hear
again.  But for now, he had no way of knowing if the rabbits gave
consent or not.

So he didn't know if he had the right or not.  Didn't know if he was
taking like a Red man, just what the land offered, or stealing like a
White man, murdering whatever it pleased him to kill.  He had no choice.
He thrust the stick into the burrow, twisting it.  He felt it quiver,
heard the squeal, and pulled it out, still twisting.  Little rabbit, not
a big one, just a little rabbit squirming to get away from the
splinters, but Lolla-Wossiky was quick, just at the moment the rabbit
was at the burrow mouth, ready to get free and run, Lolla-Wossiky had
his hand there, held the rabbit by the head, lifted it quickly into the
air and gave it a snap and a shake.  It came down dead, little rabbit,
and Lolla-Wossiky carried it away from the burrow, back to the keg,
because it is very bad, it makes an empty place in the land, if you skin
a baby animal where its kin can see or hear you.

He did not make a fire.  Too dangerous, and there was no time to smoke
the meat, not this close to White Murderer Harrison's fort.

There wasn't much meat anyway; he ate it all, raw so it took chewing but
the flavor was very strong and good.  If you can't smoke meat, Red man
knows, carry all you can in your belly.  He tucked the hide into the
waist of his loincloth, hoisted the keg over his shoulder, and started
north.  The white light was on ahead of him, dream beast calling, dream
beast urging him on.  I will wake you up, said the dream beast.  I will
end your dream.

White man heard about dream beasts.  White man thought the Red man went
out into the forest and had dreams.  Stupid White man, never understood.
All of life at first is a long sleep, a long dream.  You fall asleep at
the moment you are born, and never wake up, never wake up until finally
one day the dream beast calls you.  You go then, into the forest,
sometimes only a few steps, sometimes to the edge of the world.  You go
until you meet the beast who calls you.  The beast is not in a dream.
The beast wakes you up from the dream.  The beast shows you who you are,
teaches you your place in the land.  Then you go home awake, awake at
last, and tell the shaman and your mother and your sisters who the dream
beast was.  A bear?  A badger?  A bird?

A fish?  A hawk or an eagle?  A bee or a wasp?  The shaman will tell you
stories and help you choose your woke-up name.  Your mother and sisters
will name all your children, whether they have been born yet or not.

All of Lolla-Wossiky's brothers met their dream beasts long ago.

Now his mother was dead, his two sisters were gone to live with another
tribe.  Who would name his children?

I know, said Lolla-Wossiky.  I know.  Lolla-Wossiky will never have
children, this old one-eyed whisky-Red.  But Lolla-Wossiky will find his
dream beast.  Lolla-Wossiky will wake up.  Lolla-Wossiky will have his
woke-up name.

Then Lolla-Wossiky will see if he should live or die.  If the black
noise goes on, and waking up teaches him nothing more than he knows now,
Lolla-Wossiky will go sleep in the river and let it roll him to the sea,
far away from the land and the black noise.  But if waking up teaches
him some reason to live on, black noise or not, then LollaWossiky will
live, many long years of drink and pain, pain and drink.

Lolla-Wossiky drank four swallows every morning, four swallows every
night, and then went to sleep hoping that when the dream beast woke him
up, he then could die.

One day he stood on the banks of a Clearwater stream, with the black
noise thick in his vision and loud in his ears.  A great brown bear
stood in the water.  It slapped the face of the water and a fish flew
into the air.  The bear caught it in his teeth, chomped twice, and
swallowed.  It was not the eating that Lolla-Wossiky cared about.  It
was the bear's eyes.

The bear had one eye missing, just like Lolla-Wossiky.  This made
Lolia-Wossiky wonder if the bear could be his dream beast.  But that
could not be.  The white light that called him was still north and
somewhat west of this place.  So this bear was not the dream beast, it
was part of the dream.

Still, it might have a message for Lolla-Wossiky.  This bear might be
here because the land wanted to tell Lolla-Wossiky a story.

This is the first thing LoBa-Wossiky noticed: When the bear caught the
fish in his jaws, he was looking with his single eye, seeing the glimmer
of sunlight shining on the fish.  Lolla-Wossiky knew about this, cause
Lolla-Wossiky tilted his head to one side just like the bear.

When the bear looked into the water to see the fish swimming, so he
could slap at it, he looked with the other eye, with the eye that wasn't
there.  LollaWossiky didn't understand this.  It was very strange.

This is the last thing Lofla-Wossiky noticed: As he watched the bear,
his own good eye was closed.  And when he opened his eye, the river was
still there, the sunlight was still there, the fishes still danced into
the air and then disappeared, but the bear was gone.

Lolla-Wossiky could see the bear only if he closed his good eye.

Lolla-Wossiky drank two swallows from the keg, and the bear went away.

One day LoBa-Wossiky crossed a White man's road, and felt it like a
river moving under his feet.  The current of the road swept him along.

He staggered with it, then caught the stride and jogged along, the keg
on his shoulder.  A Red man never walked on the White man's roadthe dirt
was packed too hard in dry weather, mud too deep in rain, and the wagon
wheel ruts reached out like White man's hands to turn the Red man's
ankle, trip him up, break him down.  This time, though, the ground was
soft like spring grass on a riverbank, as long as LoUa-Wossiky ran along
the road the right direction.  Not toward the light anymore, cause the
light was soft around him, and he knew the dream beast was very very
close.

The road three times went over water-two little streams and a big
one-and each time there was a bridge, made of great heavy logs and
sturdy planks, with a roof like a White man's house.  Loila-Wossiky
stood on the first bridge a long time.  He never heard of such a thing.

Here he was standing in the place where water was supposed to be, and
yet the bridge was so heavy and strong, the walls so thick, that he
couldn't see or hear the water at all.

And the river hated it.  Lolla-Wossiky could hear how angry it was, how
it wanted to reach up and tear the bridge away.  White man's ways,
thought Lolla-Wossiky, White man has to conquer, tear things away from
the land.

Yet standing on the bridge, he noticed something else.  Even though the
likker was mostly gone from his body, the black noise was quieter on the
bridge.  He could hear more of the green silence than he had in a long
time.  As if the black noise came partly from the river.  How can that
be?  River got no anger against Red man.  And no White-built thing can
bring the Red man closer to the land.  Yet that was what happened in
this place.  Lolla-Wossiky hurried on down the road; maybe when his
dream beast woke him up, he'd understand this thing.

Road poured out into a place of meadows and a few White man's buildings.
Lots of wagons.  Horses posted and tied, grazing on the meadow grass.
Sound of metal hammers ringing, chopping of axes in the wood, screech of
saws going back and forth, all kinds of Whiteman forest-killing sounds.
A White man's town.

But not a White man's town.  Lolla-Wossiky stopped at the edge of the
open land.  Why is this White man's town different, what's missing that
I expect to see?

The stockade.  There was no stockade.

Where did the White men go to hide?  Where did they lock up drunken Reds
and White man thieves?  Where did they hide their guns?

"Lift!  Lift!  Lift!" White man's voice ringing out loud as a bell in
the thick air of a summer afternoon.

Up a grassy hill, maybe half a mile off, a strange wooden thing was
rising up.  Lolla-Wossiky couldn't see the men raising it cause the
angle was wrong; they were all hid up behind the brow of the hill.  But
he could see a new-wood frame go up, poles at the high end to raise it
into place.

"Side wall now!  Lift!  Lift!  Lift!"

Now another frame rose up, slowly, slowly, sideways to the first.

When both frames were standing straight, they met just so along one
edge.  For the first time Lolla-Wossiky saw men.  White boys scrambled
up the frames and raised their hammers and brought them down like
tommy-hawks to beat the wood into submission.  After they pounded for a
while, they stood up, three of them, standing on the very top of the
wall frames, their hammers raised up high like spears just pulled from
the body of the wild buffalo.  The poles that had pushed the walls in
place were pulled away.  The walls stood, holding each other in place.
Lolla-Wossiky heard a cheer.

Then suddenly the White men all appeared on the brow of the hill.

Did they see me?  Will they come to make me go away or lock me up?

No, they were just going down the hill to where their horses and their
wagons stood.  Lolla-Wossiky melted into the woods.

He drank four swallows from the keg, then climbed into a tree and
settled the keg into a place where three thick branches split apart.

Nice and tight, nice and safe.  Leaves nice and thick; nobody see it
from the ground, not even Red man.

Lolla-Wossiky took the long way round, but pretty soon there he was on
the hill where the new walls stood.  LOIla-Wossiky looked a long time,
but he couldn't understand what this building was going to be.

It was the new way of building, those frame walls, like White Murderer
Harrison's new mansion, but it was very big.  Bigger than anything
Lolla-Wossiky ever saw White men build, taller than the stockade.

First the strange bridges, tight as houses.  Now this strange building,
tall as trees.  Lolla-Wossiky walked out from the shelter of the forest
onto the open meadow, rocking back and forth because the ground never
stayed level when he had likker in him.  When he reached the building,
he stepped up onto the wooden floor.  White man's floor, White man's
walls, but it didn't feel like any White man building Lolla-Wossiky ever
saw.  Big open space inside.  Walls very high.

First time ever he saw White man build something that wasn't closed in
and dark.  In this place a Red man still maybe glad to be here.

"Who's that?  Who are you?"

Lolla-Wossiky turned around so fast he almost fell.  A tall White man
stood at the edge of the building.  The floor was up so high it met this
man at the waist.  He wasn't in buckskin like a hunter, or in uniform
like a soldier.  He was dressed like a farmer maybe, only he was clean.
In fact Lolla-Wossiky never saw such a man in Carthage City.

"Who are you?" demanded the man again.

"Red man," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"It's getting on dusk, but it sure ain't night yet.  I'd have to be
blind not to know you're Red.  But I know the Reds close by and you
ain't from around here."

Loila-Wossiky laughed.  What White man ever knew one Red from another so
well he could say who was from close by and who was from far away?

"You got a name, Red man?"

"Lolla-Wossiky."

"You're likkered, ain't you.  I can smell it, and you don't wtalk too
good."

"Very likkered.  Whisky-Red."

"Who gave you that likker!  You tell me!  Where'd you get that likker?"

Lolla-Wossiky was confused.  White man never asked him where he got his
likker before.  White man always knew.  "From White Murderer Harrison,"
he said.

"Harrison's two hundred miles southeast of here.  What did you call
him?"

"Governor Bill Harrison."

"You called him White Murderer Harrison."

"This Red very drunk."

"I can see that.  But you sure didn't get drunk at Fort Carthage and
then walk all this way without sobering up.  Now where'd you get that
likker?"

"You going to lock me up?"

"Lock you-now where would I lock you up, tell me that?  You really are
from Fort Carthage, aren't you.  Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Lolla-Wossiky,
we got no place to lock up drunk Reds around here, cause around here
Reds don't get drunk.  And if they do, we find the White man who gave
him likker and that White man gets a flogging.

So you tell me right now where you got that likker."

"My whisky," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"Maybe you better come with me."

"Lock me up?"

"I told you, we don't-listen, you hungry?"

"Reckon so," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"You got a place to eat?"

"Eat wherever I am."

"Well, tonight you come on down and eat at my house."

Lolla-Wossiky didn't know what to say.  Was this a White man joke?

White man jokes were very hard to understand.

"Aren't you hungry?"

"Reckon so," said Lolla-Wossiky again.

"Well, come on, then!"

Another White man came up the hill.  "Armor-of-God!" he called.

"Your good wife wondered where you were."

"Just a minute, Reverend Thrower.  I think maybe we got us company for
supper."

"Who is that?  why, Armor-of-God, I daresay that's a Red."

"He says his name's Lolla-Wossiky.  He's a ShawNee.  He's also drunk as
a skunk."

Lolla-Wossiky was very surprised.  This White man knew he was a ShawNee
without asking.  From his hair, plucked out except the tall strip down
the middle?  Other Reds did this.  The fringe on his loincloth?  White
man never saw these things.

"A ShawNee," said the new-come White man.  "Aren't they a particularly
savage tribe?"

"Well, now, I don't know, Reverend Thrower," said Armor-ofGod.

"What they are is a particularly sober tribe.  By which I mean they
don't get so likkered as some of these others.  Some folks think that
the only safe Red is a whisky-Red, so they see all these sober ShawNee
and they think that makes them dangerous."

"This one seems not to have that problem."

"I know.  I tried to find out who gave him his whisky, and he won't tell
me."

Reverend Thrower addressed LoBa-Wossiky.  "Don't you know that whisky is
the devil's tool and the downfall of the Red man?"

"I don't think he talks English enough to know what you're talking
about, Reverend."

"Likker very bad for Red man," said Lofla-Wossiky.

"Well, maybe he does understand," said Armor-of-God, chuckling.

"Loffa-Wossiky, if you know how bad Mer is, how come you stink of cheap
whisky like an Irish barroom?"

"Likker very bad for Red man," said LoRa-Wossiky, "but Red man thirsty
all the time."

"There's a simple scientific explanation for that," said Reverend
Thrower.  "Europeans have had alcoholic beverages for so long that
they've built up a tolerance.  Europeans who desperately hunger for
alcohol tend to die younger, have fewer children, provide less well for
those children they do have.  The result is that most Europeans have a
resistance to alcohol built into them.  But you Reds have never built up
that tolerance."

"Very damn right," said Lolla-Wossiky.  "True-talking White man, how
come White Murderer Harrison not kill you yet?"

"Well, now, will you listen to that," said Armor-of-God.  "That's the
second time he called Harrison a murderer."

"He also swore, which I do not appreciate.  "If he's from Carthage, he
learned to talk English from a class of White man that thinks words like
'damn' are punctuation, if you catch my drift, Reverend.  But listen,
Lolla-Wossiky.  This man here, he's Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, and
he's a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, so mind you don't use no bad
language around him."

Lolla-Wossiky hadn't the faintest idea what a minister was-there was no
such thing in Carthage City.  The best he could think of was that a
minister was like a governor, only nicer.

"Will you live in this very big house?"

"Live here?" asked Thrower.  "Oh, no.  This is the Lord's house."

"Who?"

"The Lord Jesus Christ."

Lolla-Wossiky had heard of Jesus Christ.  White man called out that name
all the time, mostly when they were angry or lying.  "Very angry man,"
said Lolla-Wossiky.  "He live here?"

"Jesus Christ is a loving and forgiving Lord," said Reverend Thrower.
"He won't live here the way a White man lives in a house.

But when good Christians want to worship-to sing hymns and pray and hear
the word of the Lord-we'll come together in this place.  It's a church,
or it will be."

"Jesus Christ talks here?" Lolla-Wossiky thought it might be interesting
to meet this very important White man face to face.

"Oh, no, not in person.  I speak for him."

From below the hill came a woman's voice.  "Armor!  Armor Weaver!"

Armor-of-God came alert.  "Supper's ready, and there she is calling out,
she hates when she has to do that.  Come on, Lolla-Wossiky.

Drunk or not, if you want supper you can come and get it."

"I hope you will," said Reverend Thrower.  "And when supper is done, I
hope to be able to teach you the words of the Lord Jesus."

"Very most first thing," said Lolla-Wossiky.  "You promise not to lock
me up.  I don't want lock-up, I got to find dream beast."

"We won't lock you up.  You can walk out of my house any time."

Armor-of-God turned to Reverend Thrower.  "You can see what these Reds
learn about White men from William Henry Harrison.  Likker and
lock-ups."

"I am more moved by his pagan beliefs.  A dream beast!  Is this their
idea of gods?"

"The dream beast isn't God, it's an animal they dream about that teaches
them things," explained Armor.  "They always take a long journey till
they have the dream and come home.  That explains what he's doing two
hundred miles from the main ShawNee settlements on the lower My-Ammy."

"Dream beast real, " said Lolla-Wossiky.

"Right," said Armor-of-God.  Lolla-Wossiky knew he was saying that only
to avoid offending him.

"This poor creature is obviously in dire need of the gospel of Jesus,"
said Thrower.

"Looks to me like he's in more need of supper at the moment.

Gospel is learned best on a full belly, wouldn't You say?"

Thrower chuckled.  "I don't think it says that anywhere in the Bible,
Armor-of-God, but I dare say you're correct."

Armor-of-God put his hands on his hips and asked Lolla-Wossiky again.
"You coming or not?"

"Reckon so," said Lolla-Wossiky.

Lolla-Wossiky's belly was full, but it was White man's food, soft and
smooth and overcooked, and it grumbled inside him.  Thrower went on and
on with very strange words.  The stories were good, but Thrower kept
going on about original sin and redemption.  One time when Lolla-Wossiky
thought he understood, he said, "What a silly god, he makes everybody
born bad to go to burning hell.  Why so mad?  All his fault!" But this
made Thrower get very upset and talk longer and faster, so after that
Lolla-Wossiky did not offer any of his thoughts.

The black noise came back louder and louder the more Thrower talked.
Whisky wearing off It was very quick for the likker to go out of him.
And when Thrower left one time to go empty himself, the black noise got
quieter.  Very strange-Lolla-Wossiky never before noticed anybody making
the black noise louder or softer by coming or going.

But maybe that was because he was here in the dream beast place.

He knew this was the place because the white light was all around him
when he looked, and he couldn't see where to go.  Don't be surprised at
bridges that make black noise soft and White minister who makes black
noise loud.  Don't be surprised at Armor-of-God with his land-face
picture who feeds Red man and doesn't sell likker or even give likker.

While Thrower was outside, Armor-of-God showed Lolla-Wossiky the map.
"This is a picture of the whole land around here.  Up to the northwest,
there's the big lake-the Kicky-Poo call it Fat Water.

Right there, Fort Chicago-it's a French outpost."

"French.  One cup of whisky for a White man scalp."

"That's the going rate, all right," said Armor-of-God.  "But the Reds
around here don't take scalps.  They trade fair with me, and I trade
fair with them, and we don't go shooting down Reds and they don't go
killing White folks for the bounty.  You understand me?  You start
getting thirsty, you think about this: There was a whisky-Red from the
Wee-Aw tribe here some four year back, he killed him a little Danish boy
out in the woods.  Do you think it was White men tracked him down?

Reckon not; you know a White man's got no hope to find no Red in these
woods, specially not farmers and such like us.  No, it was ShawNee and
Otty-Wa who found him two hours after the boy turned up missing.  And do
you think it was White men punished that whisky-Red? Reckon not; they
set that Wee-Aw down and said, 'You want to show brave?" and when he
said yes, they took six hours killing "Very kind," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"Kind?  I reckon not," said Armor-of-God.

"Red man kills White boy for whisky, I never let him show brave, he
die-uh!  Like that, quick like rattlesnake, no man him."

"I got to say you Reds think real strange," said Armor.  "You mean it's
a favor when you torture somebody to death?"

"Not somebody.  Enemy.  Catch enemy, he shows brave before he dies so
then his spirit flies back to home.  Tell his mother and sisters he died
brave, they sing songs and scream for him.  He doesn't show brave, then
his spirit falls flat on the dirt and you step on him, grind him in, he
never goes home, nobody remembers his name."

"It's a good thing Thrower's out at the privy right now, or I reckon
he'd wet his pants over that doctrine." Armor squinted at LollaWossiky.
"You mean they honored that Wee-Aw who killed that little boy?"

Very bad thing, killing little boy.  But maybe Red man knows whisky-Red,
very thirsty, making crazy.  Not like killing man to take his house or
his woman or his land, like White man all the time."

"I got to say, the more I learn about you Reds, the more it kind of
starts to make sense.  I better read the Bible more every night before I
turn Red myself."

Lolla-Wossiky laughed and laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Many Red men turn White and then die.  But never does a White man turn
Red.  I have to tell this story, everybody laugh."

"You Reds have a sense of humor like I just don't understand."

Armor patted the map.  "Here's us, right here just down river from where
the Tippy-Canoe flows into the Wobbish.  All these dots, they're White
man's farms.  And these circles, they're Red villages.

This one's ShawNee, this one's Winny-Baygo, see how it goes?"

"White Murderer Harrison tells Reds that you make this land-face picture
so you can find Red villages.  Killing everybody, he says."

"Well, that's just the kind of lie I'd expect him to tell.  So you heard
about me afore you came up here, did you?  Well, I hope you don't
believe his lies."

"Oh, no.  Nobody believes White Murderer Harrison."

"Good thing."

"Nobody believes any White man.  All lies."

"Well, not me, you understand that?  Not me.  Harrison wants to be
governor so bad that he'll tell any lie he can to get power and keep "He
says you want to be governor, too."

Armor paused at that.  Looked at the map.  Looked at the door to the
kitchen, where his wife was washing up.  "Well, I reckon he didn't lie
about that.  But my idea of what it means to be governor and his are two
different things.  I want to be governor so Red men and White men can
live together in peace here, farming the land side by side, going to the
same schools so someday there ain't no difference between Red and White.
But Harrison, he wants to get rid of the Red man altogether."

If you make the Red man just like the White man, then he won't be Red no
more.  Harrison's way or Armor's way, you end up with no Red men at the
end.  Lolla-Wossiky thought of this, but he didn't say it.  He knew that
even though turning all the Red men White would be very bad, killing
them all with likker the way Harrison planned, or killing them and
driving them off the land the way Jackson planned, those were even
worse.  Harrison was a very bad man.  Armor wanted to be a good man, he
just didn't know how.  Lolla-Wossiky understood this, so he didn't argue
with Armor-of-God.

Armor went on showing him the map.  "Down here's Fort Carthage, it's got
a square, cause it's a town.  I put a square for us, too, even though
we're not rightly a town yet.  We're calling it Vigor Church, on account
of that church we're building."

"Church for building.  Why Vigor?"

"Oh, the first folks settled here, the ones who cut the road and made
the bridges, the Miller family.  They live on up behind the church, way
along the road there.  My wife is their oldest girl, in fact.

They named this place Vigor on account of their oldest son was named
Vigor.  He drowned in the Hatrack River clear back near Suskwahenny, on
their way coming here.  So they named the place after him."

"Your wife, very pretty," said Lolla-Wossiky.

It took Armor just a few seconds to answer that, he looked so surprised.
And in the shop in back, where they ate the meal, his wife Eleanor must
have been listening, cause she was suddenly standing there in the
doorway.

"Nobody ever called me pretty," she said softly.

Loila-Wossiky was baffled.  Most White women had narrow faces, no
cheekbones, sick-looking skin.  Eleanor was darker, wide-faced, high
cheekbones.

"I think you're pretty," said Armor.  "I really do."

Lolla-Wossiky didn't believe him, and neither did Eleanor, though she
smiled and went away from the door.  He never had thought she was
pretty, that was plain.  And after a moment, Lolla-Wossiky understood
why.  She was pretty like a Red woman.  So naturally White men who never
saw straight thought her pretty was very ugly.

This also meant that Armor-of-God was married to a woman he thought was
ugly.  But he didn't shout at her or hit her, like a Red man with an
ugly squaw.  This was a good thing, LoUa-Wossiky decided.

"You very happy," said Lolia-Wossiky.

"That's because we're Christians," said Armor-of-God.  "You'd be happy,
too, if you was Christian."

"I won't never be happy," said Lolla-Wossiky.  He meant to say, "Till I
hear green silence again, till black noise goes away." But no use saying
that to a White man, they didn't know that half the things going on in
the world were plain invisible to them.

"Yes you will," said Thrower.  He strode into the room with all kinds of
energy, ready to tackle this heathen all over again.  "You accept Jesus
Christ as your savior, and you will have true happiness."

Now, that was a promise worth looking into.  That was a good reason to
talk about this Jesus Christ.  Maybe Jesus Christ was LollaWossiky's
dream beast.  Maybe he would make the black noise go away and make
Lolla-Wossiky happy again like he was before White Murderer Harrison
blew up the world with black noise from his gun.

"Jesus Christ makes me wake up?" asked Lolla-Wossiky.

"Come follow me, he said, and I will make you fishers of men," answered
Thrower.

"He waking me up?  He making me happy?"

"Eternal joy, in the bosom of the Heavenly Father," said Thrower.

None of this made any sense, but Lolla-Wossiky decided to go ahead
anyway on the chance that it would wake him up and then he'd understand
what Thrower was talking about.  Even though Thrower made the black
noise louder, maybe he also had the cure for it.

So that night Lolla-Wossiky slept out in the woods, took his four
swallows of whisky in the morning, and staggered on up to the church.

Thrower was annoyed that Lolla-Wossiky was drunk, and Armor once again
insisted on knowing who gave him likker.  Since all the other men who
were doing the church-raising were gathered around, Armor made a speech,
with a whole bunch of threats in it.

"If I find out who's likkering up these Reds, I swear I'll burn his
house down and make him go live with Harrison down on the Ohio.

Up here we're Christian folk.  Now I can't stop you from putting those
hexes on your houses and making those spells and conjures, even though
they show lack of faith in the Lord, but I sure can stop you from
poisoning the folk that the Lord saw fit to put on this land.

Do you understand me?"

All the White folk nodded and said yes and that's right and reckon SO.

"Nobody here gave me whisky," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"Maybe he carried it with him in a cup!" said one of the men.

"Maybe he's got him a still in the woods!" said another.

They all laughed.

"Please be reverent," said Thrower.  "This heathen is accepting the Lord
Jesus Christ.  He shall be covered with the water of baptism as was
Jesus himself.  Let this mark the beginning of a great missionary labor
among the Red men of the American forest!"

Amen, murmured the men.

Well, the water was cold, and that's about all Lolla-Wossiky noticed,
except that when Thrower sprinkled it on him the black noise just got
louder.  Jesus Christ didn't show up, so he wasn't the dream beast after
all.  Lolla-Wossiky was disappointed.

But Reverend Thrower wasn't.  That was the strange thing about White
men.  They just seemed not to notice what went on around them.

Here Thrower performed a baptism that didn't do a fick of good, and he
went strutting around the rest of the day like he had just called a
buffalo into a starving village in the dead of winter.

Armor-of-God was just as blind.  At noon, when Eleanor brought dinner up
the hill to the workmen, they let Lolla-Wossiky eat with them.  "Can't
turn away a Christian, can we?" said one.  But none of them was too
happy about sitting next to Lofia-Wossiky, probably because he stank of
liquor and sweat and he staggered when he walked.

It ended up that Armor-of-God sat with Lolla-Wossiky off a ways from the
others, and they talked about this and that.

Till Loila-Wossiky asked him, "Jesus Christ, he don't like hexes?"

"That's right.  He is the way, and all this beseeching and suchlike is
blasphemy."

Lolla-Wossiky nodded gravely.  "Painted hex no good.  Paint never was
alive."

"Painted, carved, same thing."

"Wooden hex, a little strong.  Tree used to be alive."

"Doesn't matter to me, wooden or painted, I won't have no hexes in my
house.  No conjures, no come-hithers, no lendings, no wardings, none of
that stuff.  A good Christian relies on prayer, and that's that.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

Lofla-Wossiky knew then that Armor-of-God was just as blind as Thrower.
Because Armor-of-God's house was the strongest-hexed house Lolla-Wossiky
ever saw.  That was part of the reason LoflaWossiky was impressed with
Armor, that his house was actually well protected, because he understood
enough to make his hexes out of living things.

Arrangements of living plants hanging on the porch, seeds with the life
in them sitting in carefully placed jars, garlics, stains of berry
juices, all so strongly placed that even with the liner in him to dull
the black noise, Loila-Wossiky could feel the pushing and pulling of the
lendings and wardings and hexes.

Yet Armor-of-God didn't have the faintest idea that his house had any
hexes at all.  "My wife Eleanor, her folks always had hexes.  Her little
brother Al Junior, he's that six-year-old wrasshng with the blond-headed
Swedish boy there-see him?  He's a real hex-carver, they say.

Lolla-Wossiky looked at the boy, but couldn't exactly see him.  He saw
the yellow-hair boy he was tussling with, but the other boy just
couldn't come clear for him, he didn't know why.

Armor was still talking.  "Don't that make you sick?  That young, and
already he's being turned away from Jesus.  Anyway, it was real hard for
Eleanor to give up those hexes and such.  But she did it.

Gave me her solemn oath, or we never would've got married."

At that moment Eleanor, the pretty wife that White men thought was ugly,
came up to take away the dinner basket.  She heard the last words that
her husband said, but she gave no sign that it meant anything to her.
Except that when she took Lolla-Wossiky's bowl from him, and looked him
in the eye, he felt like she was asking him.

Did you see those hexes?

Lolla-Wossiky smiled at her, his biggest smile, so she'd know he didn't
have any plan to tell her husband.

She smiled back, hesitantly, untrustingly.  "Did you like the food?"

she asked him.

"Everything cooked too much," said Lolla-Wossiky.  "Blood taste all
gone."

Her eyes went wide.  Armor only laughed and clapped LoUa-Wossiky on the
shoulder.  "Well, that's what it means to be civilized.  You give up
drinking blood, and that's a fact.  I hope your baptism sets you on the
right road-it's plain you've been a long time on the wrong one."

"I wondered," said Eleanor-and she stopped, glanced down at
Lolla-Wossiky's loincloth, and then looked at her husband.

"Oh, yes, we talked about that last night.  I've got some old trousers
and a shirt I don't use anymore, and Eleanor's making me new ones
anyway, so I thought, now that you're baptized, you really ought to
start dressing like a Christian."

"Very hot day," said Lolla-Wossiky.

"Yes, well, Christians believe in modesty of dress, Lolla-Wossiky."

Armor laughed and hit him on the shoulder again.

"I can bring the clothes up this afternoon," said Eleanor.

Lolla-Wossiky thought this was a very stupid idea.  Red men always
looked stupid dressed in White man's clothes.  But he didn't want to
argue with them because they were trying to be very friendly.  And maybe
the baptism would work after all, if he put on White man's clothes.
Maybe then the black noise would go away.

So he didn't answer.  He just looked at where the yellow-hair boy was
running around in circles, shouting, "Alvin!  Ally!" Lolla-Wossiky tried
very hard to see the boy that he was chasing.  He saw a foot touching
the ground and raising dust, a hand moving through the air, but never
quite saw the boy himself.  Very strange thing.

Eleanor was waiting for him to answer.  LoUa-Wossiky said nothing, since
he was now watching the boy who wasn't there.  Finally Armor-of-God
laughed and said, "Bring the clothes up, Eleanor.

We'll dress him like a Christian, all right, and maybe tomorrow he can
lend a hand on building the church, start learning a Christian trade.
Get a saw into his hand."

Lolla-Wossiky didn't actually hear that last, or he might have taken off
into the woods right away.  He had -,een what happened to Red men who
started using White man's tools.  The way they got cut -off from the
land, bit by bit, every time they hefted that metal.  Even guns.  A Red
man starts using guns for hunting, he's half White the first time he
pulls the trigger; only thing a Red man can use a gun for is killing
White men, that's what Ta-Kumsaw always said, and he was right.  But
Lolla-Wossiky didn't hear Armor talk about wanting LoUa-Wossiky to use a
saw because he had just made the most remarkable discovery.  When he
closed his good eye, he could see that boy.  Just like the one-eyed bear
in the river.  Open his eye, and there was the yellow-head boy chasing
and shouting, but no Alvin Miller Junior.

Close his eye, and there was nothing but the black noise and the traces
of the green-and then, right in the middle, there was the boy, bright
and shining with light as if he had the sun in his back pocket, laughing
and playing with a voice like music.

And then he didn't see him at all.

LoUa-Wossiky opened his eye.  There was Reverend Thrower.  Armor and
Eleanor were gone-ah the men were back to work on the church.  It was
Thrower who made the boy disappear, that was plain enough.  Or maybe
not-because now, with Thrower standing by him, Lolia-Wossiky could see
the boy with his good eye.  Just like any other child.

"Lofla-Wossiky, it occurs to me that you really ought to have a
Christian name.  I've never baptized a Red before, and so I just
thoughtlessly used your uncivilized nomenclature.  You're supposed to
take a new name, a Christian name.  Not necessarily a saint's namewe're
not Papists-but something to suggest your new commitment to Christ."

Lolla-Wossiky nodded.  He knew he would need a new name, if the baptism
turned out to work after all.  Once he met his dream beast and went back
home, he would get a name.  He tried to explain this to Thrower, but the
White minister didn't really understand.  Finally, though, he grasped
the idea that Lolla-Wossiky wanted a new name and meant to get one soon,
so he was mollified.

"While we're both right here, by the way," said Thrower, "I wondered if
I might examine your head.  I am working on developing some orderly
categorizations for the infant science of phrenology.  It is the idea
that particular talents and propensities in the human soul are reflected
in or perhaps even caused by protuberances and depressions in the shape
of the skull."

Lolla-Wossiky didn't have any idea what Thrower was talking about, so he
nodded silently.  This usually worked with White men who were talking
nonsense, and Thrower was no exception.  The end of it was that Thrower
felt all over Lolla-Wossiky's head, stopping now and then to make
sketches and notes on a piece of paper, muttering things like
"Interesting......  Ha!" and "So much for that theory."

When it was over, Thrower thanked him.  "You've contributed greatly to
the cause of science, Mr.  Wossiky.  You are living proof that a Red man
does not necessarily have the bumps of savagery and cannibalism. Instead
you have the normal array of knacks and lacks that any human has.  Red
men are not intrinsically different from White men, at least not in any
simple, easily categorized way.  In fact, you have every sign of being
quite a remarkable speaker, with a profoundly developed sense of
religion.  It is no accident that you are the first Red man to accept
the gospel in my ministry here in America.  I must say that your
phrenological pattern has many great similarities to my own.  In short,
my dear new-baptized Christian, I would not be surprised if you ended up
being a missionary of the gospel yourself Preaching to great multitudes
of Red men and women and bringing them to an understanding of heaven.
Contemplate that vision, Mr.  Wossiky.  If I am not mistaken, it is your
future."

Lolla-Wossiky barely caught the gist of what Thrower said.

Something about him being a preacher.  Something about telling the
future.

Lolla-Wossiky tried to make sense of this, but it didn't work.

By nightfall, Lolla-Wossiky was dressed in White man's clothes, looking
like a fool.  His likker had worn off and he hadn't had a chance to
dodge back into the woods and get his four swallows, so the black noise
was getting very bad.  Worse yet, it looked to be a rainy night, so he
couldn't see with his eye, and with the black noise as bad as it was,
his land sense couldn't lead him to his keg, either.

The result was that he was staggering worse than when he had likker in
him, the ground heaved and tossed so much under his feet.

He fell over trying to get out of his chair at Armor's supper table.

Eleanor insisted that he had to spend the night there.  "We can't have
him sleep in the woods, not when it rains," she said, and as if to
buttress her point there was a clap of thunder and rain started pelting
the roof and walls.  Eleanor made up a bed on the floor of the kitchen
while Thrower and Armor went around the house closing shutters.

Gratefully Lolla-Wossiky crawled to the bed, not even removing the stiff
uncomfortable trousers and shirt, and lay down, his eye closed, trying
to endure the stabbing in his head, the pain of the black noise like
knives cutting out his brain slice by slice.

As usual, they thought he was asleep.

"He seems drunker than he did this morning," said Thrower.

"I know he never left the hill," said Armor.  "There's not a chance he
got a drink anywhere."

"I've heard it said that when a drunk becomes sober," said Thrower, "at
first he acts more drunk than when he has alcohol in him.

"I hope that's all it is," said Armor.

"I daresay he was somewhat disappointed at the baptism today," said
Thrower.  "Of course it's impossible to understand what a savage is
feeling, but-"

"I wouldn't call him a savage, Reverend Thrower," said Eleanor.

"I think in his own way he's civilized."

"You might as well call a badger civilized, then," said Thrower.

"In his own way, anyway."

"I mean to say," Eleanor said, her voice even quieter and
meekersounding, but therefore carrying all the more weight, "that I saw
him reading."

"Turning pages you mean," said Thrower.  "He couldn't be reading.

"No.  He read, and his lips formed the words," she said.  "The signs on
the wall in the front room, where we serve customers.  He read the
words."

"It's possible, you know," said Armor.  "I know for a fact that the
Irrakwa read just as good as any White men.  I been there to do business
often enough, and you can bet you have to read the fine print on the
contracts they write up.  Red men can learn to read, and that's a fact.

all' "But this one, this drunk-"

"Who knows what he can become, when the likker ain't in him?"

said Eleanor.

Then they went away to the other room, and left the house for a while,
walking Thrower home to the cabin he was staying in before the rain got
so bad he had to stay the night.

Alone in the house, Lolla-Wossiky tried to make sense of things.

Baptism alone hadn't wakened him from his dream.  Nor had White man's
clothes.  Maybe going without likker for a night would do it, like
Eleanor suggested, though it made him crazy with pain so he couldn't
sleep.

Whatever happened, though, he knew that the dream beast was waiting
somewhere near here.  The white light was surf-used all around him now;
this was the waking place for Lofla-Wossiky.  Maybe if he stayed away
from the church hill today, maybe if he wandered in the woods around
Vigor Church, then the dream beast could find him.

One thing was sure.  He wasn't going to spend another night without
whisky.  Not when he had a keg out in a crotch of a tree that could take
away the black noise and let him sleep.

Lolla-Wossiky walked everywhere in the woods.  He saw many animals, but
they all ran from him; he was so drunk or so bound up in the black noise
that he never was part of the land, and they ran from him just as if he
were White.

Discouraged, he began to drink more than four swallows, even though he
knew he would run out of whisky too fast.  He walked less and less in
the forest, more and more along the White man's paths and roads, showing
up at farmhouses in the middle of the day.  The women sometimes screamed
and ran away, carrying a baby and leading children off into the woods.
Other women pointed guns at him and made him leave.  Some of them fed
him and talked about Jesus Christ.  Finally Armor-of-God told him not to
visit the farms when the men were away, working on the church.

So there was nothing left for Lolla-Wossiky to do.  He knew he was close
to the dream beast, but he couldn't find it.  He couldn't walk in the
forest because the animals ran from him and he stumbled and fell all the
time, more and more, until he feared he might break a bone and die of
starvation because he couldn't even call small animals to feed him.  He
couldn't visit the farms because the men were angry.  So he lay on the
commons, sleeping from drunkenness or trying to endure the pain of the
black noise, one or the other.

Sometimes he worked up the energy to go up the hill and see the men
working on the church.  Whenever he got there, some man would call out,
"Here comes the Red Christian!" and Lolla-Wossiky knew that there was
malice and ridicule in the voices that said it and the voices that
laughed.

He was not at the church the day the roof-beam fell.  He was sleeping on
the grass of the commons, near the porch of Armor's house, when he heard
the crash.  It startled him awake, and the black noise came back harsher
than ever, even though he had drunk eight swallows that morning and
ought to be drunk till noon.  He lay there holding his head until men
started coming down from the hill, cursing and muttering about the
strange thing that happened.

"What happened?" Lolia-Wossiky asked.  He had to know, because whatever
it was, it had made the black noise worse than it had been in years.
"Was a man killed?" He knew that a gunshot made the black noise in the
first place.  "Did White Murderer Harrison shoot somebody?"

At first they paid him no attention, because they thought he was drunk,
of course.  But finally someone told him what happened.

They had been laying the first ridgebeam in place, high on top of the
building, when the central ridgepole shivered and tossed the ridgebeam
up in the air.  "Came down flat, just like God's own foot stepping on
the earth, and wouldn't you know, there was that little Alvin Junior, Al
Miller's boy, right under the beam.  Well, we thought he was dead.  The
boy just stood there, the beam landed smack-you must have heard the
noise, that's why it sounded like a gun to youbut you won't believe
this.  That ridgebeam split right in half, right in the very place where
Alvin was standing, split right in two and landed on this side and that
side of him, didn't touch a hair on his head."

"Somethinp, strange about that boy," said a man.

"He's got a guardian angel, that's what he's got," said another.

Alvin Junior.  The boy he couldn't see with his eye-open.

There was no one at the church when Lolia-Wossiky got there.  The
ridgebeam was also gone, everything ' swept out, no sign of the
accident.  But Lolla-Wossiky was not looking with his eye.  He could
feel it, almost as soon as he got within sight of the church.  A
whirlpool, not fast at the edges, but stronger and stronger the closer
he came.  A whirlwind of light, and the closer he got, the weaker the
black noise became.  Until he stood on the church floor, in the spot
that he knew was where the boy was standing.  How did he know?  The
black noise was quieter.  Not gone, the pain not healed, but
Lolla-Wossiky could feel the green land again, just a little, not like
it used to be, but he could feel the small life under the floor, a
squirrel in the meadow not far off, things he hadn't felt, drunk or
sober, in all the years since the gun blew the black noise into his
head.

Lolla-Wossiky turned around and around, seeing nothing but the walls of
the church.  Until he closed his eye.  Then he saw the whirlwind, yes,
white light spinning and spinning around him, and the black noise
retreating.  He was in the end of his own dream now, and he could see
with his eye closed, see clearly.  There was a shining path ahead of
him, a road as bright as the noonday sky, dazzling like meadow snow on a
clear day.  He knew already, without opening his eye to see, where the
path would lead.  Up the hill, down the other side, up a higher hill, to
a house not far from a stream, a house where lived a White boy who was
only visible to Lolla-Wossiky with his eye closed.

His silent step had returned to him, now that the black noise had backed
off a bit.  He walked around the house, around and around.

No one heard him.  Inside laughter, shouting, screaming.  Happy
children, quarreling children.  Stern voices of parents.  Except for the
language, it could be his village.  His own sisters and brothers in the
happy days before White Murderer Harrison took his father's life.

The White father, Alvin Miller, came out to the privy.  Not long after,
the boy himself came, running, as if he was afraid.  He shouted at the
privy door.  With his eye open, Lolla-Wossiky only knew that someone was
standing there, shouting.  With his eye closed, he saw the boy clearly,
radiant, and heard his voice like birdsong across a river, all music,
even though what he said was silly, foolish, like a child.

"If you don't come out I'll do it right in front of the door so you'll
step in it when you come out!"

Then silence, as the boy grew more worried, hitting himself on the top
of his head with his own fist, as if to say, Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Something changed in Al Junior's expression; Lolla-Wossiky opened his
eye to see that the father had come out, was saying something.

The boy answered him, ashamed.  The father corrected him.

LollaWossiky closed his eye.

"Yes sir," said the boy.

Again the father must be speaking, but with his eye closed LoliaWossiky
did not hear the father.

"Sorry, Papa."

Then the father must have walked away, because little Alvin went into
the privy.  Muttering, so soft no one could hear.  But Loila-Wossiky
heard.  "Well, if you'd just build another outhouse I'd be fine."

Lolla-Wossiky laughed.  Foolish boy, foolish father, like an boys, like
all fathers.

The boy finished and went into the house.

Here I am, said Loila-Wossiky silently.  I followed the shining path, I
came to this place, I saw silly White family things; now where is my
dream beast?

And again he saw the white light gather, inside the house, following the
boy up the stairs.  For Loila-Wossiky there were no walls.  He saw the
boy being very careful, as if he were watching for an enemy, for some
attack.  When he reached the bedroom he ducked inside, closed his door
quickly behind him.  Loila-Wossiky saw him so clearly that he thought he
could almost hear his thoughts; and then, because he thought it, and
because this was near the end of his dream, almost to the time of
waking, he did hear the boy's thoughts, or at least felt his feelings.
It was his sisters he was afraid of.  A silly quarrel, begun wit
teasing, but malicious now-he was afraid of their vengeance.

It came as he stripped off his clothes and pulled his nightshirt over
his head.  Stinging!  Insects, thought the boy.  Spiders, scorpions,
tiny snakes!  He pulled the nightshirt off, slapped himself, cried out
from the pain, the surprise, the fear.

But Lolia-Wossiky could feel the land well enough to know there were no
insects.  Not on his body, not in the shirt.  Though there were many
living creatures there.  Small life, little animals.  Roaches, hundreds
of them living in the walls and floors.

Not in all the walls and floors, though.  Just in Alvin Junior's room.

All gathered to his room.

Was it enmity?  Roaches were too small for hate.  They knew only three
feelings, those little creatures.  Fear, hunger, and the third sense,
the land sense.  The trust in how things ought to be.  Did the boy feed
them?  No.  They came to him for the other thing.

Lolla-Wossiky could hardly believe it, but he felt it in the roaches and
couldn't doubt.  The boy had called them somehow.  The boy had the land
sense, at least enough to call these small creatures.

Call them why?  Who wanted roaches?  But he was only a boy.

There didn't have to be sense in it.  Just the discovery that the little
life would come when you called it.  Red boys learned this, but always
with their father or a brother, always out on the first hunt.

Kneel and speak silently to the life you need to take, and ask it if
this is a good time, and if it is willing to die to make your life
strong.  Is it your time to die?  asks the Red boy.  And if the life
consents, it will come.

This is what the boy did.  Except it wasn't so simple.  He didn't call
the roaches to die for his need, because he had no need.  No, he called
them and kept them safe.  He protected them.  It was like a treaty.

There were certain places the roaches didn't go.  Into Alvin's bed.

Into his little brother Calvin's cradle.  Into Alvin's clothing, folded
on the stool.  And in return Alvin never killed them.  They were safe in
his room.  It was a sanctuary, a reserve.  A very silly thing, a child
playing with things he didn't understand.

But the marvel of it was-this was a White boy, doing something beyond
even a Red man's reach.  When did the Red man ever say to the bear, come
and live with me and I will keep you safe?  When did the bear ever
believe such a thing?  No wonder the light was centered on this boy.
This wasn't the foolish knack of the White man Hooch, or even the strong
living hexes of the woman Eleanor.  This wasn't the Red man's power to
fit himself into the pattern of the land.  No, Alvin didn't fit himself
into anything.  The land fit itself to him.  If he wanted the roaches to
live a certain way, to make a bargain, then that was how the land
ordered itself.  In this small place, for this time, with these tiny
lives, Alvin Junior had commanded and the land obeyed.

Did the boy understand how miraculous this was?

No, no, he had no idea.  How could he know?  What White man could even
understand it?

And now, because he didn't understand, Alvin Junior was destroying the
delicate thing that he had done.  The insects that had bitten him were
metal pins that his sisters had poked into his nightshirt.

Now he could hear them laughing behind their wall.  Because he had them;
Lolla-Wossiky could feel his childish rage.  He only did one been very
frightened, now he was very angry.  Get even, get back at little thing
to tease them, and they pay him back by scaring him, poking him a
hundred times and making him bleed.  Get even, give them such a
scareAlvin Junior sat on the edge of the bed, angrily taking the pins
out of his nightshirt, saving them-White men were so careful with all
their useless metal tools, even such tiny ones as those.  As he sat
there he saw the roaches scurrying along the walls, running in and out
of cracks in the floor, and he saw his vengeance.

Lolla-Wossiky felt him making the plan in his mind.  Then Alvin knelt on
the floor and explained it softly to the roaches.  Because he was a
child, and a White boy with no one to teach him, Alvin thought he had to
say the words aloud, that the roaches somehow understood his language.
But no-it was the order of things, the way he arranged the world in his
mind.

And in his mind he bed to them.  Hunger, he told them.  And in the other
room, food.  He showed them food if they went under the wall into the
sisters' room and climbed on the beds and the bodies there.

Food if they hurried, food for all of them.  It was a lie, and
LollaWossiky wanted to shout at him not to do this.

If a Red man knelt and called to prey that he didn't need, the prey
would know his lie and wouldn't come.  The lie itself would cut the Red
man from the land, make him walk alone awhile.  But this White boy could
be with such force and strength that the tiny minds of the roaches
believed him.  They scurried, a hundred, a thousand of them under the
walls, into the other room.

Alvin Junior heard something, and he was delighted.  But LollaWossiky
was angry.  He opened his eye, so he didn't have to see Alvin Junior's
glee at his revenge.  Instead now he heard the sisters screaming as the
roaches climbed all over them.  And then the parents and brothers
rushing into their room.  And the stomping.  The stomping, the smashing,
the murders of the roaches.  Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye and felt the
deaths, each one a pinprick.  It had been so long with the black noise
masking all the deaths behind one vast memory of murder that
Lolla-Wossiky had forgotten what the small pains felt like.

Like the death of bees.

Roaches, useless animals, eating up garbage, making filthy rustling
noises in their dens, loathsome when they crawled on the skin; but part
of the land, part of the life, part of the green silence, and their
death was an evil noise, their useless murder because they believed in a
white man.

This is why I came, Lolla-Wossiky realized.  The land brought me here,
knowing that this boy had such power, knowing that there was no one to
teach him how to use it, no one to teach him to wait to feel the need of
the land before changing it.  No one to teach him how to be Red instead
of White.

I didn't come for my own dream beast, but to be the dream beast for this
boy.

The noise settled.  The sisters, the brothers, the parents went back to
sleep.  Lolla-Wossiky pressed his fingers into the cracks between the
logs, climbed carefully, his eye closed so that the land would guide him
instead of trusting in himself.  The boy's shutters were open, and
Lolla-Wossiky thrust his elbows over the sill and hung there, looking
in.

First with his eye open.  He saw a bed, a stool with clothes neatly
folded, and at the foot of the bed, a cradle.  The window opened onto
the space between the bed and the cradle.  In the bed, a shape,
boysized, unidentifiable.

Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye again.  Alvin lay in the bed.

LollaWossiky felt the heat of the boy's excitement like a fever. He had
been so afraid of being caught, so exhilarated at his victory, and now
lay trembling, trying to breathe calmly, trying to stifle laughter.

His eye open again, Lolia-Wossiky scrambled up onto the sill and swung
onto the floor.  He expected Alvin to notice him, to cry out; but the
shape of the boy lay still in the bed; there was no sound.

The boy couldn't see him when his eye was open, any more than he could
see the boy.  This was the end of the dream, after all, and LollaWossiky
was dream beast for the boy.  It was Lolla-Wossiky's duty to give
visions to the boy, not to be seen as himself, a whisky-Red with one eye
missing.

What vision will I show him?

Lolla-Wossiky reached inside his white man's trousers to where he still
wore his loincloth, and pulled his knife from its sheath.  He held both
his hands high, the one holding the knife.  Then he closed his eye.

The boy still didn't see him; his eyes were closed.  So Lolla-Wossiky
gathered the white light he could feel around him, gathered it close to
himself, so that he could feel himself shining brighter and brighter.

The light came from his skin, so he tore open the breast of the White
man's shirt he wore, then raised his hands again.  Now, even through
closed eyelids, the boy could see the brightness, and he opened his eye.

Lolla-Wossiky felt the boy's terror at the sight of the apparition he
had become: a bright and shining Red man, one-eyed, with a sharp knife
in his hand.  But it wasn't fear Lolla-Wossiky wanted.  No one should
fear his own dream beast.  So he sent the light outward to the boy, to
include him, and with the light he sent calm, calm, don't be scared.

The boy relaxed a little, but still wriggled up in his bed, so he was
sitting up, leaning against the wall.

It was time to begin to wake the boy from his life of sleep.  How did
Lolla-Wossiky know what to do?  No man, Red or White, had ever been
another man's dream beast.  Yet he knew without thinking what he ought
to do.  What the boy needed to see and feel.  Whatever came to
Lolla-Wossiky's mind that felt right to do, that was what he did.

Lolla-Wossiky took his shining knife and brought the blade against his
other palm-and cut.  Sharp, hard, deep, so blood leapt from the wound,
rushed down his forearm to gather and pool in his sleeve.

Quickly it began to drip on the floor.

The pain came suddenly, a moment later; Lolla-Wossiky knew at once how
to take the pain and make it into a picture and put it into the boy's
mind.  The picture of his sisters' room as a small weak creature saw it.
Rushing in, hungering, hungering, looking for the food, certain that the
food was there; on the soft body was the promise, climb the body, find
the food.  But great hands slapped and brushed, and the small creature
was thrown onto the floor.  The floor shook with giant footfalls, a
sudden shadow, the agony of death.

Again and again, each small life, hungering, trusting, and then
betrayed, crushed, battered.

Many lived, but they cowered, they scurried, they fled.  The sisters'
room, the room of death, yes, they fled from there.  But better to stay
there and die than run into the other room, the room of lies.  Not
words, there were no words in the small creature's life, there were no
thoughts that could be named as thoughts.  But the fear of death in the
one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world
gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be
trusted, where nothing was certain.  A terrible place.

Lolla-Wossiky ended the vision.  The boy was pressing his hands against
his eyes, sobbing desperately.  Lolla-Wossiky had never seen anyone so
tortured by remorse; the vision Lolla-Wossiky had given him was stronger
than any dream a man could imagine for himself.  I am a terrible dream
beast, thought Lolla-Wossiky.  He will wish I hadn't wakened him.  In
dread of his own strength, Lolla-Wossiky opened his eye.

At once the boy disappeared, and Lolla-Wossiky knew that the boy would
think that Lolla-Wossiky had also disappeared.  What now?  he thought.
Am I here to make this boy crazy?  To give him a terrible thing, as bad
as the black noise was to me?

He could see from the shaking of the bed, the movement of the
bedclothes, that the boy was still crying passionately.  Loila-Wossiky
closed his eye, and again sent the light to the boy.  Calm, calm.

The boy's weeping became a whimper, and he looked again at
Loila-Wossiky, who was still shining with a dazzling light.

LoBa-Wossiky didn't know what to do.  While he was silent and uncertain,
Alvin began to speak, to plead.  "I'm sorry, I'll never do it again,

Babbling on and on.  Loila-Wossiky pushed more light at him, to help him
see better.  It came to the boy almost as a question.  What will you
never do again?

Alvin couldn't answer, didn't know.  What was it he actually did?

Was it because he sent the roaches to die?

He looked at the Shining Man and saw an image of a Red kneeling before a
deer, calling it to come and die; the deer came, trembling, afraid; the
Red loosed his arrow and it stood quivering on the deer's flank; the
deer's legs wobbled, and it fell.  It wasn't the dying or the that was
his sin, because dying and killing were a part of LIFE.

Was it the power he had?  The knack he had for making things go just
where he wanted, to break just at the right place, or fit together so
tight that they joined forever without any gluing or hammering.

The knack he had for making things do what he wanted, arrange themselves
in the right order.  Was it that?

Again he looked at the Shining Man, and now he saw a vision of himself
pressing his hands against a stone, and the stone melted like butter
under his hands, came out in just the shape he wanted, smooth and whole,
fell from the side of the mountain and rolled away, a perfect ball, a
perfect sphere, growing and growing until it was a whole world, shaped
just the way his hands had made it, with trees and grass springing up in
its face, and animals running and leaping and flying and swimming and
crawling and burrowing on and above and beneath the ball of stone that
he had made.  No, it wasn't a terrible power, it was a glorious one, if
he only knew how to use it.

If it isn't the dying and it isn't the power, what did I do wrong?

This time the Shining Man didn't show him anything.  This time Alvin
didn't have the answer come to him in a vision.  This time he studied it
out in his mind.  He felt like he couldn't understand, he was too stupid
to understand, and then suddenly he knew.

It was because he did it for himself It was because the roaches thought
he was doing it for them, and really he was doing it for himself Hurting
the roaches, his sisters, everyone, making everyone suffer and all for
what?  Because Alvin Miller Junior was angry and wanted to get evenNow
he looked at the Shining Man and saw a fire leap from his single eye and
strike him in the heart.  "I'll never use it for myself again," murmured
Alvin Junior, and when he said the words he felt as though his heart
were on fire, it burned so hot inside.  And then the Shining Man
disappeared again.

Lolla-Wossiky stood panting, his head spinning.  He felt weak, weary. He
had no idea what the boy had been thinking.  He only knew what visions
to send him, and then at the end, no vision at all, just to stand there,
that's all he was to do, stand there and stand there until, suddenly, he
sent a strong pulse of fire at the boy and buried it in his heart.

And now what?  Twice now he had closed his eye and appeared to the boy.
Was he through?  He knew that he was not.

For the third time Loila-Wossiky closed his eye.  Now he could see that
the boy was much brighter than he was; that the light had passed from
him into the child.  And then he understood-he was the boy's dream
beast, yes, but the boy was also his.  Now it was time for him to wake
up from his dream life.

He took three steps and knelt beside the bed, his face only a little way
from the boy's small and frightened face, which now shone so brightly
that Lolla-Wossiky could hardly see that it was a child and not a man
who looked at him.  What do I want from him?  Why am I here?

What can he give me, this powerful child?

"Make all things whole," Lolla-Wossiky whispered.  He spoke, not in
English, but in ShawNee.

Did the boy understand?  Alvin raised his small hand, reached out gently
and touched Lolla-Wossiky's cheek, under the broken eye.

Then he raised his finger until it touched the slack eyelid.

There was a cracking sound in the air, and a spark of light.  The boy
gasped and drew back his hand.  Lolla-Wossiky didn't see him, though,
because suddenly the boy was invisible.  But Lolla-Wossiky had no care
for what he saw, for what he felt was the most impossible thing of all:
Silence.  Green silence.  The black noise was utterly, completely gone.
His land-sense had returned, and the ancient injury was healed.

Lofla-Wossiky knelt there, gasping for breath, as the land returned to
him the way that it had been before.  All these years had passed; he had
forgotten how strong it was, to see in all directions, hear the breath
of every animal, smell the scent of every plant.  A man who has been dry
and thirsty until he was at the point of death, and suddenly cold water
pours down his throat so fast he can't swallow, can't breathe; it's what
he longed for, but much too strong, much too sudden, can't contain it,
can't endure it"It didn't work," the boy whispered.  "I'm sorry."

Loila-Wossiky opened his good eye, and now for the first time saw the
boy as a natural man.  Alvin was staring at his bad eye.

LoilaWossiky wondered why; he reached up, touched his missing eye.

The lid still hung over an empty socket.  Then he understood.  The boy
thought that was what he was supposed to heal.  No, no, don't be
disappointed, child, you healed me from the deep injury; what do I care
about this tiny wound?  I never lost my sight; it was my landsense that
was gone, and you gave it back to me.

He meant to shout all this to the boy, cry out and sing for the joy of
it.  But it was all too strong for him.  The words never came to his
lips.

He couldn't even send him visions now because both of them were now
awake.  The dream was over.  They had each been dream beast for the
other.

LoBa-Wossiky seized the boy with both hands, pulled him close, kissed
him on the forehead, hard and strong, like a father to a son, like
brothers, like true friends the day before they die.  Then he ran to the
window, swung out and dropped to the ground.  The earth yielded to his
feet as it did to other Red men, as it hadn't done for him in so many
years; the grass rose up stronger where he stepped; the bushes parted
for him, the leaves softened and yielded as he ran among the trees; and
now he did cry out, shouted, sang, caring not at all who heard him.
Animals didn't run from him, as they used to; now they came to hear his
song; songbirds awoke to sing with him; a deer leapt from the wood and
ran beside him through a meadow, and he rested his hand upon her flank.

He ran until he had no breath, and in all that time he met no enemy, he
felt no pain; he was whole again, in every way that mattered.

He stood on the bank of the Wobbish River, across from the mouth of the
Tippy-Canoe, panting, laughing, gasping for air.

Only then did he realize that his hand was still dripping blood from
where he had cut himself to give pain to the White boy.  His pants and
shirt were thick with it.  White man's clothing!  I never needed it.  He
stripped it off and flung it into the river.

A funny thing happened.  The clothing didn't move.  It sat on the
surface of the water, not sinking, not sliding leftward with the
current.

How could this be?  Wasn't the dream over?  Wasn't he fully awake yet?

Lolla-Wossiky closed his eye, Immediately he saw a terrible thing and
shouted in fear.  As soon as he closed his eye, he saw the black noise
again, a great sheet of it, hard and frozen.  It was the river.

It was the water.  It was made of death.

He opened his eye, and it was water again, but still his clothing didn't
move.

He closed his eye, and saw that where the clothing was, light sparkled
on the surface of the black.  It pooled, it shone, it dazzled.

It was his own blood shining.

Now he could see that the black noise wasn't a thing.  It was nothing.
Emptiness.  The place where the land ended, and emptiness began; it was
the edge of the world.  But where his own blood sparkled, it was like a
bridge across nothingness.  Lolla-Wossiky knelt, his eye still closed,
and reached out with his cut and still-bleeding hand, touched the water.

It was solid, warm and solid.  He smeared his blood across the surface,
and it made a platform.  He crawled out onto the platform.  It was
smooth and hard as ice, only warm, welcoming.

He opened his eye.  It was a river again, except that under him it was
solid.  Wherever his blood had touched, the water was hard and smooth.

He crawled out to where the clothing was, slid it ahead of him.

All the way out to the middle of the river he crawled, and beyond the
middle, making a thin, glowing bridge of blood to the other side.

What he was doing was impossible.  The boy had done much more than heal
him.  He had changed the order of things.  It was frightening and
wonderful.  Lolla-Wossiky looked down into the water between his hands.

His own one-eyed reflection looked back up at him.  Then he closed his
eye, and a whole new vision leapt to view.

He saw himself standing in a clearing, speaking to a hundred Red men, a
thousand, from every tribe.  He saw them build a city of lodges, a
thousand, five thousand, ten thousand Reds, all of them strong and
whole, free of the White man's likker, the White man's hate.  In his
vision they called him the Prophet, but he insisted that he was not that
at all.  He was only the door, the open door.  Step through, he said,
and be strong, one people, one land.

The door.

Tenskwa-Tawa.

In his vision, his mother's face appeared, and she said that word to
him.  Tenskwa-Tawa.  It is your name now, for the dreamer is awake.

And more, he saw much more that night, staring downward into the solid
water of the Wobbish River, he saw so much that he could never tell it
all; in that hour on the water he saw the whole history of the land, the
life of every man and woman, White or Red or Black, who ever set foot on
it.  He saw the beginning and he saw the end.

Great wars and petty cruelties, all the murderings of men, all the sins;
but also all the goodness, all the beauty.

And above all, a vision of the Crystal City.  The city made of water as
solid and as clear as glass, water that would never melt, formed into
crystal towers so high that they should have cast shadows seven Miles
across the land.  But because they were so pure and clear they cast no
shadow at all, the sunlight passed unblocked through every inch and yard
and mile of it.  Wherever a man or woman stood, they could look deep
into the crystal and see all the visions that LollaWossiky saw now.
Perfect understanding, that was what they had, seeing with eyes of pure
sunlight and speaking with the voice of lightning.

Lolla-Wossiky, who from now on would be named Tenskwa-Tawa, did not know
if he would build the Crystal City, or live in it, or even see it before
he died.  It was enough to do the first things that he saw in the solid
water of the Wobbish River.  He looked and looked until his mind
couldn't see more.  Then he crawled across to the far shore, climbed
onto the bank, and walked until he came to the meadow he had seen in the
vision.

This was where he would call the Reds together, teach them what he saw
in his vision, and help them to be, not the strongest, but strong; not
the largest, but large; not the freest, but free.

A certain keg in the crotch of a certain tree.  All summer it was hidden
from view.  But the rain still found it, and the heat of high summer,
and the insects, and the teeth of salt-hungry squirrels.

Wetting, drying, heating, cooling; no keg can last forever in such
conditions.  It split, just a little, but enough; the liquid inside
seeped out, drop by drop; in a few hours the keg was empty.

It didn't matter.  No one ever looked for it.  No one ever missed it.

No one mourned when it broke apart from ice in the winter, the fragments
tumbling down the tree into the snow.

A Sign

When word started spreading about a one-eyed Red man who was called the
Prophet, Governor Bill Harrison laughed and said, "Why, that ain't
nobody but my old friend Lolla-Wossiky.  When he runs out of that likker
keg he stole from me, he'll quit seeing visions."

After a little while, though, Governor Harrison took note of how much
store was set by the Prophet's words, and how the Reds spoke his name as
reverent as a true Christian says the name of Jesus, and it got him
somewhat alarmed.  So he called together all the Reds around Carthage
City-it was nigh onto a whisky day, so there wasn't no shortage of
audience for him-and he gave them a speech.  And in that speech he said
one particular thing: "If old Lolla-Wossiky is really a Prophet, then he
ought to do us a miracle, to show he's got more to him than just talk.
You ought to make him cut off a hand or a foot and then put it
back-that'd prove he was a prophet now, wouldn't it?  Or better still,
make him put out an eye and then heal it back.  What's that you say? You
mean he already had his eye put out?  Well then he's ripe for a miracle,
wouldn't you say?  I say that as long as he's only got one eye, he ain't
no prophet!"

Word of that came to the Prophet while he was teaching in a meadow that
sloped gently down to the banks of the Tippy-Canoe, not a mile above
where it poured into the waters of the Wobbish.  It was some whisky-Reds
brought that challenge, and they wasn't above mocking the Prophet and
saying, "We came to see you make your eye whole."

The Prophet looked at them with his one good eye, and he said, "With
this eye I see two Red men, weak and sick, slaves of likker, the kind of
men who would mock me with the words of the man who killed my father."
Then he closed his good eye, and he said, "With this eye I see two
children of the land, whole and strong and beautiful, who love wives and
children, and do good to all creatures." Then he opened his eye again
and said, "Which eye is sick, and which eye sees true?" And they said to
him, "Tenskwa-Tawa, you are a true prophet, and both your eyes are
whole."

"Go tell White Murderer Harrison that I have performed the sign he asked
for.  And tell him another sign that he didn't ask for.  Tell him that
one day a fire will start in his own house.  No man's hand will set this
fire.  Only rain will put out this fire, and before the fire dies, it
will cut off something he loves more than a hand or a foot or an eye,
and he will not have the power to restore it, either"

Powder Keg

Hooch was astounded.  "You mean you don't want the whole shipment?"

"We ain't used up what you sold us last time, Hooch," said the
quartermaster.  "Four barrels, that's all we want.  More than we need,
to tell the truth."

"I come down the river from Dekane, loaded up with likker, not stopping
to sell any at the towns along the way, I make that sacrifice and you
tell me- "Now, Hooch, I reckon we all know what kind of sacrifice that
was." The quartermaster smirked a little.  "I think you'll still recover
your costs, pretty much, and if you don't, well, it just means you ain't
been careful with the profits you've made off us afore.  "Who else is
selling to you?"

"Nobody," said the quartermaster.

"I been coming to Carthage City for nigh on seven years now, and the
last four years I've had a monopoly- "And if you'll pay heed, you'll
remember that in the old days it used to be Reds what bought most of
your likker."

Hooch looked around, walked away from the quartermaster, stood on the
moist grassy ground of the riverbank.  His flatboat rocked lazily on the
water.  There wasn't a Red to be seen, not a one, and that was a fact.
But it wasn't no conspiracy, Hooch knew that.  Reds had been slacking
off the last few times he came.  Always there used to be a few drunks,
though.

He turned and shouted at the quartermaster.  "You telling me there ain't
no whisky-Reds left!"

"Sure there's whisky-Reds.  But we ain't run out of whisky yet.

So they're all off somewhere lying around being drunk."

Hooch cussed a little.  "I'm going to see the Governor about this.

"Not today you ain't," said the quartermaster.  "He's got himself a
right busy schedule."

Hooch grinned nastily.  "Oh, his schedule ain't too busy for me.

"It sure is, Hooch.  He said it real specific."

"I reckon he might think his schedule is too busy, boy, but I reckon it
just ain't so."

"Suit yourself," said the quartermaster.  "Want me to unload the four
barrels I got here?"

"No I don't," he said.  Then he shouted at his poleboys, most specially
at that Mike Fink, cause he looked to be the most likely to do murder if
need be.  "Anybody tries to lay a hand on that whisky, I want to see
four bullet holes in their body before we chuck him in the water!"

The poleboys laughed and waved, except Mike Fink, who just sort of
screwed his face up a little tighter.  That was one mean old boy.

They said you could tell which men had ever tried to wrassle Mike They
said, if you want to get away from Fink, cause they got no ea Fink with
one ear still on your head, you got to wait till he's chewing on your
first ear and then shoot him twice to distract him while you get away. A
real good riverboy.  But it made Hooch a little nervy to think what Fink
might do if Hooch didn't have a payroll for him.  Bill Harrison was
going to pay for this whole load of likker, or there'd be real trouble.

Walking into the stockade, Hooch noticed a few things.  The sign was the
same one Harrison put up four years ago; it was getting rattylooking
now, weathered up, but nobody changed it.  Town wasn't growing either.
Everything had lost that new look, and now it was plain shabby.

Not like the way things were going back in Ohio Territory.  What used to
be little stockade towns like this were turning into real towns, with
painted houses, even a few cobbled streets.  Ohio was booming, at least
the eastern part of it, close on to Suskwahenny, and folks speculated on
how it wasn't far from statehood.

But there wasn't no boom going, on in Carthage City.

Hooch walked along the main street inside the stockade.  Still plenty of
soldiers, and they still looked to have pretty good discipline, had to
give Governor Bill credit for that.  But where there used to be
whisky-Reds sprawled all over the place, now there was river-rat types,
uglier-looking than Mike Fink, unshaved, with a whisky stink as bad as
any likkered-up Red ever had.  Four old buildings had been turned into
saloons, too, and they were doing good business in the middle of the
afternoon.

That's why, thought Hooch.  That's the trouble.  Carthage City's gone
and turned into a river town, a saloon town.  Nobody wants to live
around here, with all these river rats.  It's a whisky town.

But if it's a whisky town, Governor Bill ought to be buying whisky from
me instead of this business about only wanting four barrels.

"You can wait if you want, Mr.  Palmer, but the Governor won't see you
today."

Hooch sat on the bench outside Harrison's office.  He noticed that
Harrison had switched offices with his adjutant.  Gave up his nice big
office in exchange for what?  Smaller space, but-all interior walls.

No WI Now, that meant something.  That meant Harrison didn't like having
people look in on him.  Maybe he was even afraid of getting himself
killed.

Hooch sat there for two hours, watching soldiers come in and out.

He tried not to get mad.  Harrison did this now and then, making
somebody sit around and wait so by the time they got in they was so
upset they couldn't think straight.  And sometimes he did it so a body'd
get in a huff and go away.  Or start to feeling small and unimportant,
so Harrison could do some bullying.  Hooch knew all this, so he tried to
stay calm.  But when it got on to evening, and the soldiers started
changing shifts and going off duty, it was more than he could stand.

"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded of the corporal who sat at
the front desk.

"Going off duty," said the corporal.

"But I'm still here, said Hooch.

"You can go off duty too, if you like," said the corporal.

That smart-mouthed answer was like a slap in the face.  Time was these
boys all tried to suck up to Hooch Palmer.  Times were changing too
fast.  Hooch didn't like it at all.  "I could buy your old mother and
sell her at a profit," said Hooch.

That got to him.  That corporal didn't look bored no more.  But he
didn't let himself haul off and take a swing, neither.  Just stood
there, more or less at attention, and said, "Mr.  Palmer, you can wait
here all night and wait here all day tomorrow, and you ain't going to
get in to see His Excellency the Governor.  And You just sitting here
waiting all day is Proof You're just too plain dumb to catch on to how
things are."

So it was Hooch lost his temper and took a swing.  Well, not a swing
exactly.  More like a kick, cause Hooch never did learn no rules about
fighting like a gentleman.  His idea of a duel was to wait behind a rock
for his enemy to pass by, shoot him in the back, and run like hell.  So
that corporal got Hooch's big old boot in his knee, which bent his leg
backward in a way it wasn't meant to go.  That corporal screamed bloody
murder, which he had a right to, and not just from the painafter a kick
like that, his leg would never be any good again.

Hooch probably shouldn't've kicked him there, he knew, but that boy was
so snooty.  Practically begged for it.

Trouble was, the corporal wasn't exactly alone.  First yelp he made, all
of a sudden there was a sergeant and four soldiers, bayonets at the
ready, popping right out of the Governor's office and looking mad as
hornets.  The sergeant ordered two of his boys to carry the corporal to
the infirmary.  The others put Hooch under arrest.  But it wasn't
gentlemanly like that last time, four years before.  This time the butts
of their muskets got bumped into Hooch's body in a few places, sort of
accidentally, and Hooch had him some boot prints in various places on
his clothes, can't say how they got there.  He ended up locked in a jail
cell-no storage room this time.  They left him with his clothes and a
lot of pain.

No doubt about it.  Things had changed around here.

That night six other men were put in lock-up, three of them drunks,
three for brawling.  Not one was Red.  Hooch listened to them talking.
It's not like any of them was particularly bright, but Hooch couldn't
believe that they didn't talk about beating up no Reds, or making fun
with some of them or something.  It was like Reds had practically
disappeared from the vicinity.  Well, maybe that was true.

Maybe the Reds had all took off, but wasn't that what Governor Harrison
hoped for?  With the Reds gone, why wasn't Carthage City prosperous,
full of White settlers?

The only inkling Hooch got was something one of the brawlers said.

"I reckon I'm broke till taxseason." The others whooped and hollered a
little.  "I got to say I don't mind government service, but it sure
ain't steady work."

Hooch knew better than to ask them what they meant.  No need to call
attention to himself.  He sure didn't want word getting around about how
he looked all beat up the night he spent in jail.  That kind of idea
starts spreading and pretty soon everybody thinks he can beat a body up,
and Hooch didn't reckon to start all over as a common street brawler,
not at his age.

In the morning the soldiers came for him.  Different ones, and this time
they wasn't so careless with their feet and their musket butts.

They just marched Hooch on out of the jail and now, finally, he got to
see Bill Harrison.

But not in his office.  It was in his own Governor's mansion, in a
cellar room.  And the way they got there was peculiar.  The soldiersmust
have been a dozen of them-just marched along behind the house, when all
of a sudden one of them dashed over, flung up the cellar door, and two
others half dragged Hooch down the steps.  Cellar door slammed shut
almost before their heads were clear of it, and in all that time the
soldiers just kept right on marching, as if nothing was happening. Hooch
didn't like that at all.  It meant that Harrison didn't want anybody to
see that Hooch was with him.  Which meant this meeting could get pretty
ugly, cause Harrison could deny it ever happened.  Oh, the soldiers
knew, of course, but they all knew about a certain corporal who got his
knee bent the wrong way last night; they weren't about to testify on
Hooch Palmer's behalf.

Harrison was his old self, though, smiling and shaking Hooch by the hand
and clapping him on the shoulder.  "How are you, Hooch?"

"I been better, Gov.  How's your wife?  And that little boy of yours?"

"She's healthy as you could hope for, a refined lady like her being out
here on the frontier.  And my little boy, he's quite a soldier, we even
stitched him up a little uniform, you should see him strutting on
parade.

"It's talk like that makes me think I ought to take a wife someday.  "I
heartily recommend it.  Oh, here, Hooch, what am I thinking of?

You set down, set down right there."

Hooch sat.  "Thanks, Bill."

Harrison nodded, satisfied.  "It's good to see you, it's been so long.
"Wisht I'd've seen you yesterday," said Hooch.

Harrison smiled ruefully.  "Well, I get busy.  Didn't my boys tell you I
had a full-up schedule?"

"Schedule never used to be full for me, Bill."

"You know how it gets sometimes.  Real busy, and what can I do about
it?"

Hooch shook his head.  "Now, Bill, we've lied to each other just about
long enough, I think.  What happened was part of a plan, and it wasn't
my plan."

"What are you talking about, Hooch?"

"I'm saying maybe that corporal didn't want his leg broke, but I have a
feeling his job was to get me swinging at him."

"His orders was to see that nobody disturbed me unless they were on my
schedule, Hooch.  That's the only plan I know about." Harris n looked
sad.  "Hooch, I got to tell You, this is real ugly.  Assaulting an
officer of the U.S.  Army."

"A corporal ain't no officer, Bill."

"I only wish I could ship you back to Suskwahenny for -trial ers there,
and juries, and so on.  But the trial Hooch.  They got law has to be
here, and juries around here ain't too partial to folks who go around
breaking corporals' knees."

"Suppose you stop the threats and tell me what you really want?"

"Want?  I ain't asking for favors, Hooch.  Just concerned about a friend
of mine who's got himself in trouble with the law."

"It must be something real sickening or you'd bribe me to do it instead
of trying to strong-arm me.  It must be something that you think I
wouldn't be willing to do unless you scare me to death, and I keep
trying to imagine what you think is so bad that you think I wouldn't do
it.  It ain't much of a list, Bill."

Harrison shook his head.  "Hooch, you got me wrong.  Just plain wrong."

"This town is dying, Bill," said Hooch.  "Things ain't working out like
you planned.  And I think it's cause you done some real dumb things.

I think the Reds started going away-or maybe they all died off-and you
made the stupid mistake of trying to make up for all that lost likker
income by bringing in the scum of the earth, the worst kind of White
man, the river rats who spent the night in jail with me.

You've used them to collect taxes, right?  Farmers don't like taxes.
They specially don't like taxes when they're collected by scum like
this."

Harrison poured himself three fingers of whisky in a tumbler and drank
off half of it in a single gulp.

"So you been losing your whisky-Reds, and you been losing your White
farmers, and all you got left is your soldiers, the river rats, and
whatever money you can steal from the United States Army appropriation
for peace-keeping in the west."

Harrison drank the rest of the whisky and belched.

"What that means is you've been unlucky and you've been stupid, and
somehow you think you can make me get you out of it."

Harrison poured another three fingers into the glass.  But instead of
drinking it, he hauled off and threw it into Hooch's face.  The whisky
splashed in his eyes, the tumbler bounced off his forehead, and Hooch
found himself rolling on the floor trying to dig the alcohol out of his
eyes.

A while later, with a wet cloth pressed against his forehead, Hooch was
sitting in the chair again, acting a lot more meek and reasonable.

But that was because he knew Harrison had a flush and his own hand was
just two pair.  Get out of here alive and then just see what comes next,
right?

"I wasn't stupid," Harrison said.

No, you're the smartest governor Carthage ever had.  I'm surprised you
ain't King.  That's what Hooch would've said.  But he was keeping his
mouth shut.

"It was that Prophet.  That Red up north.  Building his Prophetstown
right across the Wobbish from Vigor Church-you can't tell me that's just
a coincidence.  It's Armor-of-God, that's what it is, trying to take the
state of Wobbish away from me.  Using a Red to do it, too.

I knew that a lot of Reds were going north, everybody knew that, but I
still had me my whisky-Reds, them as hadn't died off.  And with fewer
Reds around herespecially the ShawNee, when they leftwell, I thought I'd
get more White settlers.  And you're wrong about my tax collectors. They
didn't run the White settlers off.  It was TaKumsaw."

"I thought it was the Prophet."

"Don't get smart with me, Hooch, I don't have much patience these days."

Why didn't you warn me before you threw the glass?  No, no, don't y say
nothing to make him mad.  "Sorry, Bill."

"Ta-Kumsaw's been real smart.  He doesn't kill White folks.  He just
shows up at their farms with fifty ShawNee.  Doesn't shoot anybody, but
when you got fifty painted-up warriors all around your house, these
White folks didn't exactly figure it was smart to start shooting.  So
the White farmers watched while the ShawNee opened every gate, every
stable, every coop.  Let them animals go on out.

Horses, pigs, milk cows, chickens.  Just like Noah bringing beasts into
the ark, the ShawNee walk into the woods and the animals trot on right
behind.  Just like that.  Never see them again."

"You can't tell me they never round up at least some of their stock."

"All gone.  Never find even their tracks.  Never even a feather from a
chicken.  That's what run the White farmers off, is knowing that any
day, all their animals can disappear."

"ShawNee eating them or something?  Ain't no chicken smart enough to
live long in the woods.  It's just Christmas time for foxes, that's all
it is."

"How should I know?  White folks come to me, they say, Get our animals
back, or kill Reds what took them.  But my soldiers, my scouts, nobody
can find where Ta-Kumsaw's people are.  No villag at all!  I tried
raiding a Caska-Skeeaw village up the Little My-Ammy, but all that did
was convince more Reds to leave, didn't even slow down what Ta-Kumsaw
was doing."

Hooch could imagine what that raid on the Caska-Skeeaw village was like.
Old men, women, children, their corpses shot up and halfbumt-Hooch knew
how Harrison dealt with Reds.

"And then last month, here comes the Prophet.  I knew he was coming-even
the whisky-Reds couldn't talk about nothing else.

Prophet's coming.  Got to go see the Prophet.  Well, I tried to find out
where he was going to be, where he was going to give a speech, I even
had some of my tame Reds try to find out for me, but no dice, Hooch.

through the Not a clue.  Nobody knew.  Just one day the word went u
whole town, Prophet's here.  Where?  Just come on, Prophet's here.

No one ever said where.  I swear these Reds can talk without talking, if
you know what I mean."

"Bill, tell me you had spies there, or I'll start to thinking you lost
your touch."

"Spies?  I went myself, how's that?  And do you know how?

TaKumsaw sent me an invitation, if that don't beat all.  No soldiers, no
guns, just me."

And you went?  He could've captured you and' "He gave me his word.
Ta-Kumsaw may be a Red, but he keeps his word."

Hooch thought that was kind of funny.  Harrison, the man who prided
himself on never keeping a promise to a Red man, but he still counted on
Ta-Kumsaw keeping a promise to him.  Well, he got back alive, didn't he?
So Ta-Kumsaw was as good as his word.

,i went there.  Must've been every Red in the whole My-Ammy country
there.  Must've been ten thousand.  Squatting around in this old
abandoned cornfield-there's plenty of them in these parts, you can bet,
thanks toTa-Kumsaw.  If I'd had my two cannon there and a hundred
soldiers, I could've ended the whole Red problem, then and there.  "
"Too bad you didn't," said Hooch.

"Ta-Kumsaw wanted me to sit right up front, but I wouldn't.  I hung back
and I listened.  The Prophet got up, stood on an old stump in the field,
and he talked and talked and talked."

"You understand any of it?  I mean, you don't talk ShawNee."

"He was talking English, Hooch.  Too many different tribes there, the
only language they all knew was English.  Oh, sometimes he talked in
that Red gibberish, but there was plenty of English.  Talking about the
destiny of the Red man.  Stay pure from White contamination.  Live all
together and fill up a part of the land so the White man will have his
place and the Red man will have his.  Build a city-a crystal city, he
said, it sounded real pretty except these Reds can't even build a proper
shed, I hate to think how they'd do at building a city out of glass! But
most of all, he said, Don't drink likker.  Not a drop.

Give it up, stay away from it.  Likker is the chain of the White man,
the chain and the whip, the chain and the whip and the knife.

First he'll catch you, then he'll whip you, then he'll kill you, likker
will, and when the White man's killed you with his whisky, he'll come in
and steal your land, destroy it, make it unfit, dead, useless."

"Sounds like he made a real impression on you, Bill," said Hooch.

"Sounds like you memorized the speech he gave."

"Memorized?  He talked for three straight hours.  Talked about visions
of the past, visions of the future.  Talked abouth, Hooch, it was crazy
stuff, but those Reds were drinking it up like, like-"

"Whisky."

"Like whisky except it was instead of whisky.  They all went with him.
Pretty near all of them, anyway.  Only ones left are a few whiskyReds
that're bound to die soon.  And of course my tame Reds, but that's
different.  And some wild Reds across the Ohio."

"Went with him where?"

"Prophetstown!  That's what kills me, Hooch.  They all go up to
Prophetstown, or thereabouts, right across the river from Vigor Church.

And that's exactly where all the Whites are going!  Well, not all to
Vigor Church, but up into the lands where Armor-of-Hell Weaver has his
maps.  They're in cahoots, Hooch, I promise you that.

Ta-Kumsaw, Armor-of-God Weaver, and the Prophet."

"Sounds like."

"The worst thing is I had that Prophet here in my own office must be a
thousand times, I could have killed that boy and saved myself more
trouble-but you never know, do you?"

,you know this Prophet?"

,You mean you don't know who it is?"

"I don't know that many Reds by name, Bill."

,How about if I tell you that he's only got one eye?"

"YOU ain't saying it's Lolla-Wossiky!"

"Reckon so."

"That one-eyed drunk?"

"He  Calls himself Tenskwa-Tawa now.  It "God's own truth, Hooc means
'the open door' or something.  I'd like to shut that door.  I should've
killed him when I had the chance.  But I figured when he ran off-he ran
off, you know, stole a keg and took off into the woods-"

"I was here that night, I helped chase him."

Well when he didn't come back, I figured he probably drank him off that
keg.  But there he is telling Reds how he used to drink himself to death
but God sent him visions and he's never had another drink.

"Send me visions, I'd give up drinking, too."

Harrison took another swallow of whisky.  From the jug, this time, since
the tumbler was on the floor in the corner of the room.  "You see my
problem, Hooch."

"I see you got lots of problems, Bill, and I don't know how any of them
has a thing to do with me, except you weren't joking when you had the
quartermaster tell me you only wanted four barrels."

"Oh, it's got more to do with you than that, count on it, HoochMore than
that.  Because I ain't beat.  The Prophet's took away all my
whisky-Reds, and Ta-Kumsaw's got my White citizens scared, but I ain't
quitting."

"No, you're no quitter," said Hooch.  You're a slimy sneaky snake of a
man, but you're no quitter.  Didn't say that, of course, cause Harrison
was bound to take it wrong-but to Hooch, it was all praise.

His kind of man.

"It's Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet, simple as that.  I got to kill I got to

them.  No, no, I take it back.  I got to beat them and kill them

in both look like fools and then kill them."

take them on and make the

"Good idea.  I'll handle the belling on it."

"I bet You would.  Stand there taking bets.  Well, I can't just
takceaumsye soldiers up north to Vigor Church and wipe out Prophetstown,
Armor-of-God would fight me every step of the way, probably get the army
detachment at Fort Wayne to back him up.

Probably get my commission st ripped or something.  So I've got to
arrange things so the people in Vigor Church, all along the Wobbish,
they all beg me to come up and get rid of them Reds."

Now, at last, Hooch understood what this was all about.  "You want a
provocation."

"That's my boy, Hooch.  That's my boy.  I want some Reds to go up north
and make some real trouble, and tell everybody that Ta-Kumsaw and the
Prophet told them to do it.  Blame it all on them."

Hooch nodded.  "I see.  It couldn't be just running off their cows or
nothing like that.  No, the only thing that'll get those people up north
screaming for Red blood is something real ugly.  Like capturing children
and torturing them to death and then signing Ta-Kumsaw's name on them
and leaving them where they'll be found.  Something like that."

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to tell anybody to do something awful
like that, Hooch.  In fact I don't reckon I'd give them specific
instructions at all.  Just tell them to do something that'd rile up the
Whites up north, and then spread the word that Ta-Kumsaw ordered "But
you wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be rape and torture.  "

"I wouldn't want them to touch any White women, Hooch.  That's out of
line. "

"Oh, that's right, pure truth," said Hooch.  "So it's definitely
torturing children.  Boy children."

"Like I said, I wouldn't ever tell somebody to do a thing like that."

Hooch nodded a little, his eyes closed.  Harrison might not tell
somebody to do it, but he sure wasn't telling him not to do it, either.

"And of course it couldn't be any Reds from around here, could it, Bill,
cause they're all gone, and your tame Reds are the most worthless scum
that ever lived on the face of the earth."

"Pretty much, that's true."

"So you need Reds from south of the river.  Reds who still haven't heard
the Prophet's preaching, so they still want likker.  Reds who still have
brains enough to do the job right.  Reds who have the blood thirst to
kill children real slow.  And you need my cargo as a bribe."

"Reckon so, Hooch."

"You got it, Bill.  Dismiss charges against me, and you got all my
likker free.  Just give me enough money to pay off my poleboys so they
don't knife me on the way home, I hope that ain't too much to ask."

"Now, Hooch, you know that ain't all I need."

"But Bill, that's all I'll do."

"I can't be the one to go ask them, Hooch.  I can't be the one to go
tell them Cree-Eks or ChocTaws what I need done.  It's got to be
somebody else, somebody who if it gets found out I can say, I never told
him to do that.  He used his own whisky to do it, I didn't have any
idea."

"I understand you, but you guessed right from the start.  You actually
found something so low that I won't be part of it."

Harrison glowered at him.  "Assaulting an officer is a hanging offense
in this fort, Hooch.  Didn't I make that clear?"

"Bill, I've lied, cheated, and sometimes killed to get ahead in the
world.  But one thing I've never done is bribe somebody to go steal some
mother's children and torture them to death.  I honestly never did that,
and I honestly never will."

Harrison studied Hooch's face and saw that it was true.  "Well, don't
that beat all.  There's actually a sin so bad that Hooch Palmer won't do
it, even if he dies because of it."

"You won't kill me, Bill."

"Oh yes I will, Hooch.  There's two reasons I will.  First, you gave me
the wrong answer to my request.  And second, you heard my request in the
first place.  You're a dead man, Hooch."

"Fine with me," said Hooch.  "Make it a real scratchy rope, too.

A good and tall gallows, with a twenty-foot drop.  I want a hanging that
folks'll remember for a long time."

"You'll get a tree limb and we'll raise the rope up slow, so you
strangle instead of breaking your neck."

"Just so it's memorable," said Hooch.

Harrison called in some soldiers and had them take Hooch back to jail.
This time they did a little kicking and poking, so Hooch had a whole new
batch of bruises, and maybe a broken rib.

He also didn't have much time.

So he lay down real calm on the floor of the jail.  The drunks were
gone, but the three brawlers were still there, using all the cots; the
floor was all that was available.  Hooch didn't much care.  He knew
Harrison would give him an hour or two to think about it, then take him
out and put the rope around his neck and kill him.  He might pretend to
give him one last chance, of course, but he wouldn't mean it, because
now he wouldn't trust Hooch.  Hooch had told him no, and so he'd never
trust him to carry out the assignment if he let him go.

Well, Hooch planned to use the time wisely.  He started out pretty
simply.  He closed his eyes and let some heat build up inside him.  A
spark.  And then he sent that spark outside himself.  It was like what
doodlebugs said they did, sending out their bug to go searching
underground and see what it could see.  He set his spark to searching
and pretty soon he found what he was looking for.  Governor Bill's own
house.  His spark was too far away by now for him to find some
particular spot in the house.  And his aim couldn't be too tight.  So
instead he just pumped all his hate and rage and pain into the spark,
built it hotter and hotter and hotter.  He let himself go like he never
done before in his life.  And he kept pushing it and pushing it until he
started hearing that most welcome sound.

"Fire!  Fire!" The shouts came from outside, from far away, but more and
more people took up the cry.  Gunshots went off-distress signals.

The three brawlers heard it, too.  One of them stepped on Hooch where he
was lying on the floor, they were in such a hurry.  Stood at the door,
they did, rattling and shouting at the guard.  "Let us out!

Don't go trying to fight that fire without letting us out first!

Don't let us die in here!"

Hooch hardly noticed the man stepping on him, he already hurt so bad.
Instead he just lay there, using his spark again, only this time heating
up the metal inside the lock of the jail door.  Now his aim was tight
and his spark could get much hotter.

The guard came in and put his key in the lock, turned it, opened the
door.  "You boys can come on out," he said.  "Sergeant said so, we need
you to help with the fire brigade."

Hooch struggled to his feet, but the guard straight-armed him and shoved
him back into the cell.  Hooch wasn't surprised.  But he made the spark
go hotter yet, so hot that now the iron of the lock melted inside.  It
even glowed red a little.  The guard slammed the door shut and went to
turn the key.  By now it was so hot that it burned his hand.  He cussed
and went for his shirttail to try and grab the key, but Hooch kicked the
door open, knocking the guard down.  He stomped the guard in the face
and kicked his head, which probably broke his neck, but Hooch didn't
think of that as murder.  He thought of it as justice, cause the guard
had been all set to leave him locked in his cell to burn to death.

Hooch walked on out of the jail.  Nobody paid him much attention.

but he could see the smoke He couldn't see the mansion from here,
rising.  Sky was low and grey.  Probably it'd rain before it burned the
stockade.  Hooch sure hoped not, though.  Hoped the whole place burned
to the ground.  It was one thing to want to kill off Reds, that Kill was
fine with Hooch, he and Harrison saw eye to eye on that them with likker
if you Can, bullets if you can't.  But you don't go killing White folks,
you don't go hiring Reds to torture White babies.

maybe to Harrison it was all part of the same thing.  Maybe to him it
was like White soldiers having to die in a war with Reds only the
soldiers'd just be a little younger.  All in a good cause, right?

Maybe It actually took Harrison could think that way, but Hooch couldn't
drew Jackson him by surprise, to tell the truth.  He was more like An He
drew it in than he ever supposed.  He had a line he wouldn't cross but
still, he had a line, and a different place than old Hickory did, he'd
die before he crossed it.

of course he didn't reckon to die if he could help it.  He couldn't go
out the stockade gate, cause the bucket line to the river would go
through there and he'd be seen.  But it was easy enough to climb UP to
the parapet.  The soldiers weren't exactly keeping a lookout.  He
clambered over the wall and dropped down outside the fort.

Nobody saw him.  He walked the ten yards into the woods, then made his
wayslowly, cause his ribs hurt pretty bad and he was a little weak from
so much sparking, it took something out of him-through the woods to the
riverbank.

He came out of the woods on the far side of the open area around the
wharf.  There was his flatboat, still loaded up with all his kegs.

And his poleboys standing around, watching the bucket brigade dipping
into the river some thirty yards farther upstream.  It didn't surere
helping with prise Hooch a bit that his poleboys weren't over the
buckets.  They weren't exactly the public-spirited type.

Hooch walked out onto the wharf, beckoning for the poleboys to come join
him.  He jumped down to the flatboat; stumbled a little, from being weak
and hurting.  He turned around to tell his boys what was happening, why
they had to push off, but they hadn't followed.

They just stood there on the bank, looking at him.  He beckoned again,
but they didn't make a move to come.

Well, then, he'd go without them.  He was even moving toward the rope,
to cast off and pole himself away, when he realized that not a the
poleboys were on shore.  No, there was one missing.  And he knew right
where that missing boy would be.  Right there on the flatboat, standing
right behind him, reaching out his handsMike Fink wasn't the knifing
kind.  Oh, he'd knife you if he had to, but he'd rather kill with his
bare hands.  He used to say something about killing with a knife, some
comparison with whores and a broomstick.  Anyway, that's why Hooch knew
that it wouldn't be a knife.  That it wouldn't be quick.

Harrison must've known Hooch might get away, so he bought off Mike Fink,
and now Fink would kill him sure.

Sure, but slow.  And slow gave Hooch time.  Time to make sure he didn't
die alone.

So as the fingers closed around his throat and cinched tight, much
tighter than Hooch ever imagined, clamping him so he thought his head
would get wrung right off, he forced himself to make his spark go, to
find that keg, that one place, he knew right where the place was on the
flatboat, to hot up that keg, as hot as he could, hotter, hotterAnd he
waited for the explosion, waited and waited, but it never came.  It felt
like Fink's fingers had pressed through the front of his throat clear to
the spine, and he felt all his muscles just give way, he felt himself
kicking, his lungs heaving to try to suck in air that just wouldn't
come, but he kept his spark going till the last second, waiting for the
gunpowder keg to blow.

Then he died.

Mike Fink hung on to him for another whole minute after he was dead,
maybe just cause he liked the feel of a dead man dangling from his
hands.  Hard to tell with Mike Fink.  Some folks said he was as nice a
man as you could hope to find, when he was in the mood.  Sure that's
what Mike thought of himself He liked to be nice and have friends and
drink real sociable.  But when it came to killing, well, he liked that
too.

But you can't just hang on to a dead body forever.  For one thing,
somebody's going to start complaining about it or maybe puking.  So he
shoved Hooch's body off into the water.

"Smoke," said one of the poleboys, pointing.

Sure enough, there was smoke coming out of the middle of the pile of
kegs.

"It's the gunpowder keg!" shouted one of them.

Well, the poleboys took off running to get away from the explosion, but
Mike Fink just laughed and laughed.  He walked over and started
unloading kegs, hoisting them onto the wharf, unloading them until he
got to the middle where there was a keg with a fuse coming out of it. He
didn't pick that one up with his hands, though.  He tipped it over with
his heel, then kind of rolled it along til it was on the open area
around the edge of the boat.

By now the poleboys had come back to see what was going on, since it
looked pretty much like Mike Fink wasn't going to blow up after all.

"Hatchet," Mike called out, and one of the boys tossed him the one he
kept in a sheath at his belt.  It took a few good whacks, but the top
finally sprung off the keg, and a whole cloud of steam came up. The
water inside was so hot it was still boiling.

"You mean it wasn't gunpowder after all?" asked of the boys.  Not a
bright one, but then not many rivermen was famous for brains.

"Oh, it was gunpowder when he set it down here," said Mike.

"Back in Suskwahenny.  But you don't think Mike Fink'd go all the way
down the Ohio River on the same flatboat with a keg of powder with a
fuse coming out of it, do you?"

Then Mike jumped off the boat up onto the wharf and bellowed at the top
of his voice, so loud that they heard him clear inside the fort, so loud
that the bucket brigade stopped long enough to listen.

"My name is Mike Fink, boys, and I'm the meanest lowdown son of an
alligator that ever bit off the head of a buffalo!  I eat growed men's
ears for breakfast and bears' ears for supper, and when I'm thirsty I
can drink enough to stop Niagara from falling.  When I piss folks get on
flatboats and float downstream for fifty mile, and when I fart the
Frenchmen catch the air in bottles and sell it for perfume.  I'm Mike
Fink, and this my flatboat, and if you miserable little pukes ever put
that fire out, there's a free pint of whisky in it for every one of
you!"

Then Mike Fink led the poleboys over and joined the bucket brigade, and
they slowed the fire down until the rain came and put it out.

That night, with all the soldiers drinking and singing, Mike Fink was
sitting up sober as you please, feeling pretty good about finally being
in the likker business for himself.  Only one of the poleboys was with
him now, the youngest fellow, who kind of looked up to Fink.

The boy was setting there playing with the fuse that used to go into a
gunpowder keg.

"This fuse wasn't lit," said the poleboy.

"No, I reckon not," said Mike Fink.

"Well, how'd the water get to boiling then?"

"Reckon Hooch had a few tricks up his sleeve.  Reckon Hooch had
something to do with the fire in the fort."

"You knew that, didn't you?"

Fink shook his head.  "Nope, just lucky.  I'm just plain lucky.  I just
get a feeling about things, like I had a feeling about that gunpowder
keg, and I just do what I feel like doing."

"You mean like a knack?"

In answer, Fink stood up and pulled down his trousers.  There on his
left buttock was a sprawl of a tattoo, six-sided and dangerouslooking.
"My mama had that poked on when I wasn't a month old.

Said that'd keep me safe so I'd live out my whole natural life."

He turned and showed the boy the other buttock.  "And that one she said
was to help me make my fortune.  I didn't know how it'd work, and she
died without telling me, but as near as I can tell it makes me lucky.

Makes it so I just kind of know what I ought to do." He grinned. "Got me
a flatboat now, and a cargo of whisky, don't I?"

"Is the Governor really going to give you a medal for killing Hooch?"

"Well, for catching him, anyhow, looks like."

"I don't guess the Gov. looked too bothered that old Hooch was dead,
though.  "Nope," said Fink.  "No, I reckon not.  No, me and the Goy,
we're good friends now.  He says he's got some things need doing, that
only a man like me can do."

The poleboy looked at him with adoration in his eighteen-year-old eyes.
"Can I help you?  Can I come with you?"

"You ever been in a fight?"

"A lot of fights!"

"You ever bit off an ear?"

"No, but I gouged out a man's eye once."

"Eyes are easy.  Eyes are soft."

"And I butted a man's head so he lost five teeth."

Fink considered that for a few seconds.  Then he grinned and nodded.
"Sure, you come along with me, boy.  By the time I'm through, there
ain't a man woman or child within a hundred mile of this river who won't
know my name.  Do you doubt that, boy?"

The boy didn't doubt it.

In the morning, Mike Fink and his crew pushed off for the south bank of
the Ohio, loaded with a wagon, some mules, and eight kegs of whisky.
Bound to do a little trading with the Reds.

In the afternoon, Governor William Harrison buried the chaffed remains
of his second wife and their little boy, who had the misfortune of being
in the nursery together, dressing the boy in his little parade uniform,
when the room burst into flames.

A fire in his own house, set by no hand, which cut off what he loved the
most, and no power on earth could bring them back.

Captives

Alvin Junior never felt small except when he was setting on the back of
a big old horse.  Not to say he wasn't a good rider-he and horses got
along pretty good, they never throwing him and he never whipping them.
It's just that his legs stuck way out on both sides, and since he was
riding with a saddle on this trip, the stirrup had to be hiked up so far
they punched new holes in the leather so he could ride.  Al was looking
forward to the day he growed up to be man-size.

Other folks might tell him he was right big for his age, but that didn't
amount to nothing in Alvin's opinion.  When your age is ten, big for
your age ain't nothing like being big.

"I don't like it," said Faith Miller.  "Don't like sending my boys off
in the middle of all these Red troubles.  Mother always worried, but she
had good cause.  All his life Al was kind of clumsy, always having
accidents.  Things turned out fine in the end, but it was nip and tuck a
lot of the time.  Worst was a few months ago, when the new millstone
fell on his leg and gave it a real ugly break.  It looked like he was
going to die, and he pretty much expected to himself.

Would have, too.  Surely would have.  Even though he knew he had the
power to heal himself.

Ever since the Shining Man came to him in his room that night when he
was six, Al had never used his knack to help himself.  Cutting stone for
his father, that he could do, cause it would help everybody.

He'd run his fingers on the stone, get the feel of it, find the hidden
places in the stone where it could break, and then set it all in order,
just make it go that way; and the stone would come out, just right, just
the way he asked.  But never for his own good.

Then with his leg broke and the skin tore up, everybody knowed he was
bound to die.  And Al never would've used his knack for fixing things to
heal himself, never would've tried, except old Taleswapper was there.
Taleswapper asked him, why don't you fix your leg?" He then told him
what he never told a soul before, about the ? Shining Man.  Taleswapper
believed him, too, didn't think he was crazy or dreaming.  He made Al
think back, think real hard, and remember what the Shining Man said. And
when Al remembered, it come to him that it was Al himself who said that
about never doing it for himself The Shining Man just said, "Make all
things whole."

Make all things whole.  Well, wasn't his leg part of "all things"?

So he fixed it, best he could.  There was a lot more to it than that,
but all in all he used his own power, with the help of his family, to
heal himself.  That's why he was alive.

But during those days he looked death in the face and he wasn't as
scared of it as he thought he'd be.  Lying there with death seeping
through his bone, he began to feel like his body was just a kind of
lean-to, a shelter he lived in during bad weather till his house was
built.  Like them shanty cabins new folks built till they could get a
log house set up proper.  And if he died, it wouldn't be awful at all.

Just different, and maybe better.

So when his ma went on and on about the Reds and how dangerous it was
and how they might get killed, he didn't give no heed.  Not because he
thought that she was wrong, but because he didn't much care whether he
died or not.

Well, no, that wasn't quite so.  He had a lot of -things to do, though
he didn't know yet what they were, and so he'd be annoyed about dying.
He sure didn't plan to die.  It just didn't fill him up with fear like
it did some folks.

Al's big brother Measure was trying to get Ma to ease off and not get
herself all worked up.  "We'll be all right, Mama," said Measure.

"All the trouble's down south, and we'll be on good roads all the way.

"Folks disappear every week on those good roads," she said.

Those French up in Detroit are buying scalps, they don't never let up on
that, don't matter one bit what Ta-Kumsaw and his savages are doing, it
only takes one arrow to kill You-"

"Ma," said Measure.  "If you're'a-scared of Reds getting us, you ought
to want us to go.  I mean there's ten thousand Reds at least living in
Prophetstown right across the river.  It's the biggest city west of
Philadelphia right now, and every one of them is a Red.  We're getting
away from Reds by going east-"

"That one-eyed Prophet don't worry me," she said.  "He never about g.  I
just think you shouldn't-"

"It don't matter what you think," said Pa.

Ma turned to face him.  He'd been slopping the hogs out back, but now he
was come around to say good-bye.  "Don't you tell me it don't matter
what I-"

"It don't matter what I think, neither," said Pa.  "It don't matter what
anybody thinks, and you know it."

"Then I don't see why the good Lord gave us brains, then, if that's how
things are, Alvin Miller!"

"Al's going east to Hatrack River to be an apprentice blacksmith," said
Pa.  "I'll miss him, you'll miss him, everybody except maybe Reverend
Thrower's going to miss the boy, but the papers are signed and Al Junior
is going.  So instead of jawing how you don't want them to go, kiss the
boys good-bye and wave them off."

If Pa'd been milk she would've curdled him on the spot, she gave him
such a look.  "I'll kiss my boys, and I'll wave them off," she said.

"I don't need you to tell me that.  I don't need you to tell me
anything."

"I reckon not," said Pa.  "But I'll tell you anyway, and I reckon you'll
return the favor, just like you always done." He reached up a hand to
shake with Measure, saying good-bye like a man does.  "You get him there
safe and come right back," he told Measure.

"You know I will," said Measure.

"Your ma's right, it's dangerous every step of the way, so keep your
eyes open.  We named you right, you got such keen eyes, boy, so use
them."

"I will, Pa."

Ma said her good-bye to Measure while Pa came on over to Al.  He gave Al
a good stinging slap on the leg and shook his hand, too, and that felt
good, Pa treating him like a man, just like Measure.  Maybe if Al wasn't
sitting up on a horse, Pa would've roughed his hair like a little boy,
but then maybe he wouldn't have, either, and it still felt grown-up, all
the same.

"I ain't scared of the Reds," said Al.  He spoke real soft, so Ma
wouldn't hear.  "But I sure wish I didn't have to go."

"I know it, Al," said Pa.  "But you got to.  For your own good."

Then Pa got that faraway sad look on his face, which Al Junior had seen
before more than once, and never understood.  Pa was a strange man.  It
took Al a long time to realize that, since for the longest time while Al
was just little, Pa was Pa, and he didn't try to understand him.

Now Al was getting older, and he began to compare his father to the
other men around.  To Armor-of-God Weaver, for instance, the most
important man in town, always talking about peace with the Red man,
sharing the land with him, mapping out Red lands and White land verybody
listened to him with respect.  Nobody listened to Pa that way,
considering his words real serious, maybe arguing a little, but knowing
that what he said was important.  And Reverend Thrower, with his
highfalutin educated way of talking, shouting from his pulpit about
death and resurrection and the fires of hell and the rewards of heaven,
everybody listened to him, too. It was different from the way they
listened to Armor, cause it was always about religion and so it didn't
have nothing to do with little stuff like farming and chores and how
folks lived.  But respect.

When Pa talked, other folks listened to him, all right, but they just
scoffed sometimes.  "Oh, Alvin Miller, you just go on, don't you!"

Al noticed that, and it made him mad at first.  But then he realized
that when folks was in trouble and needed help, they didn't go to
Reverend Thrower, no sir, and they didn't go to Armor-of-God, cause
neither of them knew all that much about how to solve the kind of
problems folks had from time to time.  Thrower might tell them how to
stay out of hell, but that wasn't till they was dead, and Armor might
tell them how to keep peace with the Reds, but that was politics except
when it was war.  When they had a quarrel about a boundary line, or
didn't know what to do about a boy that always sassed his ma no matter
how many lickings he got, or when the weevils got their seed corn and
they didn't have nothing to plant, they come to Al Miller.  And he'd say
his piece, just a few words usually, and they'd go off shaking their
heads and saying, "Oh, Alvin Miller, you just go on, don't you!"

But then they'd go ahead and settle that boundary line and build them a
stone fence there; and they'd let their smart-mouth boy move on out of
the house and take up as a hired man on a neighbor's farm; and come
planting time a half-dozen folks'd come by with sacks of "spare" seed
cause Al Miller mentioned they might be a little shy.

When Al Junior compared his pa to other men, he knew Pa was strange,
knew Pa did things for reasons known only to himself.  But he also knew
that Pa could be trusted.  Folks might give their respect to
Armor-of-God and Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, but they trusted Al
Miller.

So did Al Junior.  Trusted his pa.  Even though he didn't want to leave
home, even though having been so close to death he felt like
apprenticing and suchlike was a waste of time-what did it matter what
his trade was, would there be smiths in heaven?-still he knew that if Pa
said it was right for him to go, then Al would go.  The way folks always
knew that if Al Miller said, "Just do this and it'll work out," why,
they should do the thing he said, and it'd work out like he said.

He had told Pa he didn't want to go; Pa had said, Go anyway, it's for
your own good.  That's all Alvin Junior needed to hear.  He nodded his
head and did what Pa said, not cause he had no spunk, not cause he was
scared of his pa like other boys he knew.  He just knew his pa well
enough to trust his judgment.  Simple as that.

"I'll miss you, Pa." And then he did a crazy fool thing, which if he
stopped to think about it he never would've done.  He reached down and
tousled his father's hair.  Even while he was doing it, he thought, Pa's
going to slap me silly for treating him like a boy!  Pa's eyebrows did
go up, and he reached up and caught Al Junior's hand by the wrist.

But then he got him a twinkle in his eye and laughed loud and said, "I
reckon you can do that once, Son, and live."

Pa was still laughing when he stepped back to give Ma space to say her
good-bye.  She had tears running down her face, but she didn't have no
last-minute list of dos and don'ts for him, the way she had for Measure.
She just kissed his hand and clung on to it, and looked him in the eye
and said, "If I let you go today, I'll never see you with my natural
eyes again, as long as I live."

"No, Ma, don't say that," he told her, "Nothing bad's going to happen to
me."

"You just remember me," she said.  "And you keep that amulet I gave you.
You wear that all the time."

"What's it do?" he asked, taking it from his pocket again.  "I don't
know this kind."

"Never you mind, you just keep it close to you all the time."

"I will, Ma."

Measure walked his horse up beside Al Junior's.  "We best be going now,"
he said.  "We want to get to country we don't see every day before we
bed down tonight."

"Don't you do that," said Pa sternly.  "We arranged for you to stay with
the Peachee family tonight.  That's as far as you need to get in one
day.  Don't want you to spend a night in the open when you don't have
to.

"All right, all right," said Measure, "but we at least ought to get
there before supper."

"Go on then," said Ma.  "Go on then, boys."

They only got a rod or so on the way before Pa came running out and
caught Measure's horse by the bridle, and Al Junior's, too.

"Boys, you remember!  Cross rivers at the bridges.  You hear me?

Only at the bridges!  There's bridges at every river on this road,
between here and Hatrack River."

"I know, Pa," said Measure.  "I helped build them all, you know."

"Use them!  That's all I'm saying.  And if it rains, you stop, you find
a house and stop, you hear me?  I don't want you out in the water."

They both pledged most solemnly not to get near anything wet.

"Won't even stand downstream from the horses when they spurt," said
Measure.

Pa shook a finger at him.  "Don't you make light," he said.

Finally they got on their way, not looking back cause that was awful
luck, and knowing that Ma and Pa went back into the house well before
they was out of sight, cause it was calling for a long separation if you
watched a long time when folks were leaving, and if you watched them
clear out of sight it was a good chance somebody'd die before you ever
saw them again.  Ma took that real serious.  Going inside quick like
that was the last thing she'd be able to do to help protect her boys on
their way.

Al and Measure stopped in a stretch of woods between Hatchs' and
Bjomsons' farms, where the last storm knocked down a tree half onto the
road.  They could get by all right, being on horseback as they were, but
you don't leave a thing like that for somebody else to find.

Maybe somebody in a wagon, hurrying to make home before dark on a stormy
night, maybe that's who'd come by next, and find the road blocked.  So
they stopped and ate the lunch Ma packed for them, and then set to work
with their hatchets, cutting it free from the few taut strands of wood
that clung to the ragged stump.  They were wishing for a saw long before
they were done, but you don't carry a saw with you on a
three-hundred-mile trip on horseback.  A change of clothes, a hatchet, a
knife, a musket for hunting, powder and lead, a length of rope, a
blanket, and a few odd tokens and amulets forwardings and lendings. Much
more than that and you'd have to bring a wagon or a pack horse.

After the trunk was free, they tied both horses to it and pulled it out
of the way.  Hard work, sweaty work, cause the horses weren't used to
Pulling as a team and they bothered each other.  Tree kept snagging up
on them, too, and they had to keep rolling it and chopping away
branches.  Now, Al knew he could've used his knack to change the wood of
that tree inside, to make it split apart in all the right places.  But
that wouldn't have been right, he knew.  The Shining Man wouldn't've
stood for that-it would've been pure selfishness, pure laziness, and no
good to anybody.  So he hacked and tugged and sweated right alongside
Measure.  And it wasn't so bad.  It was good work, and when it was all
done it was no more than an hour.  It was time well spent.

They talked somewhat during the work, of course.  Some of the
conversation turned on the stories about Red massacres down south.

Measure was pretty skeptical.  "Oh, I hear those stories, but the bloody
ones are all things somebody heard from somebody else about somebody
else.  The folks who actually lived down there and got run out, all they
ever say is that Ta-Kumsaw come and run off their pigs and chickens,
that's all.  Not a one ever said nothing about no arrows flying or folks
getting killed.  Al, being ten years old, was more inclined to believe
the stories, the bloodier the better.  "Maybe when they kill somebody,
they kill the whole family so nobody talks about it."

"NOW You think about it, Al.  That don't make sense.  Ta-Kumsaw wants a
the White people out of there, don't he?  So he wants them scared to
death, so they pack up and move, don't he?  So wouldn't he leave one
alive to tell about it, if he was doing massacres?  Wouldn't somebody've
found some bodies, at least?"

"Well where do the stories come from, then?"

"Armor-of-God says Harrison's telling lies, to try to get people bet up
against the Reds."

"Well, he couldn't very well lie about them burning down his house and
his stockade.  People could Plain see if it got burnt, couldn't they?

And he couldn't very well lie about it killing his wife and his little
boy, could he?"

"Well of course it did burn, Al.  But maybe it wasn't fire arrows from
Ta-Kumsaw started that fire.  You ever think of that?  "Governor
Harrison isn't going to burn down his own house and kill his own family
just so he can get people hot against the Reds, said Al.  "That's plain
dumb."

And they speculated on and on about Red troubles in the south

m part of the Wobbish country, because that was the most important topic
of conversation around, and since nobody knowed anything accurate
anyway, everybody's opinion was as good as anybody else's.

Seeing how they weren't more than a half mile from two different farms,
in country they'd visited four or five times a year for ten years, it
never even came to mind they ought to keep their eyes open for trouble.
You just don't keep too wary that close to home, not even when you're
talking about Red massacres and stories about murders and torture.  Fact
is, though, careful or not there wasn't much they could've done.  Al was
coiling ropes and Measure was cinching up the saddles when all of a
sudden there was about a dozen Reds around them.

One minute nobody but crickets and mice and a bird here and there, the
next minute Reds all painted up.

It took a few seconds even at that for them to be afraid.  There was a
lot of Reds in Prophetstown, and they came pretty regular to trade at
Armor-of-God's store.  So Alvin spoke before he even hardly looked at
them.  "Howdy," said Alvin.

They didn't howdy him back.  They had paint all over their faces.

"These ain't no howdy Reds," said Measure softly.  "They got muskets."

That made it sure these weren't no Prophetstown Reds.  The Prophet
taught his followers never to use White man's weapons.  A true Red
didn't need to hunt with a gun, because the land knew his need, and the
game would come near enough to kill with a bow.  Only reason for a Red
to have a gun, said the Prophet, was to be a murderer, and murdering was
for White men.  That's what he said.  So it was plain these weren't Reds
that put much store in the Prophet.

Alvin was looking one right in the face.  Al must've showed his fear,
cause the Red got a glint in his eye and smiled a little.  The Red
reached out his hand.

"Give him the rope," said Measure.

"It's our rope," said Al.  As soon as he said it he knew it didn't make
no sense.  Al handed both ropes to him.

The Red took the coils, gentle as you please.  Then he tossed one over
the White boys' heads, to another Red, and the whole bunch of them set
to work, stripping off the boys' outer clothes and then tying their arms
behind them so tight it was pulling on their shoulder joints something
painful.

"Why do they want our clothes?" Al asked.

In answer, one of the Reds slapped him hard across the face.  He must've
liked the sound it made, because he slapped him again.  The sting of it
brought tears to Al's eyes, but he didn't cry out, partly cause he was
so surprised, partly cause it made him mad and he didn't want to give
them no satisfaction.  Slapping was an idea that caught on real good
with the other Reds, cause they started in slapPing Measure, too, both
of the boys, again and again, till they were half-dazed and their cheeks
were bleeding inside and out.

One Red babbled something, and they gave him Al's shirt.  He slashed at
it with his knife, and then rubbed it on Al's bleeding face.

Must not have got enough blood on it, because he took his knife and
slashed right across Al's forehead.  The blood just gushed out, and a
second later the pain hit Al and for the lint time he did cry out.

it felt like he'd been laid open right to the bone, and the blood was
running down in his eyes so he couldn't see.  Measure yelled for them to
leave Al alone, but there wasn't no chance of that.  Everybody knew that
once a Red started in to cuffing on you, you were bound to end up dead.

Minute Al cried out and the blood started coming, them Reds started
laughing and making little hooting sounds.  This bunch was out for real
trouble, and Al thought back to all the stories he heard.

Most famous one was probably about Dan Boone, a Pennsylvania man who
tried to settle in the Crown Colonies for a while.  That was back when
the Cherriky were against the White man, and one day Dan Boone's boy got
kidnapped.  Boone wasn't a half hour behind them Reds.  It was like they
were playing with him.  They'd stop and cut off parts of the boy's skin,
or poke out an eye, something to cause bad pain and make him scream.
Boone heard his boy screaming, and followed, him and his neighbors,
armed with their muskets and halfmad with rage.  They'd reach the place
where the boy'd been tortured, and the Reds were gone, not a trace of a
track in the wood, and then there'd come another scream.  Twenty miles
they went that day, and finally at nightfall they found the boy hanging
from three different trees.  They say Boone never forgot that, he could
never look a Red in the eye after that without thinking on that
twenty-mile day.

Al had that twenty-mile day on his mind now, too, hearing them Reds
laugh, feeling the pain, just the start of the pain, knowing that
whatever these Reds were after, they wanted it to start with two dead
White boys, and they wouldn't mind a little noise along the way.

Keep still, he told himself Keep still.

They rubbed his slashed-up shirt on his face, and Measure's hacked up
clothes, too.  While they were doing that, Al kept his mind on other
things.  Only time he ever tried to heal himself was that busted leg of
his, and then he was lying down, resting, plenty of time to study it
out, to find his way to all those small places where there was broken
veins and heal them up, knit together the skin and bone.  This time he
was a-scared and getting pushed this way and that, not calm, not
resting.  But he still managed to find the biggest veins and arteries,
make them close up.  Last time they wiped his face on a shirt, his
forehead didn't gush blood down to cover his eyes again.  It was still
bleeding, but just a trickle now, and Al tipped his head up so the blood
would ooze on down his temples, and leave his eyes clear to see.

They hadn't cut Measure yet.  He was looking at Al, and there was a sick
look on Measure's face.  Al knew his brother well enough to guess what
he was thinking, about how Ma and Pa trusted Al into Measure's keeping,
and now look how he let them down.  That was crazy, to blame himself.
They could've done what they were doing now at any cabin or house in the
whole countryside, and weren't nobody could stop them.  If Al and
Measure hadn't been going off on a long trip, they might still have been
on this very road at this very time anyhow.  But Al couldn't say nothing
like that to Measure, couldn't do much except to smile.

Smile and, as best he could, work on healing up his own wound.

Making everything in his forehead go back to the way it was supposed to
be.  He kept at it, finding it easier and easier to do, while he watched
what the Reds were doing.

They didn't talk much.  They pretty much knew what to do.  They got the
blood-smeared clothes and tied them to the saddles.  Then with a knife
one of them carved the English letters for "Ta-Kumsaw" in one of the
saddle seats, and "Prophet" in the other.  For a second Al was surprised
that he could write English, but then he saw him checking how he made
the letters, comparing them to a paper he had folded up in the waistband
of his loincloth.  A paper.

Then, while two of them held each horse by the bridle, another Red
jabbed the horse's flanks with a knife, little cuts, not all that deep,
but enough to make them crazy with pain, kicking out, bucking, rearing
up.  The horses knocked down the Reds holding them and took off, ran
away, heading-as the Reds knowed they wouldn up the road toward home.

A message, that's what it was.  These Reds wanted to be followed.

They wanted a whole bunch of White folks to get their muskets and horses
and follow.  Like Daniel Boone in the story.  Follow the sound Of
screaming.  Go crazy from the sound of their children dying.

Well Alvin decided then and there that, live or die, he and Measure
wouldn't let Reds make his parents hear what Daniel Boone heard.

There wasn't a chance in the world of them getting away.  Even if Al
made the rope come apart-which he could do easy enough-there wasn't no
way two White boys could outrun Reds in the forest.  No, these Reds had
them as long as they wanted.  But Al knew Ways to keep them from doing
things to them.  And it would be all right to do it, too, to use his
knack, because it wouldn't just be for himself.  it would be for his
brother, and for his family, and in a funny way he knew it would be for
the Reds, too, because if there was something real, if some White boys
really did get tortured to death, then there'd be a war, there'd be a
real knock-down-drag-out fight between Reds and Whites, and a lot of
people on both sides would die.  As long as he didn't kill anybody,
then, it would be all right for Al to use his knack.

With the horses gone, the Reds tied thongs around Al's and Measure's
necks.  Then they pulled on the thongs to drag them along.

Measure was a big man, taller than any of the Reds, so as they led him
they made him bend over.  It was hard for him to run, and the thong was
real tight on him.  Al was getting pulled along behind him, so he could
see how Measure was being treated, could hear him choking a little.  It
was a simple thing for Al, though, to get inside that thong and stretch
it out, stretch it and stretch it, so it was loose around Measure's
neck, and long enough that Measure could run pretty much upright, It
happened slow enough that the Reds didn't really notice it.

But Al knew that they'd notice what he was doing soon enough.

Everybody knew that Reds didn't leave footprints.  And when Reds took
White captives, they usually carried them, slung by their arms and legs
like dressed-out deer, so the clumsy White folks wouldn't leave no
tracks.  These Reds meant to be followed, then, cause they were letting
Al and Measure leave tracks and traces every step they took.

But they didn't mean it to be too easy to find them.  After they'd gone
forever, it felt like-a couple of hours at least-they came to a brook
and walked on upstream a ways, and then ran on another half mile or
maybe a mile before they finally stopped in a clearing and built a fire.

No farms close by, but that didn't mean much.  By now the horses were
home with the bloody clothing and the wounds in the horses' flanks and
those names carved into the saddles.  By now every White man in the
whole area was bringing his family in to Vigor Church, where a few men
could protect them while the rest went out searching for the missing
boys.  By now Ma was pale with terror, Pa raging for the other men to
hurry, hurry, not a minute to waste, got to find the boys, if you don't
come now I'll go on alone!  And the others saying, Calm down, calm down,
can't do no good by yourself, we'll catch them, you bet.  Nobody
admitting what they all knew-that Al and Measure were as good as dead.

But Al didn't plan to be dead.  No sir.  He planned to be absolutely
alive, him and Measure both.

The Reds built up the fire good and hot, and it sure wasn't no cook
fire.  Since the sun was shining bright and hard already, it made Al and
Measure sweat something awful, even in their short summer underwear.
They sweated even more when the Reds cut even that much off them,
popping off the buttons down the front and slicing it right down the
back, so they were naked right down to the ground they sat on.

It was about then that one of the Reds noticed Al's forehead.  He took a
big Thank of underwear cloth and wiped at Al's face, rubbing pretty hard
to get the dried blood off.  Then he started jabbering at the others.
They all gathered around to see.  Then they checked Measure's forehead,
too.  Well, Al knew what they were looking for.

And he knew they wouldn't find it.  Cause he had healed up his own
forehead without a scar, not a mark on his own face.  And of course no
mark on Measure, either, since he wasn't cut.  That'd make them think a
little.

But it wasn't healing that Al was depending on to save them.  It was too
hard, too slow-they could sure cut faster than Al could heal, and that
was the truth.  It was a lot faster for him to use that knack he had on
things like stone and metal, which was all the same straight through;
living flesh, on the other hand, was complicated with all kinds of
little stuff that he had to get right in his head before he could change
it and make it whole.

So when one of the Reds sat down in front of Measure, brandishing a
knife, Al didn't wait for him to start cutting.  He got that knife into
his head, the steel of the blade-White man's knife, just like they were
carrying White man's muskets.  He found the edge of it, the point, and
flattened it out, smoothed it, rounded it.

AL

The Red laid that knife up against Measure's bare chest and tried to
cut.  Measure braced himself for the pain to start.  But that knife made
no more mark on Measure than if it was a spoon.

Al almost laughed to see that Red pull his knife away and look at it,
try to see what was wrong.  He ran the edge against his own finger, to
test it; Al thought of making the blade razor sharp right then, but no,
no, the rule was to use his knack to make things right, not to cause
injury.  The others gathered round to look at the knife.  Some of them
mocked the knife's owner, probably thinking he hadn't kept the edge
sharp.  But Al spent that time finding all the other steel edges that
those Red men had and making them round and smooth.  They couldn't've
cut a pea pod in half with them knives when Al was through.

Sure enough, all the others pulled out their knives to try them, running
the edges against Al or Measure first, and finally yelling and shouting
and accusing each other, quarreling over whose fault it was, probably.

But they had a job to do, didn't they?  They were supposed to torture
these White boys and make them scream, or at least hack them up bad
enough that when their folks found the bodies they'd thirst for revenge.

So one of the Reds took his old-fashioned stone-edged tommyhawk and
brandished it in front of Al's face, waving it around so he'd get good
and scared.  Al used the time to soften up the stone, weaken the wood,
loosen the thongs that held it all together.  By the time the Red got to
lifting it up ready to do some real business, like smashing Al in the
face with it, it crumbled apart in his hand.  The wood was rotted clear
through, the stone fell to the ground as gravel, and even the thong was
split and frayed through.  That Red man shouted and jumped back like as
if he had a rattler a-biting at him.

Another one had a steel-blade hatchet, and he didn't waste no time
waving it around, he just laid out Measure's hand on a rock and whacked
it down, meaning to cut Measure's fingers off.  This was easy stuff to
Al, though.  Hadn't he cut whole millstones, when the need was?  So the
hatchet struck and rang on the stone, and Measure gasped at the sight of
it, sure it'd take his fingers clean off; but when the Red picked up the
hatchet, there was Measure's hand just like before, not marked a bit,
while the hatchet had finger-shaped depressions in the blade, like it
was made of cool butter or wet cake-soap.

Them Reds, they howled, they looked at each other with fear in their
eyes, fear and anger at the strange things going on.  Alvin couldn't
know it, being White, but the thing that made this worst of all for them
was they couldn't feel it like they felt a White man's spells or charms
or doodles.  A White man put a hex, they felt it like a bump in their
land-sense; a beseeching was a nasty stink; a warding was a buzz when
they came close.  But this that Alvin did, it didn't interrupt the land
at all, their sense of how things ought to be didn't show them nothing
different going on.  It was like all the natural laws had changed on
them, and suddenly steel was soft and flesh was hard, rock was brittle
and leather weak as grass.  They didn't look to Al or Measure as the
cause of what was going on.  It was some natural force doing it, as best
they could figure.

All that Alvin saw was their fear and anger and confusion, which pleased
him well enough.  He wasn't cocky, though.  He knew there was some
things he didn't know how to handle.  Water was the main one; if they
took it in their heads to drown the boys, Al wouldn't know how to stop
them, or save himself or Measure.  He was only ten, and being bound by
rules he didn't understand, he hadn't figured out what-all his knack was
good for, or how it worked.  Maybe there was things within his power
that could be right spetackler, if he only knowed how, but the point was
he didn't know, and so he only did the things that were within his
reach.

This much was on his side-they didn't think of drowning.  But they
thought of fire.  Most likely they were planning that from the
start-folks told tales of finding torture victims in the Red wars back
in New England, their blackened feet in the cooling ashes of a fire,
where they had to watch their own toes char until the pain and bleeding
and madness of it killed them.  Alvin saw them stoking up the fire,
putting hot-burning branches on it to make it flare.  He didn't know how
to take the heat out of a fire, he'd never tried.  So he thought as fast
as he could, and while they were picking Measure up by his armpits and
dragging him to the fire, Al got inside the firewood and broke it up,
made it crumble into dust, so it burnt up fast, all at once, in a fire
so fast it made a loud, clap and a puff of bright hot light shot upward.
It rose so fast that it made a wind blow in from all directions onto the
place where the fire had been, and it made a whirlwind for a second or
two, whipping around, sucking up the ashes and then puffing them out to
drift down like dust.

Just like that, nothing left of the fire at all except dust settling
fine as mist all over the clearing.

Oh, they howled, they jumped and danced and beat on their own shoulders
and chests.  And while they were carrying on like an Irish funeral, Al
loosened the ropes on him and Measure, hoping against hope that they
might even get away after all before their folks and neighbors found
them and started in with shooting and killing and dying.

Measure felt the ropes loosening, of course, and looked sharp at Alvin;
up to then he'd been almost as crazy with what was happening as the
Reds.  Of course, he knew right off that it was Alvin doing it, but it
wasn't as if Alvin could explain what he was planning-it took Measure by
surprise same as the others.  Now, though, he looked at Alvin and
nodded, starting to twist his arms out of the ropes.  None of the Reds
had noticed so far, and maybe they could get a running start, or
maybe-just maybe-the Reds were so upset they wouldn't even try to
follow.

Right then, though, everything changed.  There was a hooting sound from
the forest, and then it got picked up by what sounded like three hundred
owls, all in a circle.  Measure must have thought for a second that Al
was causing that to happen, too, the way he looked at his little
brother-but the Reds knew what it was, and stopped their carrying on
right away.  From the fear on their faces, though, Al figured it must be
something good, maybe even something like rescue.

From the forest all around the clearing there stepped out dozens, then a
hundred Reds.  These were all carrying bows-not a musket among them-and
the way they dressed and had their hair, Al reckoned them to be ShawNee,
and followers of the Prophet.  It was about the last thing Al expected,
truth to tell.  It was White faces he wanted to see, not more Red ones.

One Red stepped out of the mass of the newcomers, a tall strong man with
a face as hard and sharp as stone, it looked like.  He fired off a
couple of harsh-sounding words, and immediately their captors began
babbling, jabbering, pleading.  It was like a bunch of children, Al
thought, doing something they knew they shouldn't ought to, and then
their pa comes along and catches them at it.  Having been caught in such
mischief himself sometimes, he almost felt a little sympathy, till he
remembered that what his captors had had in mind was cruel death for him
and his brother.  Just because they ended up without a scratch didn't
mean them Reds weren't guilty of the bad intent.

Then one word stuck out of all the yammering-a name: Ta-Kumsaw.

Al looked at Measure to see if he'd heard, and Measure was looking at
him, raising his eyebrows, asking the same thing.  They both mouthed the
name at the same time.  Ta-Kumsaw.

Did this mean Ta-Kumsaw was in charge of all this?  Was he angry at the
captors because they failed at the torture, or because they'd captured
White boys at all?  There wasn't no explanation from the Reds, that was
sure.  All that Al could know for sure was what they did.  The new-come
Reds took all the muskets away from the guntoters, and then led them off
into the woods.  Only about a dozen Reds stayed with Al and Measure.
Among them was Ta-Kumsaw.

"They say you have fingers made of steel," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Measure looked at Al for him to answer, and Al couldn't think of
anything to say.  He was sure reluctant about telling this Red what it
was he done.  So it was Measure answered him after all, by raising his
hands and wiggling his fingers.  "Just regular fingers near as I can
tell," he said.

Ta-Kumsaw reached out and took him by the hand-a strong, hard grip, it
must have been, cause Measure tried to pull away and couldn't.

"Iron skin," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Can't cut with knife.  Can't burn. Boys
made of stone."

He pulled Measure up to a standing position and, with his free hand,
slapped him hard on the upper part of the arm.  "Stone boy, throw me on
the dirt!"

"I can't wrassle you," said Measure.  "I don't want a fight with
nobody."

"Throw me!" commanded Ta-Kumsaw.  And he adjusted his grip, put out his
foot, and waited until Measure put out his own foot to join him.  Facing
off, man to man, the way the Reds did in their games.

Only this wasn't no game, not to these boys who'd been looking death in
the face and didn't have no guarantee that it still wasn't just around
the corner.

Al didn't know what he ought to do, but he was in a mood for doing
something, coming on the heels of all his changing of things.  So it was
almost without a thought of the consequences that the very moment
Measure and Ta-kumsaw started to push and pull on each other, Al made
the dirt come all loose under Ta-Kumsaw's feet, so his own pushing made
him fall ass over elbow in the dirt.

The other Reds had been kind of laughing and joshing about the wrassle,
but when they saw the greatest chief of all the tribes, a man whose name
was known from Boston to New Orleans, when they saw him smash on the
ground like that they kind of left off laughing.

Truth to tell there wasn't a sound in that clearin .  Ta-Kumsaw picked
himself up and looked at the dirt under his feet, scraping on it with
his foot.  It was solid enough now, of course.  But he stepped a few
feet away, onto the grass, and held out his hand again.

This time Measure had a little more confidence, and reached out to take
his hand-but at the last second, Ta-Kumsaw snatched his own hand away.
He stood very still, not looking at Measure or Al or anybody, just
looking into space, his face all hard and set.  Then he turned to the
other Reds and fired off a volley of words, spitting them out with all
the Ss and Ks and Xs of ShawNee talk.  Al and the other children of
Vigor Church used to imitate Red talk by saying things like "boxy talksy
skock woxity" and laughing till their sides ached.

But it didn't sound too funny the way Ta-Kumsaw said it, and when he was
done Al and Measure found themselves getting pulled along by them thongs
again.  And when the rags of their undedohns fell down and started
tripping them up, Ta-Kumsaw came back and tore them off the boys,
ripping that fabric to shreds with his bare hands, his face all angry.
Neither Al nor Measure felt like mentioning that they was left pretty
near naked by this time, considering that the only wearing apparel left
on them was the thong around their neck; it just didn't seem like a good
time to complain.  Where Ta-Kumsaw was taking them they had no idea, and
since they also had no choice about going, there wasn't much point in
asking, either.

Al and Measure never ran so long or so far in their lives.  Hour
after hour, mile after mile, never going too terrible fast, but never
stopping, neither.  Moving like this, a Red could travel faster on foot
than a White usually could on horseback, unless he was making his nag
run all the way.  Which wasn't too good on the horse.  And the horse had
to stay on cleared roads.  While Reds-Reds didn't even need a path.

Al noticed real quick that running through the woods was different for
the Reds than it was for him and Measure.  The only sound he heard was
his and Measure's footfalls.  Al being near the back, he could see how
things went with Measure.  The Red who was pulling Measure would push a
branch with his body, and the branch would bend to make way.

But the next second when Measure tried to push through, it would snatch
at his skin and then break off.  Reds would step on roots or twigs and
there'd be no sound, nothing snagging their feet; Al would step on the
same spot, and he'd trip up, stumble, the thong catching at his neck; or
the twig would snap under his bare foot, or the rough bark of the root
would tear at his skin.  Al, on account of being just a boy, was used to
walking around barefoot a good deal of the time, so the soles of his
feet were somewhat toughened up.  But Measure'd been in growed-man's
boots for some years now, and Al could see that after maybe half a mile
Measure was bleeding.

One thing he could do, Al reckoned, was help his brother's feet to heal
up.  He tried to start, to find his way into his brother's body the way
he'd found his way into the stone and the steel and the wood.

Running along like that, though, it was hard to concentrate.  And living
flesh was just too complicated.

Al wasn't the kind to give up.  No, he just tried a different way.

Since it was running that distracted him, he just quit thinking about
running.  Didn't look at the ground.  Didn't try to step where the Red
ahead of him stepped, just didn't think about it at all.  Like trimming
an oil lamp, he trimmed his own wick, as they say, letting his eyes
focus on nothing, thinking about nothing, letting his body work like a
pet animal that could be let to have its own head and go its own wayHe
had no notion that he was doing what doodlebugs do, when they let their
bug go out of their head and travel on its own.  And anyway it wasn't
the same, on account of there wasn't no doodlebug in the natural world
who ever tried to doodle while he was running with a thong around his
neck.

Now, though, he didn't have a speck of trouble getting into Measure's
body, finding the sore places, the bleeding cuts on his feet, the ache
in his legs, the pain in his side.  Healing the feet, toughing them up,
callusing them, that was easy enough.  For the others, Al felt how
Measure's body was craving for him to breathe more, deeper, faster; so
Al got into his lungs and cleared them, opened them into the deepest
places.  Now when Measure sucked in air, his body got more of a use out
of it, like it could wring out each rag of air to get the very last drop
of good out of it.  Al didn't even half understand what he was doing-but
he knowed it worked, cause the pain in Measure's body began to ease, he
didn't'weary so much, he didn't gasp for breath.

As he returned to himself, Al noticed that in the whole time he was
helping Measure, he didn't step on no twig that broke or get smacked by
some snaggy branch flipping back from the Red in front of him.

Now, though, he was getting poked and tripped and snapped as much as
ever.  He thought right off, it was happening just the same all along,

only I didn't hardly notice cause I wasn't rightly Paying attention to
my own skin.  But even as he decided that was true and even mostly
believed it, he also realized that the sound of the world had changed.

Now it was just breathing and pale-skinned feet thumping on the dirt or
swishing through ancient dead leaves.  A bird sound now and then, a fly
buzzing.  Nothing remarkable, except that Al could remember, just as
plain as anything, that until he came back from it up from Measure's
body he could hear something else, a kind of music, a kind of-green
music.  Well, that didn't make no sense.  There wasn't no Way Music
could have a color to it, that was plain crazy.  So put Al that out Of
his mind, just didn't think about it.  Without thinking about it,
though, he was still longing to hear it again.  Hear it or see it or
smell it, however it came into him, he wanted it back again.

And one more little thing.  Until he went Out Of himself to help
Measure, his own body wasn't doing all that well, neither; in fact he
was near wore out.  But now he was all right, his body was doing e, fill
he was breathing deep, his legs and arms felt like he could go on
forever, sturdy in their motion as trees were in their stillness.  Now
maybe that was because in healing Measure, he also somehow healed
himself-but he didn't rightly believe that, cause he always knew what he
did and what he didn't do.  No, to Al Junior's thinking, his body was
doing better because of something else.  And that something else, either
it was Part of the green music, or it caused the music, or they both
were caused by the same thing.  As near as Al could figure..

Running along like that, Al and Measure didn't have no chance till
getting on nightfall, when they came to a Red village on the curve of a
dark deep river.  Ta-Kumsaw led them right into the middle of the
village and then walked off and left them.  The river was just down the
slope from them, maybe a hundred yards of grassy ground.

"Think we could make it down to the river without them catching us?"
whispered Measure.

"No," said Al.  "And anyways I can't swim.  Pa never let me near the
water."

Then all the Red women and children come out of the stick-andmud huts
they lived in and pointed at them two naked Whites, man and boy, and
laughed and threw sods at them.  At first Al and Measure tried to dodge,
but it just made them laugh harder and run around and around throwing
wet dirt from different angles, trying to catch them in the face or the
crotch.  Finally Measure just sat down on the grass, put his face to his
knees, and let them throw all they wanted.  Al did the same.  Finally
somebody barked a few words and the sod-throwing stopped.  Al looked up
in time to see Ta-Kumsaw walking away, and a couple of his fighting men
come out to watch and make sure nothing else happened.

"That was the farthest I ever run in my whole life," said Measure.

"Me too," said Al.

"Right at the start there I thought I was like to die, I was so tired,"
said Measure.  "Then I got my second wind.  I didn't think I had it in
me.  Al didn't say nothing.

"Or did you have something to do with that?"

"Maybe some," said Al.

"I never know what you can do, Alvin."

"Me neither," said Al, and it was the truth.

"When that hatchet come down on my fingers I thought that was the end of
my working days."

"Just be glad they didn't try to drownd us."

"You and water again," said Measure.  "Well I'm glad you done what you
done, Al.  Though, I will say it might've worked out better if you
hadn't made the chief slip like that when he was set to armwrassle me."

"Why not?" said Al.  "I didn't want him to hurt you-"

"There's no way you should know it, Al, so don't blame yourself.

But that kind of wrassling ain't to hurt a body, it's kind of a test. Of
manliness and quickness and what all.  If he beat me, but I put up a
fair fight, then I'd have his respect, and if I beat him fair, why,
there's respect in that, too.  Armor told me about it.  They do it all
the time."

Alvin thought about this.  "So when I made him fall, was that real bad?"

"I don't know.  Depends on why they think it happened.  Might be they'll
think it means that God is on my side or something."

"Do they believe in God?"

"They've got a Prophet, don't they?  Just like in the Bible.

Anyway I just hope they don't think it means I'm a coward and a cheater.

Things won't go so good for me then."

"Well I'll tell them it was me done it," said Al.

"Don't you dare," said Measure.  "The only thing saved us was they
didn't know it was you doing them changes on the knives and hatchets and
such.  If they knowed it was you, Al, they would've hacked your head
open, mashed you flat and then done what they wanted with me.

Only thing that saved you was they didn't know what was causing it."

Then they got to talking about how worried Pa and Ma would be,
speculating on how Ma would be so mad, or maybe she'd be too worried to
be angry at Pa, and there must be men out looking for them by now even
if the horses never came home, cause when they didn't show up for supper
at the Peachees they wouldn't waste a minute giving the warning.

"They'll be talking about war with the Reds," said Measure.  "I know
that much-there's plenty of folks from down Carthage way who hate
Ta-Kumsaw already, from his running off their livestock earlier this
year."

"But it was Ta-Kumsaw who saved us," said Al.

"Or that's how it looks, anyway.  But I notice he didn't take us home,
or even ask us where home was.  And how did he happen to come along
right at that very minute, if he wasn't part of it himself?

No, Al, I don't know what's going on, but Ta-Kumsaw didn't save us, or
if he did he saved us for his own reasons, and I don't know as how I
trust him to do good for us.  For one thing, I really ain't much for
setting around naked in the middle of a Red village."

"Me neither.  And I'm hungry."

It wasn't long, though, before Ta-Kumsaw himself came out with a pot of
corn mash.  It was almost funny, seeing that tall Red man, who carried
himself like a king, toting a pot like one of the Red women.

But after that first surprise, Al realized that when Ta-Kumsaw did it,
pot-toting looked downright noble.

He set down the pot in front of Al and Measure, and then took a couple
of strips of Red-weave cloth from around his neck.  "Wrap up," he said,
and handed each of them a strip.  Neither one of them knowed the first
thing about tying on a loincloth, beginning with the fact that Ta-Kumsaw
was still holding the deerskin belts that were supposed to hold them on.
Ta-Kumsaw laughed at how confused they were, and then made Al stand up.
He dressed Al himself, and that showed Measure how it was done so he
could cover himself, too.  It wasn't like proper clothes, but it was
sure better than being buck naked.

Then Ta-Kumsaw sat down on the grass, the pot between him and them, and
showed them how to eat the mash-dipping in his hand, pulling out a
tepid, jelly-thick glop of it and smacking it into his open mouth.
Tasted so bland that Alvin like to gagged on it.  Measure saw it, and
said, "Eat." So Alvin ate, and once he got some swallowed he could feel
how much his belly wanted more, even though it still took real
persuasion to get his throat to take on the job of transportation.

When they had the pot cleaned right down to the bottom, TaKumsaw set it
aside.  He looked at Measure for a while.  "How did you make me fall
down, White coward?" he said.

Al was all for speaking up right then, but Measure answered too quick
and loud.  "I ain't no coward, Chief Ta-Kumsaw, and if you wrassle me
now it'll be fair and square."

Ta-Kumsaw smiled grimly.  "So you can make me fall down.with all these
women and children watching?"

"It was me," said Alvin.

Ta-Kumsaw turned his head, slowly, the smile not leaving his face -but
not so grim now, neither.  "Very small boy," he said.  "Very worthless
child.  You can make the ground loose under my feet?"

just got a knack," said Alvin.  "I didn't know you weren't aiming to
hurt him."

"I saw a hatchet," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Finger-marks like this." He waved
his finger to show the kind of pattern Measure's fingers had left in the
blade of the hatchet.  "You did that?"

"It ain't right to cut a man's fingers off."

Ta-Kumsaw laughed out loud.  "Very good!" Then he leaned in close.
"White men's knacks, they make noise, very much noise.  But you, what
you do is so quiet nobody sees it."

Al didn't know what he was talking about.

In the silence, Measure spoke up bold as you please.  "What you plan to
do with us, Chief Ta-Kumsaw?"

"Tomorrow we run again," he said.

"Well why don't you think about letting us run toward home?

There's got to be a hundred of our neighbors out now, mad as hornets.
There's going to be a lot of trouble if you don't let us go home."

Ta-Kumsaw shook his head.  "My brother wants you."

Measure looked at Alvin, then back at Ta-Kumsaw.  "You mean the
Prophet?"

"Tenskwa-Tawa," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Measure looked plain sick.  "You mean after he built up his Prophetstown
for four years, nobody causing him a lick of trouble, White man and Red
man getting along real good, now he goes around taking Whites captive
and torturing them and-" Ta-Kumsaw clapped his hands once, loudly.
Measure fell silent.

"Chok-Taw took you!  Chok-Taw tried to kill you!  My people don't kill
except to defend our land and our families from White thieves and
murderers.  And Tenskwa-Tawa's people, they don't kill at all."

That was the first Al ever heard of there being a split between
TaKumsaw's people and the Prophet's people.

"Then how'd you know where we were?" demanded Measure.

"How'd you know how to find us?"

"Tenskwa-Tawa saw you," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Told me to hurry and get you,
save you from the Chok-Taw, bring you to Mizogan."

Measure, who knew more about Armor-of-God's maps than Alvin did,
recognized the name.  "That's the big lake, where Fort Chicago is.

"We don't go to Fort Chicago," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "We go to the holy
place."

"A church?" asked Alvin.

Ta-Kumsaw laughed.  "You White people, when you make a place holy you
build walls so nothing of the land can get in.  Your god is nothing and
nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that
could be anywhere, it doesn't matter-nothing and nowhere."

"Well what does make a place holy?" asked Alvin.

"Because that's where the Red man talks to the land, and the land
answers." Ta-Kumsaw grinned.  "Sleep now.  We will go when it's still
dark."

"It's going to be mighty cool tonight," said Measure.

"Women will bring you blankets.  Warriors don't need them.  This is
summer." Ta-Kumsaw walked a few steps away, then turned back to Alvin.
"Weaw-Moxiky ran behind you, White boy.  He saw what you did.

Don't try to keep the secret from Tenskwa-Tawa.  He will know when you
lie." Then the chief was gone.

"What's he talking about?" asked Measure.

"I wisht I knew," said Al.  "I'm going to have trouble telling the truth
when I don't know what the truth is."

The blankets came soon enough.  Al snuggled close to his big brother,
for courage more than warmth.  He and Measure whispered awhile, trying
to puzzle things out.  If Ta-Kumsaw wasn't in on this from the start,
how come them Chok-Taw cut his and the Prophet's names into the saddle?
And even if that was a lie, it was going to look real bad that Ta-Kumsaw
finally did end up with the captives, and then up and took them to Lake
Mizogan instead of just letting them
go home.  It was going to take some tall talking to keep this from
turning into a war.

Finally, though, they fell silent, weary to the bone from all their
running, not to mention their work moving the tree and the plain terror
when the Chok-Taw was out to torture them.  Measure started snoring
lightly.  And Alvin, he found himself drifting.  In the very last
moments before sleep, he heard that green music again, or saw it, or
anyhow knew that it was there.  But before he could even listen, he
dozed off.  Dozed off and slept real peaceful, what with the night
breeze blowing cool off the river, the blanket and the warmth of
Measure's body keeping him warm, the nightsounds of the animals, the
cries of a hungry infant from a hut somewhere; all of it was part of the
green music flowing through his head.

Red-Lover

They gathered in the clearing, some thirty White men, grim-faced and
angry and tired from walking through the woods.  The trail was easy
enough to follow, but it seemed like the branches grabbed at them and
the roots tripped them up-the forest was never kind to a White man.

Then there was an hour lost when the trail reached a stream, and they
had to go up and down the stream to find where the Reds took them boys
out of the water and up onto land again.  Old Alvin Miller like to went
crazy when he saw they dragged the boys through water-it took his son
Calm about ten minutes to get him quiet and able to go on.  The man was
just mad with fear.

"Shouldn't've sent him away, I never should've let him go," he kept
saying.

And Calm kept saying, "Could've happened anywhere, don't blame yourself,
we'll find them all right, they're still walking ain't they?"

All kinds of talk, but mostly it was his voice that soothed Al Miller,
it was his manner-some folks even said it was his knack, that his ma
named him straight for what he could best do.

Now they were in the clearing, and trails led off about five different
ways, and all of them plumb disappeared after a few steps.

They found the boys' tore-up underwear a few steps into the woods
heading northwest.  Nobody figured they ought to show that to Al Miller,
so by the time he got there-him bringing up the rear at that point, with
Calm by his side-the undeohns were tucked away out of sight.

"We'll never track them from here," said Armor-of-God.  "The boys aren't
leaving no footprints now-which don't mean nothing, Mr.  Miller, so
don't you fret." Armor called his father-in-law Mr.  Miller ever since
Al throwed him out of the house into the snow that time he came to say
Al Junior was dying cause the family committed the sin of using hexes
and beseechings.  It just don't seem right to call a man Pa after he
heaves you off his porch.  "They might be toting the boys, or they might
be stepping after them, kind of wiping out their prints.  We all know if
a Red don't want to leave a trail, there ain't no trail."

"We all know about Reds," said Al Miller.  "And what they do to White
boys when the' "So far all we know is they're trying to scare us," said
Armor.

"Doing a good job so far," said one of the Swedes.  "Scared mostly to
death, my family and me."

"Besides, everybody knows Armor-of-God here is a Red-lover."

Armor looked around, trying to see who said that.  "If by Red-lover you
mean I think Reds are human beings just like Whites, then it's true. But
if you mean I like Reds better than Whites, then you best work up some
courage to step out here and say it to my face, so I can mash your face
into the bark of a tree."

"No need to quarrel," said Reverend Thrower, panting.  He wasn't much
for exercise, was Thrower, so he only just now caught up with the rest
of them.  "The Lord God loves all his children, even the heathens.

Armor-of-God is a good Christian.  But we all know that if it ever comes
to fighting between Christian and heathen, Armor-ofGod will stand on the
side of righteousness."

The crowd murmured their agreement.  After all, they all liked Armor;
he'd loaned most of them money or given them credit at his store, and
never nagged them for payment-a good many of them might not have made it
through their first few years in Wobbish country if it wasn't for Armor.
Grateful or not, though, they all knew he treated Reds like they was
almost White, which was a bit suspicious at a time like this.

"It's coming to fighting right now," said a man.  "We don't have to
track down these Reds.  We got their names on the saddles, carved right
in."

"Now just wait a minute!" said Armor-of-God.  "You just think a minute!
In all this time Prophetstown's been a-growing there across the Wobbish
from Vigor Church, has any Red so much as stole a thing from you?
Slapped one of your children?  Snatched a pig?  Done any single bad
thing to any one of you?"

"I think stealing Al Miller's boys is a pretty bad thing!" said a man.

"I'm talking about the Reds in Prophetstown!  You know they never done
nothing wrong, you know that!  And you know why, too.  You know it's
cause the Prophet tells them to live in peace, keep to their own land
and do no harm to the White man."

"That ain't what Ta-Kumsaw says!"

"Well even if they did want to do some terrible crime against White
folks-which I ain't saying-is there any one of you thinks Ta-Kumsaw or
Tenskwa-Tawa is so blamed stupid he's going to sign his name?"

"They're proud of killing White folks!"

"If the Red man was smart, he'd be White!"

"See what I mean about Red-lovers?"

Armor-Of-God knew these people, and he knew that most of them were still
with him.  Even the grumblers weren't about to go off halfcocked; they'd
sit tight until the whole group decided on action.  So let them call him
a Red-lover, that was fine, when men was scared and mad they said things
that later they repented of As long as they waited.  As long as they
didn't jump into war against the Reds.

Cause Armor had his suspicions about this whole thing.  It was just too
easy, the way them horses was sent on home with names carved in the
saddle.  It wasn't the way Reds did things, even the bad ones that would
kill You soon as look at You.  Armor knew enough about Reds to know they
only tortured to give a man a chance to show brave, not to terrorize
people.  (Or most Reds, anyway-there were stories about the Irrakwa
before they got civilized.)  So whoever did this wasn't acting like a
natural Red.  Armor was near convinced it was a hired-out job.

The French in Detroit had been trying to cause war between Reds and
American settlers for years-it might've been them.  And it might have
been Bill Harrison.  Oh yes, it might well have been that man, down
there like a spider in his fort on the Ohio.

Armor thought that was the most likely thing.  Course he wouldn't dare
to say it out loud, cause folks would think he was just jealous of Bill
Harrison, which was true-he was jealous.  But he also knew that Harrison
was a wicked man, who'd do anything to make things go his way.

Maybe even get some wild Reds to come up and kill a few White boys near
Prophetstown.  After all, it was Tenskwa-Tawa who got most of the Reds
from Harrison's part of the country to lay off whisky and come , to
Prophetstown.  And it was Ta-Kumsaw who ran off half the White settlers
down there.  It looked to Armor like Harrison was behind this, a lot
more likely than the French.

But he couldn't say none of this, cause there was no proof He just had
to try to keep things calm, till some real evidence showed up.

Which might be right now.  They'd brought along old Tack Sweeper,
wheezing his way with the best of them-it was remarkable how vigorous he
was, for a man whose lungs sounded like a baby's rattle when he
breathed.  Tack Sweeper had him a knack, which wasn't all that reliable,
he was the first to say.  But sometimes it worked remarkable well.  What
he did was stand around in a place for a while with his eyes closed and
sort of see the things that happened there in the past.

Just quick little visions, a few faces.  Like that time they was afraid
maybe Jan de Vries killed hisself on purpose, or maybe was murdered,
Tack was able to see how it was an accident when his gun went off in his
own face, so they could bury him in the churchyard and not have to worry
about hunting for no killer.

So the hope was Tack could tell them something about what-happened in
this clearing.  He shooed them all back to the edges of the wood, so
they'd be out of the way.  Then he walked around in the middle, his eyes
closed, moving slow.  "You boys shouldn't have got so mad here," he said
after a while.  "All I can see is you all jawing."

They laughed, kind of embarrassed.  They should've knowed better than to
mess up the memories of a place before Tack got there.

"It don't look good.  I keep seeing them Red faces.  Knife, all kind of
knives getting slashed on folks' skin.  A hatchet falling."

Al Miller moaned.

"It's all just a mess here, so much happened," said Tack.  "I can't see
right.  No.  No, I can-one man.  A Red man, I know his face, I seen
him-he's just standing there, just still as you please, I know that
face."

"Who is it?" said Armor-of-God.  But he knew, he had that sickening
feeling of dread, oh he knew.

"Ta-Kumsaw," said Tack.  He opened his eyes wide and looked at Armor,
almost apologetic.  "I wouldn't've believed it either, Armor," he said.
"I always kind of thought Ta-Kumsaw was the bravest man I ever knew. But
he was here, and he was in charge.  I see him standing there, and
telling people what to do.  He stood right here.  I can see him so clear
cause there wasn't nobody else stood exactly in that place for so long.
And he was mad.  Ain't no mistake about it."

Armor believed it.  They all did-they all knew Tack was a truthful man,
and if he said he was sure, then he was sure.  But there had to be some
reason.  "Maybe he come and saved the boys, did you think of that?

Maybe he come and stopped some band of wild Reds from-"

"Red Lover." somebody shouted.

"You know Ta-Kumsaw!  He's no coward, and stealing them boys was a
cowardly thing to do, you know that man!"

"Nobody ever knows a Red manTa -Kumsaw didn't take those boys!" insisted
Armor-of-God.  "I know it!"

Then everybody fell silent, cause old Al Miller was pushing his way
forward, out to where Armor-of-God was standing.  Faced down his
son-in-law, he did, with a face like living hell he was so mad.  "You
don't know nothing, Armor-of-God Weaver.  You are the most worthless
scum ever formed on the top of a chamber pot.  First you married my
daughter and wouldn't let her work no hexes cause you were so cock-eyed
sure it was the devil's work.  Then you let all these Reds stay around
here all the time.  And when we thought of building a stockade you said,
No, if we build a stockade that just gives them French something to
attack and burn down, we'll befriends with the Reds and then they'll
leave us alone, we'll trade with the Reds.  Well look what it got us!

Look what you done for us!  Ain't we all glad we listened to you now!

I don't think you're no Red-lover, Armor-ofGod, I just think you're the
blamedest fool ever to cross the Ohio and come out west, and the only
folks dumber than You is us if we listen to you for another minute!"

Then Al Miller turned to face the other men, who were looking at him
with awe in their face like they just seen majesty for the first time in
their lives.  "We done it Armor's was for ten years here.  But I've done
with that.  I lost one boy in the Hatrack River on my way here, and this
town is named for him.  Now I lost two other boys.  I only got me five
sons left, but I tell you I'll put guns in their hands myself, and lead
them all into the middle of Prophetstown and blast them Reds into hell,
even if it means we all die!  You hear me?"

They heard him, oh yes they did.  They heard and shouted back.

This was the word they wanted right now, the word of hate and anger and
revenge, and nobody better to give it to them than Al Miller, who was
normally a peaceable man, never picked a quarrel with nobody.

Him being the father of the captured boys just made it all the stronger
when he spoke.

"The way I see it," said Al Miller, "]Uill Harrison was right all along.
Ain't no way the Red man and the White man can share this land.

And I tell you something else.  It ain't me that's leaving. There's too
much blood of mine been shed here now for me to pack up and go away. I'm
staying, either on this land or in it."

Me too, said all them boys.  That's the truth, Al Miller.  We're
staying.

"Thanks to Armor here, we got no stockade and we got no U.S.
Army fort closer than Carthage City.  If we fight right now, we might
lose everything and everybody.  So let's hold off the Reds as best we
can and send for help.  A dozen men down to Carthage City and beg Bill
Harrison to send us up an army, and maybe bring his cannon if he can. My
two boys are gone, and a thousand Reds for each of my sons won't be
enough getting even for me!"

The dozen riders set on their way south first thing the next morning.

They left from the commons, which was crowded with wagons-as more and
more families from outlying farms came in to town to put up with
close-in friends and kinfolk.  But Al Miller wasn't there to see them
off.  Yesterday his words set them all in motion, but that was all the
leadership they'd get from him.  He didn't want to be in charge.

He just wanted his boys back.

In the church, Armor-of-God sat on the front pew, despondent.

"We're making the most terrible mistake," he said to Reverend Thrower.

"That's what men do," said Thrower, "when they make their decisions
without the help of the Lord."

"It wasn't Ta-Kumsaw, I know it.  Nor the Prophet either."

"He's no Prophet, not of God, anyway," said Thrower.

"He's no killer, either," said Armor.  "Maybe Tack was right, maybe
somehow Ta-Kumsaw's got something to do with this.  But I know one
thing.  Ta-Kumsaw's no killer.  Even when he was a young man, during
General Wayne's war, there was a bunch of Reds all set to burn a bunch
of captives to death, the way they did in those daysChippy-Wa, I think
they were.  And along comes Ta-Kumsaw, all by himself, just this one
lone ShawNee, and he makes them stop.  We want the White man to respect
us, to treat us as a nation, he says to them.  White man won't respect
us if we act like this!  We got to be civilized.  No scalps, no torture,
no burning, no killing captives.  That's what he says to them.

He's stuck to that ever since.  He kills in battle, yes, but in all his
raids down south he didn't kill one soul, do you realize that? If
Ta-Kumsaw's got them boys, then they're as safe as if their mama had
them home in bed."

Thrower sighed.  "I suppose you know these Reds better than I do."

"I know them better than anybody." He laughed bitterly.  "So they call
me a Red-lover and don't listen to a word I say.  Now they're calling
for that whisky-dealing tyrant from Carthage City to come up here and
take over.  No matter what he does he'll be a hero.  They'll make him
governor for real, then.  Heck, they'll probably make him President, if
Wobbish ever joins the U.S.A."

"I don't know this Harrison.  He can't be the devil you make him out to
be.  " Armor laughed.  "Sometimes, Reverend, I think you are as trusting
as a little child."

"Which is how the Lord told us to be.  Armor-of-God, be patient.

All things will work out as the Lord intends."

Armor buried his face in his hands.  "I sure hope so, Reverend.  I sure
do.  But I keep thinking about Measure, as good a man as you can hope to
find, and that boy Alvin, that sweet-faced boy, and how much store his
papa sets by him, and-" Thrower's face went grim.  "Alvin Junior," he
muttered.  "Who would have imagined that the Lord would do his work
through the hands of heathens?"

"What are you talking about?" asked Armor.

"Nothing, Armor, nothing.  Just that everything about this may be
exactly, exactly what the Lord intends."

Up the hill at the Miller house, Al still sat at the breakfast table.

He didn't eat no supper the night before, and when he tried to eat
breakfast he like to gagged on the food.  Faith cleared it all away, and
now she stood behind him, rubbing his shoulders.  She never once said to
him, I told you not to send them.  But they both knew it.  It hung
between them like a sword, and neither dared reach out to the other for
fear of it.

The silence broke when Wastenot came in, a rifle over his shoulder.

He set it beside the front door, swung a chair between his legs, and sat
and looked at his parents.  "They're gone, down to fetch the army.  To
his surprise, his father only lowered his head and rested it on his
arms, which were crossed on the table.

Mother looked at him, her face haggard with worry and grief.

"Since when did you learn how to use that thing?"

"Me and Wantnot been practicing," he said.

"And you're going to kill Reds with it?"

Wastenot was surprised at the loathing in her voice.  "I sure hope so,"
he said.

"And when all the Reds are dead, and you pile all their bodies together,
will Measure and Alvin somehow wriggle out of that pile and come on home
to me?"

Wastenot shook his head.

"Last night some Red went home to his family, all proud because he
killed him some White boys yesterday." Her voice caught when she said
it, but she went on all the same, cause when Faith Miller had aught to
say, it got said.  "And maybe his wife or his mama patted him and kissed
him and made him supper.  But don't you ever walk through that door and
tell me you killed a Red man.  Cause you won't get no supper, boy, and
you won't get no kiss, and you won't get no pat, and no word, and no
home, and no mama, you hear me?"

He heard, all right, but he didn't like it.  He stood up and walked back
to the door and picked up the gun.  "You think what you like, Mama," he
said, "but this is a war, and I am going to kill me some Reds, and I'm
going to come back home, and I'm going to own up to it proud as can be.
And if that means you don't want to be my mama no more, then you might
as well stop being my mama now, and not wait till I come back." He
opened the door, but stopped before slamming it shut behind him.  "Cheer
up, Mama.  Maybe I won't come back at all."

He never talked that way to his mother in his life, and he wasn't real
sure that it felt good to do it now.  But she was being crazy, not
understanding that it was war now, that them Reds had declared it open
season on White fol4 and so there wasn't no more choice about it.

What bothered him most, though, as he got on his horse and rode out to
David's place, was that he couldn't exactly be sure but he thought, he
just suspected anyway, that Papa was crying.  If that didn't beat all.
Yesterday Papa was so hot against the Reds, and now Mama talked against
fighting, and Papa just sat there and cried.

Maybe it was getting old that made Papa like that.  But that wasn't
Wastenot's business, not now.  Maybe Papa and Mama didn't want to kill
them as took their sons-but Wastenot knew what he was going to do to
them as took his brothers.  Their blood was his blood, and whoever shed
his blood was going to shed some of their own, too, a gallon for every
drop.

Lake Mizogan

In his whole life Alvin never saw so much water all in one place.

He stood on the top of a sand dune, looking out over the lake. Measure
stood beside him, a hand resting on Al's shoulder.

"Pa told me to keep you away from water," said Measure, "and now look
where they bring you."

The wind was hot and hard, gusting sometimes and shooting sand around
like tiny arrows.  "Brought you, too," said Al.

"Look, there's a real storm coming'

Off in the southwest, the clouds got black and ugly.  Not one of them
summer-shower storms.  Lightning crackled along the face of the clouds.
The thunder came much later, muffled by distance.  While Alvin was
watching, he felt suddenly like he could see much wider, much farther
than before, like he could see the twisting and churning in the clouds,
feel the hot and cold of it, the icy air swooping down, the hot air
shooting upward, all writhing in a vast circle of the sky.

"Tornado," said Al.  "There's a tornado in that storm."

"I don't see one," said Measure.

"It's coming.  Look how the air is spinning there.  Look at that."

"I believe you, Al.  But it's not like there's any place to hide around
here."

"Look at all these people," said Alvin.  "If it hits us here

"When did you learn how to tell the weather?" asked Measure.

"You never done that before."

Al didn't have an answer to that.  He never had felt a storm inside
himself like this.  It was like the green music he'd heard last night,
all kinds of strange things happening now that he was captured by these
Reds.  But he couldn't waste another minute trying to think about why he
knew-it was enough that he knew it.  "I've got to warn somebody."

Alvin took off down the dune, sliding so that each step was like
leaping off the face of the hill, then landing on one foot and leaping
again.  He'd never run downhill so fast before.

Measure chased after him, shouting, "They told us to stay up there
till-" The wind gusted and whipped away his words.  Now they were off
the hill, the sand was even worse; the wind lifted big sheets of sand
off the dunes, hurled it a ways, then let it fall.  Al had to close his
eyes, shield them with his hand, turn his face out of the wind-whatever
it took to keep the sand from blinding him as he ran to the group of
Reds gathered at the edge of the water.

Ta-Kumsaw was easy to spot, and not just cause he was so big.  The other
Reds left a space around him, and he stood there like a king.  Al ran
right up to him.  "Tornado coming!" he yelled.  "There's tornadoes in
that cloud!" Ta-Kumsaw leaned his head back and laughed; the wind was so
loud Al barely heard him.  Then Ta-Kumsaw reached over Al's head, to
touch the shoulder of another Red standing there.  "This is the boy!"
shouted Ta-Kumsaw.

Al looked at the manTa-Kumsaw touched.  He didn't carry himself like a
king at all-nothing like Ta-Kumsaw.  He was stooped somewhat, and one
eye was missing, the lid just hanging empty over nothher than muscled,
his legs ing.  He looked taut, his arms Were downright scrawny.  But
as Al sat there looking up into his face, he knew him.

There wasn't no mistake.

The wind died down for just a minute.

"Shining Man," said Al.

"Roach boy," said Tenskwa-Tawa, Lolla-Wossiky, the Prophet.

"You're real," said Al.  Not a dream, not a vision.  A real man who had
stood there at the foot of his bed, vanishing and reappearing, his face
shining like sunlight so it hurt to look at him.  But it was the same man.
"I didn't heal you!" said Al.  "I'm sorry."

"Yes you did," said the Prophet.

Then Al remembered why he'd come running down the dune, busting into a
conversation between the two greatest Reds in the whole world, these
brothers whose names were known to every White man, woman, and child
west of the Appalachee Mountains.  "Tomadoesl" he said.

As if to answer him, the wind whipped up again, howling now.  Al turned
around, and what he'd seen and felt was coming true.  There were four
twisters forming, hanging down out of the storm like snakes hanging from
trees, slithering lower toward the ground, their heads ready to strike.
They were all four coming right toward them, but not touching the ground
yet.

"Now!" shouted the Prophet.

Ta-Kumsaw handed his brother a flint-tipped arrow.  The Prophet sat down
in the sand and jammed the point of the arrow into the sole of his left
foot, then his right foot.  Blood oozed copiously from the wounds.  Then
he did the same to his hands, jabbing himself so deep in the palm that
it was bleeding on the top side of his hands, too.

Almost without thinking, Al cried out and started to cast his mind into
the Prophet's body, to heal the wounds.

"No!" cried the Prophet.  "This is the power of the Red man-the blood of
his body-the fire of the land!"

Then he turned and started walking out into Lake Mizogan.

No, not into the lake.  Onto it.  Alvin couldn't hardly believe it, but
under the Prophet's bloody feet the water became smooth and flat as
glass, and the Prophet was standing on it.  His blood pooled on the
surface, deep red.  A few yards away, the water became loose and choppy,
wind-whipped waves rushing toward the smooth place and then just
flattening, calming, becoming smooth.

The Prophet kept walking, farther out onto the water, his bloody
footprints marking the smooth path through the storm.

Al looked back at the tornadoes.  They were close now, almost overhead.
Al could feel them twisting inside him, as if he were part of the
clouds, and these were the great raging emotions of his own soul.

Out on the water, the Prophet raised his hands and pointed at one of the
twisters.  Almost immediately, the other three twisters rose up, sucked
back up into the clouds and disappeared.  But the other came nearer,
until it was directly over the Prophet, maybe a hundred feet up.  It was
near enough that around the edges of the Prophet's glassy smooth path,
the water was leaping up, as if it wanted to dive upward into the
clouds; the water started to circle, too, twisting around and around
with the wind under the twister.

"Come!" shouted the Prophet.

Alvin couldn't hear him, but he saw his eyes-even from that far away-saw
his lips move, and knew what the Prophet wanted.  Alvin didn't hesitate.
He stepped out onto the water.

By now, of course, Measure was caught up with him, and when Al started
walking onto the warm, smooth glass of the Prophet's path, Measure
shouted at him, grabbed at him.  Before he could touch him, the Reds
had him, pulled him back; he screamed at boy'thoug Alvin to come back,
don't go, don't go onto the waterAlvin heard him, and Alvin was as
scared as he could be.  But the Shining Man was waiting for him under
the mouth of the tornado, standing on the water.  Inside himself Al felt
such a longing, like Moses when he saw the burning bush-I have to stop
and see this thing, said Moses, and that's what Alvin was saying, I have
to go and see what this is.  Because this wasn't the kind of thing that
happened in the natural universe, and that was the truth.  There wasn't
no beseeching or hex or witchery he ever heard of that could call a
tornado and turn a stormy lake into glass.  Whatever this Red man was
doing, it was the most important thing Al ever saw or ever was likely to
see in his life.

And the Prophet loved him.  That was one thing Al didn't have no doubt
of.  The Shining Man had stood once at the foot of his bed and taught
him.  Al remembered that the Shining Man cut himself then, too.

Whatever the Prophet was doing, he used his own blood and pain to do it
with.  There was a real majesty to that.  Under the circumstances, Al
can't be much blamed for feeling kind of worshipful as he walked out
onto the water.

Behind him, the path loosened up, dissolved, disappeared.  He felt the
waves licking at his heels.  It scared him, but as long as he walked
forward there wasn't no harm done to him.  And finally he stood with the
Prophet, who reached out and took Alvin's hands in his.

"Stand with me," shouted the Prophet.  "Stand here in the eye of the
land, and see!"

Then the tornado sank quickly downward; the water leaped up, rising like
a wall around them.  They were in the very center of the tornado,
getting sucked upwardUntil the Prophet reached out one bloody hand and
touched the waterspout, and it, too, went smooth and hard as glass.  No,
not glass.

It was as clear and clean as a drop of dew on a spiderweb.  There wasn't
no storm now.  Just Al and the Shining Man, in the middle of a tower of
crystal, bright and transparent.

Only instead of being like a window that showed what was happening
outside, Al couldn't see the lake or the storm or the shore through the
crystal wall.  Instead he saw other things.

He saw a wagon caught in a flooding river, a tree floating down like a
battering ram, and a young man leaping out onto the tree, rolling it
over, turning if from the wagon.  And then the man tangling in the roots
of the tree, getting smashed against a boulder, then rolling and
tumbling downstream, all the time struggling to live, to breathe just a
while longer, keep breathing, keep breathingHe saw a woman bearing a
baby, and a little girl who stood nearby reached out and touched her
belly.  She shouted something, and the midwife reached in her hand and
took the baby's head, pulled it out.

The mother tore and bled.  The little girl reached under and pulled
something off the baby's face; the baby cried.  The man in the river
heard that cry, somehow, knew that he had lived long enough, and so he
died.

Al didn't know what to make of it.  Until he heard the Prophet whisper
in his ear: "The first thing you see in here is the day you are born.  "
The baby was Alvin Junior; the man who died was his brother, Vigor.  Who
was the girl who took the birth caul off his face?  Al never saw her
before in his life.

"I will show you," said the Prophet.  "This stays only a little while,
and I have things to see for myself, but I will show you." He took Alvin
by the hand and together they rose upward through the column of glass.

It didn't feel like flying, not like the soaring of a bird; it was as if
there wasn't no up or down.  The Prophet pulled him upward, but Al
couldn't figure how the Prophet pulled himself Didn't matter.  There
were so many things to see.  Wherever he hung in the air, he could look
in any direction and see something else through the wall of the tower.

Until he realized that every moment of time, every human life must be
visible through this tower wall.  How could you find your way through
here?  How could you look for any one particular story in the hundreds,
thousands, millions of moments of past time?

The Prophet stopped, hoisted the boy up until he could see what the
Prophet was seeing, their cheeks pressed together, their breath
mingling, the Prophet's heartbeat loud in Alvin's ear.

"Look," said the Prophet.

What Alvin saw was a city, shining in sunlight.  Towers of ice, it
looked like, or clear glass, because when the sun set behind the city
its light didn't so much as dim, and the city cast no shadow on the
meadowland around it.  Inside that city there were people, like bright
shadows moving here and there, going up and down the towers without
stairs or wings.  More important than what he saw, though, was what he
felt, looking at that place.  Not peace, no, there was nothing quiet
about what he felt.  It was excitement, his heart pumping fast as a
horse in full gallop.  The people there, they weren't perfect-they were
sometimes angry, sometimes sad.  But nobody was hungry, and nobody was
ignorant, and nobody had to do something just because somebody else made
them do it.  "Where is that city!" whispered Alvin.

"I don't know," said the Prophet.  "Every time I come here, I see it in
a different shape.  Sometimes these tall thin towers, sometimes big
crystal mounds, sometimes just people living on a sea of crystal fire. I
think this city was built many times in the past.  I think it will be
built again- "Are you going to build it?  Is that what Prophetstown is
for?"

Tears came from the Prophet's eyes-spilling from his one good eye,
oozing out of the slack lid of the other.  "Red man can't build this
place alone," he said.  "We are part of the land, and this city is more
than the land alone.  The land is good and bad, life and death all
together, the green silence."

Alvin thought of his sense of green music, but he didn't say nothing,
cause the Prophet was saying things he wanted to hear, and Al was smart
enough to know that sometimes it's better to listen than to talk.

"But this city," said the Prophet, "the crystal city is light without
dark, clean without dirty, healthy without sick, strong without weak,
plenty without hungry, drink without thirst, life without death."

"The people in that place, they aren't all happy," said Alvin.

"They don't live forever."

"Ah," said the Prophet.  "You don't see the same that I see."

"What I see is, they're building it." Al frowned.  "At one end they're
building it, and at the other end, it's falling down."

"Ah," said the Prophet.  "The city I see will never fall."

"Well what's the difference?  How come we don't see the same thing."

"I don't know, Roach Boy.  I never showed this to anybody.

Now go back down, wait for me below.  I have things to see before time
starts again.

Just thinking about going down made Alvin start to sink, until he was
clear to the bottom, on the shiny clear floor.  Floor?  It could have
been the ceiling for all he knowed.  There was light coming up from
there just like it was shining through the other walls, and he saw
pictures there, too.

He saw a huge cloud of dust spin faster and faster, but instead of
spitting out dust it sucked it all in, and suddenly it started glowing,
and then it caught fire, and it was the sun, just as plain as could be.

Alvin knew somewhat about the planets, cause Thrower talked about them,
so he wasn't surprised to see them glowing points of light that pretty
soon got dim.  And after a while instead of dust mixed with darkness, it
was all either worlds or empty space, pretty much.  He saw the Earth, so
small, but then he came closer and he saw how big it was, spinning so
fast, one face of the Earth ]it up from sunlight, the other face dark.
He stood in the sky, it seemed, looking down on the lit place, but he
could see all that was going on.  First bare rock, spouting volcanoes;
then out of the ocean, plants spreading out, growing tall, ferns and
trees.  He saw fish leaping in the sea, crawly life on the shore where
the tide came in, and then bugs and other small critters, hopping and
nibbling on leaves and catching each other and eating each other up.
Them animals kept getting bigger and bigger, so fast Alvin couldn't
follow the changes, just the Earth spinning and him watching, huge
monstrous creatures like he never heard of, with long snakey necks some
of them, and teeth and jaws to tear down trees with a single bite, it
looked like.  And then they were gone, and there were elephants and
antelopes and tigers and horses, all the life of the earth, getting more
and more like what Alvin thought animals ought to look like.  But
nowhere in all this did he see a man.  He found apes and hairy things
that hit each other with rocks, things that walked on their hind legs
but looked about as dumb as frogs.

And then he did see some folks, though he wasn't sure at first cause
they were Black and he hadn't seen but one Black man in his life, a
slave owned by a peddler from the Crown Colonies, who happened to come
through Vigor Church maybe two years back.  But they looked like human
people, all right, Black or not, and they were pug fruit down out of
trees and berries off of bushes, feeding each other, a passel of
pickaninnies following in their tracks.  Two of the young ones got to
fighting, and the big one killed the little one.  The papa came back
then, and kicked the one who did the killing, made him go away.  Then he
picked up the dead one and brought him back to the mama, both of them
crying, and they laid that dead child down and covered him up with
rocks.  Then they gathered up their family and walked on, and after just
a few steps they were eating again, and the tears stopped, and they went
on, just went on.  These are folks, that's sure, thought Alvin.  This is
just the way human people are.

The Earth kept turning, and by the time it come round again there was
all kinds of folks, dark ones in the hot countries, light ones in the
cold countries, with all shades in between.  Except when America came
under the light of the sun.  In America folks was pretty much all the
same kind, all Red, whether they lived north or south, hot or cold, wet
or dry.  And the land was at peace, compared to the other part of the
world.  It was strange for him to see, because when the big part of the
land came by, with all its different races and nations, why, it changed
with every sweep of the Earth, whole countries moved from one place to
another, everything always shuffling around, - and wars every minute,
everywhere.  The smaller land, America, it had some wars, too, but it
was all slower, gentler.  The people lived in a different rhythm.  The
land had its own heartbeat, its own life.

From time to time more people would come from the old worldfishermen,
mostly.  Off course, led astray by storms, running from enemies.  They'd
come, and for a time they'd live their old-world life in America, trying
to build fast, and breed fast, and kill as much as they could.  Like a
sickness.  But then they'd either join in with the Reds and disappear,
or get killed off.  None of them ever kept up their old-world ways.

Until now, thought Alvin.  Now when we came, we were just too strong.
Like getting a couple of colds maybe, and you begin to think you won't
never get real sick, and then you get a dose of smallpox and you know
that you were never truly sick before at all.

Alvin felt a hand on his shoulder.

"So there is where you looked," said the Prophet.  "What did you see?"

"I think I saw the whole creation of the world," said Al.  "Just like in
the Bible.  I think I saw-"

"I know what you saw.  We all see this, all who have ever come to this
place."

"I thought you said I was the first you brought."

"This place-there are many doors inside.  Some walk in through fire.
Some walk in through water.  Some through being buried in the earth.
Some by falling through the air.  They come to this place and see.  They
go back and tell what they remember, as much of it as they understood,
and tell it, as much as they have words to say, and others listen and
remember, as much as they can understand.  This is the seeing place."

"I don't want to leave," said Alvin.

"No, and neither does the other one."

"Who?  Is there somebody else here?"

The Prophet shook his head.  "Not his body.  But I feel him in me,
looking out of my eye." He tapped the cheekbone under his good eye.

"Not this eye, the other."

"Can't you tell who it is?"

"White," he said.  "It doesn't matter.  Whoever it is did no harm.

I think maybe-will do a good thing.  Now we go."

"But I want to know all the stories in this place!"

The Prophet laughed.  "You could live forever and not see all the
stories.  They change faster than a man can see."

"How will I ever come here again?  I want to see everything, all of it!"

"I will never bring you back," said the Prophet.

"Why?  Did I do something wrong""

"Hush, Roach Boy.  I will never bring you back, because I will never
come here myself again.  This is the last time.  I have seen the end of
all my dreams."

For the first time, Alvin realized how sad the Prophet looked.

His face was haggard with grief.

"I saw you in this place.  I saw that I had to bring you here.  I saw
you in the hands of the Chok-Taw.  I sent my brother to get you, bring
you back."

"Is it cause you brought me here that you can't never come here again
yourself?"

"No.  The land has chosen.  The end will be soon." He smiled, but it was
a ghastly smile.  "Your preacher, Reverend Thrower, he said to me
once-if your foot gets sick, cut it off.  Right?"

"I don't remember that."

"I do," said the Prophet.  "This part of the land, it is already sick.

Cut it off, so the rest of the land can live."

"What do you mean?" Alvin conjured up pictures in his mind, about pieces
of the land breaking off and falling into the sea.

"Red man will go west of the Mizzipy.  White man will stay east.

Red part of land will live.  White part of land will be very dead, cut
off.  Full of smoke and metal, guns and death.  Red men who stay in the
east will turn White.  And White men won't come west of the Mizzipy."

"There's already White men west of the Mizzipy.  Trappers and traders,
mostly, but a few farmers with their families."

"I know," said the Prophet.  "But what I see here today-I know how to
make the White man never come west again, and how to make the Red man
never stay east."

"How're you going to do that?"

"If I tell," said the Prophet, "then it won't happen.  Some things in
this place, you can't tell, or it changes, and they go away."

"Is it the crystal city?" asked Alvin.

"No," said the Prophet.  "It is the river of blood.  It is the forest of
iron."

"Show me!" demanded the boy.  "Let me see what you saw!"

"No," said the Prophet.  "You wouldn't keep the secret."

"Why wouldn't I?  If I give my word I won't break it!"

"You could give your word all day, Roach Boy, but if you saw the vision
you would cry out in fear and pain.  And you would tell your brother.
You would tell your family."

"Is something going to happen to them?"

"Not one of your family will die," said the Prophet.  "All safe and
healthy when this is over."

"Show me!"

"No," said the Prophet.  "I will break the tower now, and you will
remember what we did and said here.  But the only way you'll ever come
back and see these things is if you find the crystal city."

The Prophet knelt down at the place where the wall met the floor.

He pushed his bloody fingers into the wall and lifted.  The wall rose
up, dissolved, turned to wind.  They were surrounded now by the scene
they left so many hours before, it seemed.  The water, the storm, the
twister rising back up into the clouds above them.  Lightning flashed
all around them, and the rain came down, so fast it made the shore
disappear.  The rain that landed on the crystal place where they stood
turned to crystal, too, became part of the floor under them.

The Prophet went to the edge nearest the shore, and stepped out onto the
rough water.  It went hard under his foot, but it still undulated
slowly-it wasn't as firm as the platform.  The Prophet reached back,
took Alvin's hand, pulled him out onto the new path he was making on the
surface of the lake.  It wasn't near as smooth as before, and the
farther they walked the rougher it got, the more it moved, the slicker
it got so it was hard to go up and over the waves.

"We stayed too long!" cried the Prophet.

Alvin could feel the black water under -the thin shell of crystal,
roiling with hate.  Nothingness out of an ancient nightmare, wanting to
break through the crystal, get hold of Al, suck him down, drown him,
tear him to pieces, to the tiniest pieces of all, and discard him into
the darkness.

"It wasn't me!" shouted Alvin.

The Prophet turned around, picked him up, lifted him to his shoulders.
The rain beat down on him, the wind tried to tear him from the Prophet's
shoulders.  Alvin clung tight to Tenskwa-Tawa's hair.  He could feel
that now the Prophet's feet were sinking down into the water more and
more with every step.  Behind them there wasn't a trace of a path, all
of it gone, the waves rising higher and higher.

The Prophet stumbled, fell; Alvin fell too, forward, knowing he was
going to drownAnd found himself sprawled on the wet sand of the beach,
the water licking up around him, sucking sand out from under him, trying
to pull him back out into the water.  Then strong hands under his arms,
pulling him away, up the beach, up toward the dunes.

"He's out there, the Prophet!" Alvin shouted.  Or thought he shouted-his
voice was just a whisper, and he hardly made a sound.

It wouldn't have mattered, the wind being so loud.  He opened his eyes
and they were whipped full of sand and rain.

Then Measure's lips were against his ear, yelling to him.  "The
Prophet's all right!  Ta-Kumsaw pulled him out!  I thought you were dead
for sure, when that twister sucked you up!  Are you all right?"

"I saw everything!" Alvin cried.  But he was so feeble now that he
couldn't make a sound, and he gave it up, let his body go limp, and
collapsed into exhausted sleep.

Gatlopp

Measure saw little of Alvin-too little.  After the episode with the
tornado on the lake, Measure would have thought Alvin would be awake to
his danger here, eager to get away.  Instead he seemed to care for
nothing but to be with the Prophet, listening to his stories and the
perverse poetic wisdom he dispensed.

Once when Alvin was actually with him long enough to set and talk,
Measure asked him why he bothered.  "Even when them Reds talk English I
can't understand them.  Talk about the land like it was a person, things
about taking only the life that offers itself, the land dying east of
the Mizzipy-it ain't dying here, Al, as any fool can see.

And even if it's got smallpox, black death, and ten thousand hangnails,
there ain't no doctor knows how to cure it."

"Tenskwa-Tawa does know how," said Alvin.

"Then let him do it, and let's get on home."

"Another day, Measure."

"Ma and Pa'll be worried sick, they think we're dead!"

"Tenskwa-Tawa says the land is working out its own course."

"There you go again!  Land is land, and it ain't got a thing to do with
Pa getting a bunch of the boys together combing through the woods to
find us!"

"Go on without me, then."

"I'm not Ready to do that yet.  He didn't have no Measure wasn't particular wish
to face Ma if he came home without Alvin.  "Oh, he was fine when I left
him.  Just playing around with tornadoes and walking on water with a
one-eyed Red.  Didn't want to come home just yet, you know how them
ten-year-old boys are." No, Measure wasn't ripe to come home just now,
not if he didn't have Alvin in tow.  And it was sure he couldn't take
Alvin against his will.  The boy wouldn't even listen to talk of escape.

The worst of it was that while everybody liked Alvin just fine,

-A

jabbering to him in English and ShawNee, not a soul there would so much
as talk to Measure, except Ta-Kumsaw himself, and the Prophet, who
talked all the time whether anybody was listening or not.  It got
powerful lonely, walking around all day.  And not walking far, either.

Nobody talked to him, but if he started heading away from the dunes
toward the woods, somebody'd shoot off an arrow.  It'd land with a thud
in the sand right by him.  They sure trusted their aim a lot better than
Measure did.  He kept thinking about arrows drifting a little this way
or that and hitting them.

Escape was a silly idea, when Measure gave it serious thought.

They'd track him down in no time.  But what he couldn't figure was why
they didn't want him to go.  They weren't doing nothing with him.

He was completely useless.  And they swore they had no plans to kill him
or even break him up a little.

Fourth day at the dunes, though, it finally came to a head.  He went
toTa-Kumsaw and plain demanded that he be let go.  Ta-Kumsaw looked
annoyed, but that was pretty normal for him.  This time, though, Measure
didn't back down.

"Don't you know it's plain stupid for you to keep us here?  It ain't
like we disappeared without a trace, you know.  Our horses must have
been found by now with your name all over them."

That was the first time Measure realized that Ta-Kumsaw didn't have a
notion about them horses.  "My name isn't on horses."

"On their saddles, Chief.  Don't you know?  Them Chok-Taw who took us-if
they weren't your own boys, which I ain't quite satisfied about either,
if you want to know-they carved your name into the saddle on my horse
and then jabbed the horse so it'd run.  The Prophet's name was carved in
Alvin's saddle.  They must've gone home right away."

Ta-Kumsaw's face seemed to turn dark, his eyes flashing like lightning.
If you want to see a sky-god, thought Measure, this is what he looks
like.  "All the Whites," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "They'll think I stole you.
"You didn't know?" asked Measure.  "Well if that don't beat all.  I
thought you Reds knew everything, the way you carry on.  I even tried to
mention it to some of your boys, but they just turn their backs on me.
And all the time none of you knowed it."

"I didn't know," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "But someone did." He stalked off, as
best you can do that in loose sand; then he turned back around.

"Come on, I want you!"

So Measure followed him to the bark-covered wigwam where the Prophet
held Bible classes or whatever it was he did all day.  TaKumsaw wasn't
shy about showing how angry he was.  Didn't say a thing-just walked
around the wigwam, kicking away the rocks that helped anchor it to the
sand.  Then he picked up one end of it and started lifting.

"Needs two men for this," he said.

Measure squatted down next to him, got a grip, and counted to three.  Then he heaved.  Ta-Kumsaw didn

about six inches and dropped back down.

Measure grunted from the exertion and glared at Ta-Kumsaw.

"Why didn't you lift?"

"You only got to three," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"That's the count, Chief One, two, three."

"You Whites are such fools.  Every man knows four is the strong number."

Ta-Kumsaw counted to four.  This time they lifted together, got it up,
tipped it clean over.  By now, of course, whoever was inside knew what
was going on, but nobody shouted or nothing.  And when the wigwam lay on
its back like a stranded turtle, there sat the Prophet and Alvin and a
few Reds, cross-legged on blankets on the sand, the one-eyed Red still
talking away like as if nothing had happened at all.

Ta-Kumsaw started bellowing in ShawNee, and the Prophet answered him,
mildly at first, but louder and louder as time went on.  It was quite a
row, the sort of yelling that in Measure's experience always came to
blows.  But not with these two Reds.  Just yelled for a half hour and
then stood there, facing each other, breathing hard, saying nothing at
all.  The silence was only a few minutes, but it felt longer than the
shouting.

"You understand any of this?" asked Measure.

"I just know that the Prophet said Ta-Kumsaw was coming today, and he'd
be very angry."

"Well, if he knowed, why didn't he do something to change it?"

"Oh, he's real careful about that.  He's got everything going just the
way it needs to, for the land to be divided right between White and Red.
If he goes and changes something because he knows what's
going to happen, he might undo everything, mess it all up.  So he knows
what's going to happen, but he don't tell a soul who might change it."

"Well, what good does it do to know the future if you ain't going to do
nothing about it?"

"Oh, he does things," said Alvin.  "He just doesn't necessarily tell
folks what he's doing.  That's why he made the crystal tower when that
storm came by.  To make sure the vision was still the way it was
supposed to be, to make sure things hadn't gotten themselves off the
right path."

"What's all this about?  Why are they fighting?"

"You tell me, Measure.  You're the one helped him turn over the
"wigwam."

"Beats me.  I just told him about his and the Prophet's names being
carved on our saddles."

"He knowed that," said Alvin.

"Well, he sure acted like he didn't hear of it before."

"I told the Prophet myself, the night after he took me into the tower. "

"Didn't it come to your mind that maybe the Prophet didn't tell
Ta-Kumsaw?"

"Why not?" asked Alvin.  "Why wouldn't he tell it?"

Measure nodded wisely.  "I have a feeling that's the very question
Ta-Kumsaw's asking his brother about right now."

"It's crazy not to tell, said Alvin.  "I figured Ta-Kumsaw must've sent
somebody by now to tell our folks we were all right.

"You know what I think, Al?  I think your Prophet's been playing us all
for fools.  I don't even have a guess as to why, but I think he's
working out some plan, and part of that plan is keeping us from going
home.  And since that means all our family and neighbors and all are
going to be up in arms about it, you can figure it out.  The Prophet
wants to get a real hot little shooting war going here.  "No!" said
Alvin.  "The Prophets says no man can kill another man who doesn't want
to die, that it's as wrong to kill a White man as it is to kill a wolf
or a bear that you don't want for food."

"Maybe he wants us for food.  But he's going to have a war if we don't
get home and tell our kin that we're safe."

That was right when Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet fell silent.  And it was
Measure who broke the silence.  "Think you boys are about set to let us
go home?" he asked.

The Prophet immediately sank down into a cross-legged position, sitting
on a blanket across from the two Whites.  "Go home, Measure," said the
Prophet.

"Not without Alvin."

"Yes without Alvin," said the Prophet.  "If he stays in this part of the
country, he will die."

"What are you talking about?"

"What I saw with my eyes!" said the Prophet.  "The things to come.  If
Alvin goes home now, he'll be dead in three days.  But you go, Measure.
Today in the afternoon is a very perfect time for you to go- "What are
you going to do with Alvin?  You think he's going to be any safer with
you?"

"Not with me, " said the Prophet.  "With my brother."

"This is all a stupid idea!" shouted Ta-Kumsaw.

"My brother is going to make many visits.  With the French at Detroit,
with the Irrakwa, the Appalachee nation, with the ChokTaw and the
Cree-El, every kind of Red man, every kind of White who might stop a
very bad war from happening."

"If I talk to Reds, Tenskwa-Tawa, I'll talk to them about coming to
fight with me and drive the White men back across the mountains, back
into their ships, back into the sea!"

"Talk about whatever you want," said Tenskwa-Tawa.  "But leave this
afternoon, and take the White boy who walks like a Red man."

"No," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Grief swept across Tenskwa-Tawa's face, and he moaned sharply.

"Then all the land will die, not just a part.  If you don't do what I
say today, then White man will kill all the land, from one ocean to the
other, from north to south, all the land dead!  And Red men will die
except a very few who will live on tiny pieces of ugly desert land, like
prisons, live there all their lives, because you did not obey what I saw
in my vision!"

"Ta-Kumsaw does not obey these mad visions!  Ta-Kumsaw is the face of
the land, the voice of the land!  The redbird told me, and you know
that, LoBa-Wossiky!"

The Prophet whispered.  "Lolla-Wossiky is dead."

"The voice of the land doesn't obey a one-eyed whisky-Red."

The Prophet was stung to the heart, but he kept his face impassive.

"You are the voice of the land's anger.  You will stand in battle
against a mighty army of Whites.  I tell you this will happen before the
first snow falls.  If the White boy Alvin is not with you, then you will
die in defeat."

"And if he is with me?"

"Then you will live," said the Prophet.

"I'm glad to go," said Alvin.  When Measure started to argue, Alvin
touched his arm.  "You can tell Ma and Pa I'm all right.  But I want to
go.  The Prophet told me, I can learn more from Ta-Kumsaw than any other
man in the whole world."

"Then I'm going with you, too," said Measure.  "I gave my word to Pa and
Ma both."

The Prophet looked coldly at Measure.  "You will go back to your own
people."

"Then Alvin comes with me."

"You are not the one who says," the Prophet retorted.

"And you are?  Why, because your boys got all the arrows?"

Ta-Kumsaw reached out, touched Measure on the shoulder.  "You are not a
fool, Measure.  Someone has to go back and tell your people that you and
Alvin aren't dead."

"If I leave him behind, how do I know he ain't dead, tell me that?"

"You know," said Ta-Kumsaw, "because I say that while I live no Red man
will hurt this boy."

"And while he's with you, nobody can hurt you, either, is that it?

My little brother's a hostage, that's all-" Measure could see that
Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa were both about as mad as they could be
without killing him, and he knew he was so mad he was ready to break his
hand on somebody's face.  And it might've come to that, too, except
Alvin stood up, all ten years and sixty inches of him, and took charge.

sure, you know better than anybody that I can take care of myself You
just tell Pa and Ma about what I did with them ChokTaw, and they'll see
that I'm fit.  They were sending me off anyway, weren't they?  To be a
prentice to blacksmith.  Well, I'm going to serve as prentice for a
little while toTa-Kumsaw, that's all.  And everybody knows that except
for maybe Tom Jefferson, Ta-Kumsaw is the greatest man in America.  If I
can somehow keep Ta-Kumsaw alive, then that's my duty.  And if you can
stop a war from happening by going home, then that's your duty.  Don't
you see?"

Measure did see, right enough, and he even agreed.  But he also knew
that he was going to have to face his parents.  "There's a story in the
Bible, about Joseph, the son of Jacob.  He was his father's favorite
son, but his brothers hated him and sold him into slavery, and then they
took some of his clothes and soaked them in goat's blood and tore them
up and came and told their father, Look, he got hisself et by lions. And
his father tore his clothes and he just wouldn't stop grieving, not
ever."

"But you're going to tell them I ain't dead."

"I'm going to tell them I saw you turn a hatchet head soft as butter,
walk on the water, fly up into a tornado-that'll just make them feel all
safe and warm, knowing you're tucked into such a common ordinary life
with these here Reds."

Ta-Kumsaw interrupted.  "You are a coward," he said.  "You're afraid to
tell the truth to your father and mother."

"I made an oath to them," said Measure.

"You're a coward.  You take no risk.  No danger.  You want Alvin with
you to keep you safe!"

That was just too much for Measure.  He swung out with his right arm,
aiming to connect with Ta-Kumsaw's smile.  It didn't surprise him that
Ta-Kumsaw blocked the blow-but it was kind of a shock that he caught
Measure s wrist so easy, twisted it.  Measure got even madder, punched
at Ta-Kumsaw's stomach, and this time he did connect.  But the chief's
belly was about as soft as a stump, and he snagged Measure's other hand
and held them both.

So Measure did what any good wrassler knows to do.  He popped his knee
up right between Ta-Kumsaw's legs.

Now, Measure had done that only twice before, and both times he did it,
the other fellow got right down on the ground, writhing like a
half-squished worm.  Ta-Kumsaw just stood there, rigid, like he was
still
soaking up the pain, getting madder and madder.  Since he was holding on
to Measure's arms, Measure had a good notion that he was about to die,
ripped right in half down the middle-that's how mad Ta-Kumsaw looked.

Ta-Kumsaw let go of Measure's arms.

Measure took his arms back, rubbed his wrists where the chief's
fingermarks were white and sore.  The chief looked angry, all right, but
it was Alvin he was mad at.  He turned and looked down at that boy like
he was ready to peel off Alvin's skin and feed it to him raw.

"You did your filthy White man's tricks in me," he said.

"I didn't want neither of you getting hurt," said Alvin.

"You think I'm a coward like your brother?  You think I'm afraid of
pain?"

"Measure ain't no coward!"

"He threw me to the ground with White man's tricks."

Measure didn't like hearing that same accusation.  "You know I
didn't ask him to do that!  I'll take you now, if you want!  In fight
you fair and square!"

"Strike a man with your knee?" said Ta-Kumsaw.  "You don't know how to
fight like a man."

"I'll face YOU any Way you want," said Measure.

Ta-Kumsaw smiled.  "Gatlopp, then."

By now a whole bunch of Reds had gathered round, and when they heard the
word gatlopp, they started hooting and laughing.

There wasn't a White in America who hadn't heard stories about how Dan
Boone ran the gatlopp and just kept on running, that first time he
escaped from the Reds; but there was other stories, about Whites who got
beat to death.  Taleswapper told about it somewhat, the time he visited
last year.  It's like a jury trial, he said, where the Reds hit you hard
or easy depending on how much they think you deserve to die.

If they think you're a brave man, they'll strike you hard to test You
with pain.  But if they think you're a coward, they'll break your bones
so you never get out of the gatlopp alive.  The chief can't tell the
gatlopp how hard to strike, or where.  It's just about the most
democratic and vicious system of justice ever seen.

"I see You're afraid of that," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Of course I am," said Measure.  "I'd be a fool not to, spec lally with
your boys already thinking I'm a coward."

"I'll run the gatlopp before you," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "I'll tell them to
strike me as hard as they strike you."

"They won't do it," said Measure.

"They will if I ask them," said Ta-Kumsaw.  He must have seen the
disbelief on Measure's face, cause then he said, "And if they don't,
I'll run the gatlopp again."

"And if they kill me, will you dieTa -Kumsaw looked up and down
Measure's body.  Lean and strongg Measure knew he was, from chopping
trees and firewood, toting Pails, lifting hay, and hoisting grain bags
in the mill.  But he wasn't tough.

His skin was burnt something awful from being near naked in the sun out
here on the dunes, even though he tried to use a blanket to cover up.

Strong but soft, that's what Ta-Kumsaw found when he studied Measure's
body.

"The blow that would kill You," said Ta-Kumsaw, "it might bruise me."

"SO YOU admit it ain't fair.  "Fair is when two men face the same pain.
urage is when two men face the same pain.  You don't want fair, you want
easy.  You want safe.  You're a coward.  I knew you wouldn't do it."

"I'll do it," said Measure.

"And you!" cried Ta-Kumsaw, pointing at Alvin.  "You touch nothing, you
heal nothing, you cure nothing, you don't take away pain!"

Alvin didn't say a word, just looked at him.  Measure knew that look. It
was the expression Alvin got on his face whenever he had no intention of
doing a thing you said.

"Al," said Measure.  "You better promise me not to meddle."

Al just set his lips and didn't speak.

"You better promise me not to meddle, Alvin Junior, or I just won't go
home."

Alvin promised.  Ta-Kumsaw nodded and walked away, talking in ShawNee to
his boys.  Measure felt sick with fear.

"Why are you afraid, White man?" asked the Prophet.

"Cause I'm not stupid," said Measure.  "Only a stupid man wouldn't be
scared to run the gatlopp."

The Prophet just laughed and walked off.

Alvin was sitting in the sand again, writing or drawing or something
with his finger.

"You ain't mad at me, are you, Alvin?  Cause I got to tell you, you
can't be half as mad at me as I am at you.  You got no duty to these
Reds, but you sure got a duty to your ma and pa.  Things being how they
are, I can't make you do nothing, but I can tell you I'm ashamed of you
for siding with them against me and your kin."

Al looked up, and there was tears in his eyes.  "Maybe I am siding with
my kin, did you think of that?"

of doing it, seeing as how you'll "Well you sure got a funny way keep Ma
and Pa worried sick for months, no doubt."

"Don't you think about anything bigger than our family?  Don't you think
maybe the Prophet's working out a plan to save the lives of thousands of
Reds and Whites?"

"That's where we're different," said Measure.  "I don't believe there is
anything bigger than our family."

Alvin was still writing as Measure walked away.  It didn't even occur to
Measure what Alvin wrote in the sand.  He saw, but he didn't  the
words came to his mind.

look, he didn't read it.  Now, thou RUN AWAY NOW, that's what Al was
writing.  A message to him?

Why didn't he say it with his mouth, then?  Nothing made sense.

The writing probably wasn't for him.  And he sure wasn't going to run
away and have Ta-Kumsaw and all them Reds sure he was a coward forever.

What difference would it make if he ran away now?  The Reds'd catch him
in a minute, there in the woods, and then he'd run the gatlopp anyway,
only it'd even be worse for him.

The warriors formed two lines in the sand.  They were carrying heavy
branches fallen or cut from trees.  Measure watched as an old man took
the beads from around Ta-Kumsaw's neck, then pulled off his loincloth.
Ta-Kumsaw turned to Measure and grinned.  "White man is naked when he
has no clothes.  Red man is never naked in his own land.

The wind is my clothing, the fire of the sun, the dust of the earth, the
water of rain.  I wear all these.  I am the voice and the face of the
land!"

"Just get on with it," said Measure.

"I know someone who says a man like you has no poetry in his soul," said
Ta-Kumsaw.

"And I know plenty of people who say that a man like you has no soul at
all."

Ta-Kumsaw glared at him, barked a few words to his men, and then stepped
between the lines.

He walked slowly, his chin high and arrogant.  The first Red struck him
a blow across his thighs, using the skinny end of a branch.

TaKumsaw snatched the branch out of his hands, turned it around, and
made him strike again, this time in the chest, a harsh blow that drove
the air out of Ta-Kumsaw's lungs.  Measure could hear the grunting sound
from where he stood.

The lines ran up the face of a dune, so that progress
uhpisthmeehnillwweraes slow.  Ta-Kumsaw never paused as the blows came.

stern-faced, dutiful.  They were helping him show courage, and so they
gave him pain-but no damaging blows.  His thighs and belly and shoulders
took the worst of it.  Nothing on his shins, nothing in his face.  But
that didn't mean he had it easy.  Measure could see his shoulders,
bloody from the rough bark of the branches.  He imagined himself
receiving every blow that fell, and knew that they'd strike him harder.
I'm a royal fool, he said to himself.  Here I am matching courage with
the noblest man in America, as everybody knows.

Ta-Kumsaw reached the end, turned, faced Measure from the top of the
dune.  His body was dripping with blood, and he was smiling.

"Come to me, brave White man," he called.

Measure didn't hesitate.  He started toward the gatlopp.  It was a voice
from behind that stopped him.  The Prophet, shouting in ShawNee.

The Reds looked at him.  When he was finished, Ta-Kumsaw spat.

Measure, not knowing what had been said, started forward again. When he
got to the first Red, he expected at least as hard a blow asTa -Kumsaw
got.  But there was nothing.  He took another step.  Nothing.

Maybe to show their contempt they meant to hit him in the back, but he
climbed higher and higher up the dune, and still there was not a blow,
not a move.

He should have been relieved, he knew, but instead he was angry.

They gave Ta-Kumsaw help in showing his courage, and now they were
making Measure's passage through the gatlopp a walk of shame instead of
honor.  He whirled around and faced the Prophet, who stood at the bottom
of the dune, his arm across Alvin's shoulders.

"What did you say to them?" Measure demanded.

"I told them that if they killed you, everyone would say Ta-Kumsaw and
the Prophet kidnapped these boys and murdered them.  I told them that if
they marked you in any way, when you went home everybody would say we
tortured you."

"And I say I want a fair chance to prove I'm not a coward!"

"The gatlopp is a stupid idea, for men who forget their duty."

Measure reached down and grabbed a club from a Red man's hand.

He struck his own thighs with it, again, again, trying to draw blood.

It hurt, but not very bad, because whether he wanted to or not, his arms
flinched at causing pain to his own self.  So he thrust the branch back
into the warrior's arms and demanded, "Hit me!"

"The bigger a man is, the more people he serves," said the Prophet.

"A small man serves himself.  Bigger is to serve your family.

Bigger is to serve your tribe.  Then your people.  Biggest of all, to
serve all men, and all lands.  For yourself, you show courage.  For your
family, your tribe, your people, my people-for the land and all people
in it, you walk this gatlopp with no mark on you."

Slowly, Measure turned around, walked up the dune toTa-Kumsaw,
untouched.  Again Ta-Kumsaw spat on the ground, this time at Measure's
feet.

"I ain't no coward," said Measure.

Ta-Kumsaw walked away.  Walked, slipped, slid down the dune.

The warriors of the gatlopp also walked away.  Measure stood at the top
of the hill, feeling ashamed, angry, used.

"Go!" shouted the Prophet.  "Walk south from here!"

He handed a pouch to Alvin, who scrambled up the dune and gave it to
Measure.  Measure opened it.  It contained pemmican and dried corn, so
he could suck on it on his way.

"You coming with me?" Measure asked.

"I'm going with Ta-Kumsaw," said Alvin.

"I could've made it through the gatlopp," said Measure.

"I know," said Alvin.

"If he wasn't going to let me go through it," said Measure, "hoy come
the Prophet allowed it to happen at all?"

"He ain't telling," said Alvin.  "But something terrible's going to
happen.  And he wants it to happen.  If you'd've went before, when I
told you to run away-"

"They would've caught me, Al."

"It was worth a try.  Now when you leave, you're doing just what he
wants."

"He plans for me to get killed or something?"

"He promised me you'd live through this, Measure.  And all the family.
Him and Ta-Kumsaw, too."

"Then what's so terrible?"

"I don't know.  I'm just scared of what's going to happen.  I think he's
sending me with Ta-Kumsaw to save my life."

One more time, it was worth a try.  "Alvin, if you love me, come with me
now."

Alvin started to cry.  "Measure, I love you, but I can't go."

Still crying, he ran down the dune.  Not wanting to watch him out of
sight, Measure started walking.  Almost due south, a little bit east.

He wouldn't have no trouble finding the way.  But he felt sick with
dread, and with shame for having let them talk him into leaving without
his brother.  I failed at everything here.  I'm pretty near useless.

He walked the rest of that day and spent the night in a pile of leaves
in a hollow.  Next day he walked till late afternoon, when he came to a
south-flowing creek.  It would flow into the Tippy-Canoe or the Wobbish,
one or the other.  It was too deep to walk down the middle, and too
overgrown to walk alongside.  So he just kept the stream within earshot
and made his own way through the forest.  He wasn't no Red, that was for
sure.  He got scratched up by bushes and branches and bit by insects,
none of which felt too good on his sunburnt skin.  He also kept running
into thickets and having to back out.

Like the land was his enemy, slowing him down.  He kept wishing for a
horse and a good road.

Hard as it was to go through the woods, though, he was up to it.

Partly cause Alvin toughened up his feet for him.  Partly cause of the
way he seemed to breathe deeper than ever before.  But it was more than
that.  Strength was wound in among his muscles in a way he never felt in
his Ille.  Never so alive as now.  And he thought, If I had a horse
right now, I think maybe I'd be wishing I was on foot.

It was late afternoon on the second day when he heard a splashing sound
in the river.  There was no mistaking it-horses were being walked in the
stream.  That meant White men, maybe even folks from Vigor Church, still
searching for him and Alvin.

He scrambled his way to the stream, getting scratched something awful on
the way.  They were headed downstream, away from him, four men on
horseback.  It wasn't till he was already out into the stream, yelling
to bust his head off that he noticed they were wearing the green uniform
of the U.S.  Army.  He never heard of them coming up in these parts.
This was the country where White folks didn't go much, on account of not
wanting to rile up the French at Fort Chicago.

They heard him right off, and wheeled their horses around to see him.
Almost quick as they saw him, three of them had their muskets up to the
ready.

"Don't shoot!" Measure cried.

The soldiers rode toward him, making pretty slow progress as their
horses had some trouble breasting the water.

"Don't shoot, for heaven's sake," Measure said.  "You can see I ain't
armed, I don't even have a knife."

"He talks English real good, don't he?" said one soldier to another.

"Of course I do!  I'm a White man."

"Now don't that beat all," said another soldier.  "First time I ever
heard one of them claim to be White."

Measure looked down at his own skin.  It was a vivid red color from his
sunburn, much lighter than any true Red man.  He was wearing a
loincloth, and he looked pretty wild and dirty.  But his beard was
growing somewhat, wasn't it?  For the first time Measure found himself
wishing he was a hairy man,'with thick heavy beard and lots of chest
hair.  Then there'd be no mistake, since Reds didn't grow much.

As it was, though, they wouldn't see his light-colored mustache hair or
the few little hairs on his chin till they were up close.

And they weren't taking no chances, either.  Only one rode right up to
him.  The others hung back, their muskets out, ready to open fire in
case Measure had some boys lying in ambush on the riverbank.  He could
see that the man riding toward him was Plumb scared to death, looking
this way and that, waiting to See a Red man flitch an arrow at him.

Kind of an idiot, Measure decided, since there wasn't no chance of
seeing a Red man in the woods till his arrow was already in you.

The soldier didn't come right to him.  He circled around, got beside
him.  Then he looped a rope and tossed it to Measure.  "You hitch this
around Your chest, under your arms,', said the soldier.

"What for?  "So I can lead You along."

"The hell I will," said Measure.  "If I thought You were going to drag
me along by a rope in the middle of a creek, I'd've stayed on dry land
and walked home myself "If You don't Put this rope around You in five
seconds, them boys are going to blow your head off."

"What are you talking about?" Measure demanded.  "I'm Measure Miller.  I
was captured with my little brother, Alvin, almost a week ago, and I'm
just going home to Vigor Church."

"Well, ain't that a real pretty story?  said the soldier.  He drew back
the rope, sopping wet, and cast it again.  This time it hit Measure in
the face.  Measure caught at it, held it in his hand.  The soldier drew
his Sword.  "Get ready to shoot, boys!" shouted the soldier.  "It's that
renegade, all right!

Renegade!  I-" Then it finally Occurred to Measure that something had
gone real bad with this.  They knew who he was, and they still wanted to
take him prisoner.  With three muskets and a sword close by, they had a
fair chance of maybe even killing him if he tried to run away.  This was
the U.S.  Army, wasn't it?  Once they got him to an officer, he could
explain and all this would get cleared up.  So he put the rope over his
head, and pulled the loop around his chest.

It wasn't too bad as long as they were in the water; sometimes he just
floated along.  But pretty soon they got out and then they made him walk
along behind as they picked their way through the woods.

They were looping east, around behind Vigor Church.

Measure tried talking, but they told him to shut up.  "I tell you, we
been told we can bring in renegades like You alive or dead.  White man
dressed like a Red-we know what you are."

From their conversation he was able to gather a few things.  They were
on a scout-around from General Harrison.  It made Measure sick, to think
things had got to the point where they'd call on that her-deahng
scoundrel to come north.  And he got here awful fast, too.

They spent the night camped in a clearing.  They made so much noise that
Measure thought it was a wonder they didn't have every Red in the whole
country nosing around before morning.

The next day, he flat refused to be dragged along on a rope.  "I'm near
naked, I got no weapons, and you can kill me or let me ride."

They could talk about bringing him in alive or dead and not caring
which, but he knew that that was talk.  These were a crude bunch, but
they didn't hanker much after killing white men in cold blood.  So he
ended up on horseback, holding one of them around the waist.  Pretty
soon they reached country that had some roads and trails, and they made
good time.

Just after noon they reached an army camp.  Not much of an army, maybe a
hundred in uniform and another two hundred marching and drilling on a
parade ground that used to be a pasture.  Measure couldn't remember the
name of the family that lived here.  They were new folks, just come up
from the area around Carthage.  Turned out it didn't matter who they
were, though.  It was General Harrison had their house for his
headquarters, and these scouts led him straight to Harrison.  "Ah," said
Harrison.  "One of the renegades."

"I'm no renegade," said Measure.  "They been treating me like a prisoner
this whole way.  I swear the Reds treated me better than your soldiers."

"I ain't surprised much," said Harrison.  "They treated you real nice,
I'm sure.  Where's the other renegade?"

"Other renegade?  You mean my brother Alvin?  You know who I am, and you
ain't letting me go home?"

"You answer my questions, and then I'll give some thought to answering
yours."

"My brother Alvin ain't here, and he ain't coming, and from what I see
before me I'm real glad he didn't come."

"Alvin?  Ah, yes, they told me you were claiming to be Measure Miller.
Well, we know that Measure Miller was murdered by TaKumsaw and the
Prophet."

Measure spat on the floor.  "You know that?  From a few tore-up bloody
clothes?  Well you don't fool me.  Do you think I don't see what you're
doing?"

"Take him to the cellar," said Harrison.  "Be real gentle with "You
don't want folks to know I'm alive, cause then they'll see they don't
need you up here!" shouted Measure.  "I wouldn't be surprised if You got
them Chok-Taw to capture us in the first place!"

"If that's true," said Harrison, "then if I were you I'd watch how I
talked and what I said.  I'd be real worried about getting home alive,
ever.  Now look at yourself, boy.  Skin red as a redbird, wearing a
loincloth, looking wild as a real bad dream.  No, I reckon if it turned
out you was shot dead by mistake, nobody'd blame us, not a soul.  "My
father'd know," said Measure.  "You can't fool him like that, Harrison.
And Armor-of-God, he'll-"

"Armor-of-God?  That pathetic weakling?  The one who ing people that
Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet are innocent, and we shouldn't be getting
ready to wipe them out?  Nobody listens to him no more, Measure."

"They will.  Alvin's alive, and you'll never catch him.

"Why not?"

"Cause he's with Ta-Kumsaw."

"Ah, and where is that?"

"Not around here, you can bet."

"You've seen him?  And the Prophet?"

The hungry look in Harrison's eyes made Measure kind of step back and
hold his tongue.  "I seen what I seen," said Measure.  "And I'll say
what I say."

"Say what I ask, or you'll be dead," said Harrison.

"Kill me, and I won't say nothing at all.  But I'll tell you this.

I saw the Prophet call a tornado out of a storm, I saw him walk on
water.  I saw him prophesy, and his prophecies all come true.  He knows
everything You plan to do.  You think you're doing what you want, but
You'll end up serving his purpose, you watch and see."

"What an idea," said Harrison, chuckling.  "By that reckoning, boY, it
serves his Purpose for you to be in my hands, don't it?" He waved his
hands, and the soldiers dragged him out of the house and down into the
root cellar.  They treated him real gentle on the waykicked him and
knocked him down and all they could before they threw him down the steps
and barred the door behind him.

Since these folks came from Carthage country, the cellar door had a
lock, as well as the bar.  Down with the carrots, potatoes, and spiders,
Measure tested that door as best he could.  His whole body was one big
ache.  All the scratches and the sunburn were nothing compared to the
raw skin inside his thighs from riding behind with bare

with a e

4eeps telllegs.  And that was nothing compared to the pain from the
kicks and bashes they gave him on the way here.

Measure didn't waste no more time.  He knew what was going on well
enough to know Harrison couldn't let him out alive.  He had those scouts
out looking for him and Alvin.  If they turned up alive, it would undo
all his plans, and that'd be a real shame, cause things were going just
right for Harrison.  After all these years, here he was at Vigor Church,
training the local men to be soldiers, while nobody was listening to
Armor-of-God at all.  Measure didn't much like the Prophet, but compared
to Harrison the Prophet was a saint.

Or was he?  The Prophet had him wait for the gatlopp-4by?  So he'd leave
in the afternoon two days ago, instead of morning.  So he'd reach the
Tippy-Canoe just when them soldiers were riding down.

Otherwise he would've come to Prophetstown and then hopped on over into
Vigor Church without seeing a soldier.  They'd never have found him, if
he hadn't heard them and called out to them himself.

Was this all part of the Prophet's plan?

Well, so what if it was?  Maybe the Prophet's plan was a good thing, and
maybe it wasn't-so far Measure didn't think too highly of it.

But he sure wasn't going to sit around in a root cellar waiting to see
how the plan worked out.

He burrowed his way through the potatoes to the back of the cellar.
There was more spiderwebs in his face and hair than he cared for, but
this wasn't a time to worry about tidiness.  Pretty soon he cleared him
a space at the back, with the potatoes pushed mostly to the front.

When they opened the doors, they'd just see a lot of potatoes.

Not a sign of his digging.

The root cellar was the normal kind.  Dug out, timbered over, roofed,
and then the roof covered up with all the dirt from the hole.

He could dig into the back wall and come up behind the cellar, and they
couldn't see a thing from the house at all.  It was bare-hands digging,
but this was rich Wobbish soil.  He'd come out looking more like a Black
than a Red, but he, didn't much care.

Trouble was, the back wall wasn't dirt, it was wood.  They'd waned it
in, right to the bottom.  Tidy folks.  The floor was dirt, all right.
But that meant digging down under the wall before he could tunnel up.

Instead of being something he could do overnight, it'd take days.

And any time, they might catch him digging.  Or just plain drag him out
and shoot him.  Or maybe even bring back them Chok-Taws, to do what they
started-leave him looking like Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet had him
tortured.  All possible.

Home wasn't ten miles away.  That's what plain drove him crazy.

So close to home, and they didn't even guess it, had no idea they ought
to come to help.  He remembered that torch girl from Hatrack River,
years ago, the one who saw them stuck in the river and sent help. That's
who I need right now, I need me a torch, somebody who'd find me and send
help.

But that wasn't too likely.  Not for Measure.  If it was Alvin, now,
there'd be eight miracles, whatever it took to get him out safe.

But for Measure, there'd be just whatever he could work up for hisself.

He broke a fingernail half off in the first ten minutes of digging.  The
pain was real bad, and he knew he was bleeding.  If they dragged him out
now, they'd know he was making a tunnel.  But it was his only chance. So
he kept digging, pain and all, every now and then stopping to toss out a
potato that rolled down into the hole.

Pretty soon he took off his loincloth and used it in his work.

He'd loosen up the soil with his hands, then pile it onto the cloth and
use that to hoist it up out of the hole.  It wasn't as good as having a
spade, but it sure beat moving the dirt out one handful at a time.

What did he have, days?  Hours?

Red Boy

n it wasn't an hour after Measure left.  Ta-Kumsaw stood atop a due ,
the White boy Alvin beside him.  And in front of him, Tenskwa-Tawa.

nce cried for the death of Lolla-WossikY.  His brother, the boy who o
supposedly.  Speaking the will of the land, supposbees.  A prophet,
edly.  Speaking words of cowardice, surrender, defeat, destruction.

bet.  "To take ,This is the oath of the land at peace," said the Prop
man'S tools, bite man's weapons, none of the White none of the W
clothing, none of the White man's food, none of the White man's none of
the White man's drink, and none of the White man's promake a life that
doesn't offer itself to die."

ises.  Above all, never to t The Reds who heard him had heard it all
before, as had Ta-Kumsaw.  Most of those who had come to Mizogan with
them had already refused the Prophet's covenant of weakness.  They took
a different s anger, the oath that Ta-Kumsaw offered oath, the oath of
the land ve under Red man's law, or leave the land, them.

Every White must ll or die.  A White man's weapons can be used, but only
to defend Reds kill a prisoner against murder and theft.  No Red man
will torture or -man, woman, or child.  Above all, the death of no Red
will go unavenged.

Ta-Kumsaw knew that if all the Reds of America took his oath, they could
still defeat the White man.  Whites had only made such inroads because
the Reds could never unite under one leader.  The Whites could always
ally themselves with a tribe or two, who would lead them through the
trackless forest and help them find their en ed renegade-like the
unspeakable Irrakwa, emy.  if Reds had not turn the half-White
Cherriky-then the White man could not have survived here in the land.

They would have been swallowed up, lost, as had happened to every other
group that came from the old world.

there were only a handful When the Prophet finished his challenge, who
took his oath, who would go back with him.  He seemed sad, TaKumsaw
thought.  Weighed down.  He turned his back on the ones who remained-on
the warriors, who would fight the White man.

"Those men are yours," said the Prophet.  "I wish there weren't so
many."

"Mine, yes, but I wish there weren't so few."

"Oh, you'll find allies enough.  Chok-Taw, Cree-El, Chicky-Saw, the
vicious Semmy-Noil of the Oky-Fenoky.  Enough to raise the greatest army
of Reds ever seen in this land, all thirsting for White man's blood."

"Stand at my side in that battle," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"You'll lose your cause by killing," said the Prophet.  "I'll win my
cause.
"By dying."

"If the land calls for my death, I'll answer."

"And all you people with you."

The Prophet shook his head.  "I've seen what I've seen.  The people of
my oath are as much a part of the land as the bear or the buffalo, the
squirrel or the beaver, the turkey or the pheasant or the grouse.

All those animals have stood still to take your arrow, haven't they?

Or stretched out their neck for your knife.  Or lain down their head for
your tommy-hawk."

"They're animals, meant to be meat."

"They're alive, meant to live until they die, and when they die, do so
that others can live."

"Not me.  Not my people.  We won't stretch out our neck for the White
man's knife."

The Prophet took Ta-Kumsaw by the shoulders, tears streaming down his
face.  He pressed his cheek against Ta-Kumsaw's cheek, putting his tears
on his brother's face.

"Come find me across the Mizzipy, when all this is done," said the
Prophet.

"I'll never let the land be divided," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "The east doesn't
belong to the White man."

"The east will die," said the Prophet.  "Follow me west, where the White
man will never go."

Ta-Kumsaw said nothing.

The White boy Alvin touched the Prophet's hand.  "TenskwaTawa, does that
mean I can never go west?"

The Prophet laughed.  "Why do you think I'm sending you with Ta-Kumsaw?
If anyone can turn a White boy Red, Ta-Kumsaw can."

"I don't want him," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Take him or die," said the Prophet.

Then the Prophet walked down the slope of the dune, to the dozen men who
waited for him, their palms dripping blood to seal the covenant.  They
walked off along the shore of the lake, to where their families waited.
Tomorrow they'd be back in Prophetstown.  Ripe to be slaughtered.

Ta-Kumsaw waited until the Prophet had disappeared behind a dune.

Then he cried out to the hundreds who remained.  "When will the White
man have peace?"

"When he leaves!" they shouted.  "When he dies!"

Ta-Kumsaw laughed and held out his arms.  He felt their love and trust
like the heat of the sun on a winter's day.  Lesser men had felt that
heat before, but it had oppressed them, because they weren't worthy of
the trust they had been given.  Not Ta-Kumsaw.  He had measured himself,
and he knew that there was no task ahead of him that he couldn't
accomplish.  Only treachery could keep him from victory.

And Ta-Kumsaw was very good at knowing a man's heart.

Knowing if he could be trusted.  Knowing if he was a liar.  Hadn't he
known Governor Harrison from the beginnings A man like that

couldn't hide from him.

They left only minutes later.  A few dozen men led the women and
andering village would settle.

children to the new place where their w They stayed no more than three
days in any place-a permanent village like Prophetstown was an
invitation to a massacre.  The only thing that kept the Prophet safe was
sheer numbers.  Ten thousand Reds lived there now, more than had ever
lived in any one place ulous place, Ta-Kumsaw knew it.  The before.  And
it was a mirac the stalk, thicker and milkier than any corn maize grew
up six ears to had ever been before.  Buffalo and deer wandered into the
city from a hundred miles around, walked to the cooking fires, and lay
down waiting for the knife.  When the geese flew overhead, a few from
every flock would come to land on the Wobbish and the Tippy-Canoe,
waiting for the arrow.  The fish swam up from the Mo to leap into the
nets of Prophetstown.

All that would mean nothing, if the White man ever brought his 0 fire
grapeshot and shrapnel through the fragile wigwams cannons t and lodges
of the Red city.  The searing metal would cut through the delicate
walls-that deadly driven rain would not be held out by sticks and mud.
Every Red man in Prophetstown would regret his oath on that day.

Ta-Kumsaw led them through the forest.  The White boy ran directly
behind him.  Ta-Kumsaw deliberately set a killing pace, twice as fast as
they had run before, bringing the boy and his brother to Mizogan.

They had two hundred miles to Fort Detroit, and Ta-Kumsaw was determined
to cover that distance in a single day.  No White ma could do it-no
White man's horse, either.  A mile every five minutes, on and on, the
wind whipping through the top-knot of his hair.  It would kill a man to
run so fast for half an hour, except that the Red man called on the
strength of the land to help him.  The ground pushed back against his
feet, adding to his strength.  The bushes parted, making paths; space
appeared where there was no space; Ta-Kumsaw raced across streams and
rivers so quickly that his feet did not touch the bottom of the stream,
merely sank just deep enough to find purchase on the water itself.  His
hunger to arrive at Fort Detroit was so strong that the land answered by
feeding him, giving him strength.  And not just Ta-Kumsaw, but every man
behind him, every Red man who knew the feel of the land within him, he
found the same strength as his leader, stepped in the same path,
footfall by footfall, like one great soul walking a long slender highway
through the wood.

I will have to carry the White boy, thought Ta-Kumsaw.  But the
footsteps behind him-for Whites made noise when they ran-kept up,
falling into a rhythm identical with his own.

That, of course, was not possible.  The boy's legs were too short, he
had to take more strides to cover the same ground.  Yet each step of
Ta-Kumsaw's was matched so closely that he heard the sound of the White
boy's feet as if they were his own.

Minute after minute, mile after mile, hour after hour, the boy kept on.

The sun set behind them, over the left shoulder.  The stars came out,
but no moon, and the night was dark under the trees.  Still they didn't
slow, found their way easily through the wood, because it wasn't their
own eyes or their own mind finding the way, it was the land itself
drawing them through the safe places in the darkness.

Several times in the night, Ta-Kumsaw noticed that the boy was no longer
making noise.  He called out in ShawNee to the man who ran behind the
White boy Alvin, and always the man answered, "He runs.

The moon came up, casting patches of dim light onto the forest floor.
They overtook a storm-the ground grew moist under their feet, then wet;
they ran through showers, heavy rain, showers again, and then the land
was dry.  They never slackened their pace.  The sky in the east turned
grey, then pink, then blue, and the sun leapt upward.  The day was
warming and the sun already three hands above the horizon when they saw
the smoke of cookfires, then the slack fleur-de-hs flag, and finally the
cross of the cathedral.  Only then did they slow down.

Only then did they break the perfect unison of their step, loose the
grip of the land in their minds, and come to rest in a meadow so near
the town that they could hear the organ playing in the cathedral.

Ta-Kumsaw stopped, and the boy stopped behind him.  How had Alvin, a
White boy, traveled like a Red man through the night?  TaKumsaw knelt
before the boy.  Though Alvin's eyes were open, he seemed not to see
anything.  "Alvin," said Ta-Kumsaw, speaking English.  The boy didn't
answer.  "Alvin, are you asleepp" Several warriors gathered around.

They were all somewhat quiet and spent from the journey.  Not exhausted,
because the land replenished them along the way.  Their quiet was more
from awe at having been so closely tied to the land; such a journey was
known to be a holy thing, a gift from the land to its noblest children.
Many a Red had set out on such a journey and been turned away, forced to
stop and sleep and rest and eat, stopped by darkness or bad weather,
because his need for the journey wasn't great enough, or his journey was
contrary to what the land itself needed.

Ta-Kumsaw, though, had never been refused; they all knew it.  This was
much of the reason Ta-Kumsaw was held in as high esteem as his brother.

The Prophet did miraculous things, but no one saw his visions; he could
only tell about them.  What Ta-Kumsaw did, though, his warriors did with
him, felt with him.

Now, though, they were as puzzled by the White boy asTa-Kumsaw was.  Had
Ta-Kumsaw sustained the boy by his own power?  Or had the land,
unbelievably, reached out and supported a White child for his own sake?

"Is he White like his skin, or Red in his heart?" asked one.  He spoke
ShawNee, and not in the quick way, but rather in the slow and holy
language of the shamans.

ToTa-Kumsaw's surprise, Alvin responded to his words, looking at the man
who spoke instead of staring straight ahead.  "White," murmured Alvin.
He spoke English.

"Does he speak our language?" asked a man.

Alvin appeared confused by the question.  "Ta-Kumsaw," he said.

He looked up to see the angle of the sun.  "It's morning.  Was I
asleep?"

"Not asleep," said Ta-Kumsaw in ShawNee.  Now the boy appeared not to
understand at all.  "Not asleep," Ta-Kumsaw repeated in English.

"I feel like I was asleep," he said.  "Only I'm standing up."

"You don't feel tired?  You don't want to rest?"

"Tired?  Why would I be tired?"

Ta-Kumsaw didn't want to explain.  If the boy didn't know what he had
done, then it was a gift of the land.  Or perhaps there was something to
what the Prophet had said about him.  That Ta-Kumsaw should teach him to
be Red.  If he could match grown ShawNee, step for step, in such a run
as that, perhaps this boy of all Whites could learn to feel the land.

Ta-Kumsaw stood and spoke to the others.  "I'm going into the city, with
only four others."

"And the boy," said one.  Others repeated his words.  They all knew the
Prophet's promise toTa-Kumsaw, that as long as the boy was with him he
wouldn't die.  Even if he were tempted to leave the boy behind, they'd
never let him do it.

"And the boy," Ta-Kumsaw agreed.

Detroit was not a fort like the pathetic wooden stockades of the
Americans.  It was made of stone, like the cathedral, with huge cannon
pointing outward toward the river that connected Lake Huron and Lake St.
Clair with Lake Canada, and smaller cannon aimed inland, ready to fend
off attackers on land.

But it was the city, not the fort, that impressed them.  A dozen streets
of houses, wooden ones, with shops and stores, and in the center of all,
a cathedral so massive that it made a mockery of Reverend Thrower's
church.  Black-robed priests went about their business like crows in the
streets.  The swarthy Frenchmen didn't show the same hostility toward
Reds that Americans often seemed to have.

TaKumsaw understood that this was because the French in Detroit weren't
there to settle.  They didn't think of Reds as rivals for possession of
the land.  The French here were all biding their time till they went
back to Europe, or at least back to the White-settled lands of Quebec
and Ontario across the river; except the trappers, of course, and for
them the Reds were not enemies, either.  Trappers held Reds in awe,
trying to learn how Reds found game so easily, when the trappers had
such a devilish time knowing where to lay their snares.

They thought, as White men always do, that it was some kind of trick the
Reds performed, and if they only studied Red men long enough, these
White trappers would learn how to do it.  They would never learn.

How could the land accept the kind of man who would kill every beaver in
a pond, just for the pelts, leaving the meat to rot, and no beaver left
to bear young?  No wonder the bears killed these trappers whenever they
could.  The land rejected them.

When I have driven the Americans from the land west of the mountains,
thought Ta-Kumsaw, then I will drive out the Yankees from New England,
and the Cavaliers from the Crown Colonies.  And when they're all gone,
I'll turn to the Spanish of Florida and the French of Canada.  Today
I'll make use of you for my own purpose, but tomorrow I'll drive you
out, too.  Every White face that stays in this land will stay here
because it's dead.  And in that day, beavers will die only when the land
tells them it's the time and place to die.

The French commander in Detroit was officially de Maurepas, but
Ta-Kumsaw avoided him whenever he could.  It was only the second man,
Napoleon Bonaparte, who was worth talking to.

"I heard you were at Lake Mizogan," said Napoleon.  He spoke in French,
of course, but Ta-Kumsaw had learned French at the same time he was
learning English, and from the same person.  "Come, sit down."

Napoleon looked with vague interest at the White boy Alvin, but said
nothing to him.

"I was there," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "So was my brother."

",kh.  But was there an army?"

"The seed of one," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "I gave up arguing with
Tenskwa-Tawa.  I'll make an army out of other tribes."

"When!" demanded Napoleon.  "You come here two, three times u tell me
you're going to have an army.  Do you know each year, yo how long I've
waited?  Four years, four miserable years of exile."

"I know how many years," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "You'll have your battle."

"Before my hair turns grey?  Tell me that!  Do I have to be dying of old
age before you'll call out a general rising of the Reds?  You know how
helpless I am.  La Fayette and de Maurepas won't let me go more than
fifty miles from here, won't give me any troops at all.

There has to be an army first, they say.  The Americans have to have
some main force that you can fight with.  Well, the only thing that will
cause those miserably independent bastards to unite is you.

"I know," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"You promised me an army of ten thousand Reds, Ta-Kumsaw.

Instead I keep hearing about a city of ten thousand Quakersill "Not
Quakers."

"If they renounce war it amounts to the same thing." Suddenly Napoleon
let his voice become soft, loving, persuasive.  "Ta-Kumsaw, I need you,
I depend on you, don't fail meTa -Kumsaw laughed.  Napoleon learned long
ago that his tricks worked on White men, but not half so well on Reds,
and on TaKumsaw not at all.  "You care nothing for me, and I care
nothing for you," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "You want one battle and a victory,
so you can go home a hero to Paris.  I want one battle and a victory, so
I can strike terror into White men's hearts and bring together an even
greater army of Reds under my command, to sweep the land south of here
and drive the Englishmen back across the mountains. One battle, one
victory-that's why we work together, and when that's done I'll never
think of you again, and you'll never think of me."

Napoleon was angry, but he laughed.  "Half true," he said.  "I won't
care about you, but I'll think of you.  I've learned from you, TaKumsaw.
That love of a commander makes men fight better than love of country,
and love of country better than the hope of glory, and the hope of glory
better than looting, and looting better than wages.  But best of all is
to fight for a cause.  A great and noble dream.  I've always had the
love of my men.  They would die for me.  But for a cause, they'd let
their wives and children die and think it was worth the price.

"How did you learn that from me?" said Ta-Kumsaw.  "That's my brother's
talk, not mine."

"Your brother?  I thought he didn't think anything was worth dying for."

"No, he's very free with dying.  It's killing he won't do."

Napoleon laughed, and Ta-Kumsaw laughed with him.  "You're right, you
know.  We're not friends.  But I do like you.  What puzzles me is
this-when you've won, and all the White men are gone, you really mean to
walk away and let all the tribes go back to the way they were before,
separate,.quarreling, weak."

"Happy.  That's how we were before.  Many tribes, many languages, but
one living land."

"Weak," said Napoleon again.  "If I ever brought all of my land under my
flag, Ta-Kumsaw, I'd hold them together so long and so tightly that
they'd become one great people, great and strong.  And if I ever do
that, you can count on this.  We'll be back, and take your land away
from you, just like every other land on Earth.  Count on it.  "That's
because you are evil, General Bonaparte.  You want to bend everything
and everybody to your obedience."

"That isn't evil, foolish savage.  If everybody obeyed me, then they'd
be happy and safe, at peace, and, for the first time in all of history,
free."

"Safe, unless they opposed you.  Happy, unless they hated you.

Free, unless they wanted something contrary to your will."

"Imagine, a Red man philosophizing.  Do those peasant squatters south of
here know that you've read Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith?"

"I don't think they know I can read their languages."

Napoleon leaned across his desk.  "We'll destroy them, Ta-Kumsaw, you
and I together.  But you have to bring me an army."

"My brother prophesies that we'll have that army before the year ends."

"A prophecy?"

"All his prophecies come true."

"Does he say we'll win?"

Ta-Kumsaw laughed.  "He says you'll be known as the greatest European
general who ever lived.  And I will be known as the greatest Red."

Napoleon ran his fingers through his hair and smiled, almost boyish now;
he could pass from menacing to friendly to adorable in moments.  "That
seems to dodge the question.  Dead men can be called great, too."

"But men who lose battles are'never called great, are they?

Noble, perhaps, even heroic.  But not great."

"True, Ta-Kumsaw, true.  But your brother is being coy.  Oracular.

Delphic."

"I don't know those words."

"Of course you don't.  You're a savage." Napoleon poured wine.

"I forget myself.  Wine?"

Ta-Kumsaw shook his head.

"I suppose none for the boy," said Napoleon.

"He's only ten," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"In France, that means we water the wine half and half.  What are you
doing with a White boy, Ta-Kumsaw?  Are you capturing children now?"

"This White boy," said Ta-Kumsaw, "he's more than he seems."

"In a loincloth he doesn't look like much.  Does he understand French?"

"Not a word," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "I came to ask youan you give us guns?"

"No," said Napoleon.

"We can't fight bullets with arrows," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"La Fayette refuses to authorize us to issue you any guns.  Paris agrees
with him.  They don't trust you.  They're afraid any guns they give you
might someday be turned against us."

"Then what good will it do me to raise an army?"

Napoleon smiled, sipped his wine.  "I've been speaking to some Irrakwa
traders."

"The Irrakwa are the urine of sick dogs," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "They were
cruel, vicious animals before the White man came, and they are worse
now."

"Odd.  The English seemed to find them to be kindred spirits.  And La
Fayette adores them.  All that matters now, though, is this: They
manufacture guns, in large numbers, cheaply.  Not the most reliable
weapons, but they use exactly the same size ammunition.  It means they
can make balls that fit the barrel more tightly, with better aim.

And yet they sell them for less."

"You'll buy them for us?"

"No.  You'll buy them."

"We don't have money."

"Pelts," said Napoleon.  "Beaver pelts.  Minks.  Deerhides and buffalo
leather."

Ta-Kumsaw shook his head.  "We can't ask these animals to die for the
sake of guns."

"Too bad," said Napoleon.  "You Reds have a knack for hunting, I've been
told."

"True Reds do.  The Irrakwa don't.  They've used White man's machines so
long now that they're dead to the land, just like White men.

Or they'd go and get the pelts they want for themselves."

"There's something else they want.  Besides pelts," said Napoleon.

"We don't have anything they want."

"Iron," said Napoleon.

"We don't have iron."

"No.  But they know where it is.  In the upper reaches of the Mizzipy,
and along the Mizota.  Up near the west end of High Water Lake.  All
they want is your promise that you won't harm their boats bringing iron
ore back to Irrakwa, or their miners as they dig it out of the earth."

"Peace for the future, in exchange for guns now?"

"Yes," said Napoleon.

"Aren't they afraid that I'll turn the guns against them?"

"They ask you to promise that you won't."

Ta-Kumsaw considered this.  "Tell them this.  I promise that if they
give us guns, not one of the guns will ever be used against any Irrakwa.
All my men will take this oath.  And we will never attack any of their
boats on the water, or their miners as they dig in the earth."

"You mean that?" asked Napoleon.

"If I said it, I meant it," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"As much as you hate them?"

"I hate them because the land hates them.  When the White man is gone,
and the land is strong again, not sick, then earthquakes can swallow up
miners, and storms can sink boats, and the Irrakwa will become true Red
men again or they will die.  Once the White man is gone, the land will
be stern with its children who remain."

The meeting was soon finished after that.  Ta-Kumsaw got up and shook
hands with the general.  Alvin surprised them both by also stepping
forward and offering his hand.

Napoleon shook hands with him, amused.  "Tell the boy he keeps dangerous
company," he said.

Ta-Kumsaw translated.  Alvin looked at him with wide eyes.  "Does he
mean you?" he asked.

"I think so," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"But he's the most dangerous man in the world," said Alvin.

Napoleon laughed when Ta-Kumsaw translated the boy's words.

"How can I be dangerous?  A little man stuck away out here in the middle
of the wilderness, when the center of the world is Europe, great wars
are fought there and I have no part in them!"

Ta-Kumsaw didn't need to translate-the boy understood from Napoleon's
tone and expression.  "He's so dangerous because he makes people love
him without deserving it."

Ta-Kumsaw felt the truth in the boy's words.  That was what Napoleon did
to White men, and it was dangerous, dangerous and evil and dark.  Is
this the man I rely on to help me?  To be my ally?  Yes, he is, because
I have no choice.  Ta-Kumsaw didn't translate what the boy said, even
though Napoleon insisted.  So far the French general had not attempted
to cast his spell on the boy.  If he knew the boy's words, he might try,
and it just might capture Alvin.  Ta-Kumsaw was coming to appreciate
what the boy was.  Perhaps the boy was too strong for Napoleon to charm
him.  Or perhaps the boy would become an adoring slave like de Maurepas.
Better not to find out.  Better to take the boy away.

Alvin insisted on seeing the cathedral.  One priest looked horrified to
see men in loincloths come into the place, but another rebuked him and
welcomed them inside.  Ta-Kumsaw was always amused by the statues of the
saints.  Whenever possible, the statues were shown being tortured in the
most gruesome ways.  White could talk all day about how barbaric it was,
the Red practice of torturing captives so they could show courage.  Yet
whose statues did they kneel at to pray?

People who showed courage under torture.  There was no making sense of
White men.

He and Alvin talked about this on their way out of the city, not
hurrying at all now.  He also explained to the boy something of how they
were able to run so far, so quickly.  And how remarkable it was for a
White boy to keep up with them.

Alvin seemed to understand how Red men lived within the land; at least
he tried.  "I think I felt that.  While I was running.  It's like I'm
not in myself.  My thoughts are wandering all over.  Like dreaming.

And while I'm gone, something else is telling my body what to do.

Feeding it, using it, taking it wherever it wants to go.  Is that what
you feel?"

That wasn't at all what Ta-Kumsaw felt.  When the land came into him, it
was like he was more alive than ever; not absent from his body, but more
strongly present in it than at any other time.  But he didn't explain
this to the boy.  Instead he turned the question back to Alvin.

"You say it's like dreaming.  What did you dream last night?"

"I dreamed again about a lot of the visions I saw when I was in the
crystal tower with the Shining-with the Prophet."

"The Shining Man.  I know you call him that-he told me why."

"I dreamed those things again.  Only it was different.  I could see some
things more clearly now, and other things I forgot."

"Did you dream anything you hadn't seen before?"

"This place.  The statues in the cathedral.  And that man we visited,
the general.  And something even stranger.  A big hill, almost roundno,
with eight sides.  I remember that, it was real clear.  A hill with
eight straight sides to it, sloping down.  Inside it there was a whole
city, lots of little rooms, like in anthills, only people-sized.

Or anyway bigger than ants.  And I was on top of it, wandering around in
all these strange trees-they had silver leaves, not green-and I was
looking for my brother.  For Measure."

Ta-Kumsaw said nothing for a long time.  But he thought many things.  No
White man had ever seen that place-the land was still strong enough to
keep them from finding that.  Yet this boy had dreamed of it.  And a
dream of Eight-Face Mound never came by chance.  It always meant
something.  It always meant the same thing.

"We have to go there," Ta-Kumsaw said.

"Where?"

"To the hill you dreamed of," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"There is such a place?"

"No White man has ever seen it.  For a White man to stand there would
be-filthy." Alvin didn't answer that.  What could he say?

TaKumsaw swallowed hard.  "But if you dream of it, you have to go."

"What is it?"

Ta-Kumsaw shook his head.  "The place you dreamed of.  That's all.

If you want to know more, dream again."

It was near night when they reached the camp; wigwams had been erected,
because it looked like more rain tonight.  The others insisted that
Ta-Kumsaw share a hut with Alvin, for his safety's sake.  But TaKumsaw
didn't want to.  The boy made him afraid.  The land was doing things
with this boy, and not giving Ta-Kumsaw any idea what was happening.

But when you saw yourself at the Eight-Face Mound in your dreams, you
had no choice but to go.  And since Alvin could never find the way
alone, Ta-Kumsaw had to take him.

He could never explain it to the others, and even if he could, he
wouldn't do it.  Word would get out that Ta-Kumsaw had taken a White to
the ancient holy place, and then many Reds would refuse to listen toTa-Kumsaw anymore.

So in the morning he told the others he was taking the boy off to teach
him, as the Prophet had told him he must.  "Meet me in five days where
the Pickawee flows into the Ohio," he told them.  "From there we'll go
south to talk to the Chok-Taw and the Chicky-Saw."

Take us with you, they said.  You won't be safe alone.  But he didn't
answer them, and soon enough they gave up.  He set off at a run, and
once again Alvin fell in step behind him, matching him stride for
stride.  It was almost as far again as the journey from Mizogan to
Detroit.  By nightfall they would be at the edge of the Land of Flints.

Ta-Kumsaw planned to sleep there, and find dreams of his own, before
daring to lead a White boy to Eight-Face Mound.

Cannons

Measure heard them coming only seconds before the door.  swung open and
light flooded the root cellar.  Time enough to dump out the dirt and
tuck his loincloth into the deerhide belt, then scramble forward onto
the potatoes.  The breechclout was so filthy it was like wearing dirt,
but this wasn't a time to get finicky.

They didn't waste no time on prison inspection, so they didn't see the
hole that was now reaching a good two feet under the back wall.

Instead they reached in and drug him out by the armpits, slamming the
root cellar doors shut behind him.  The light was so sudden it dazzled
him, and he couldn't make out who had him, or how many they were. Didn't
much matter.  Anyone local would have known him right off, so they had
to be Harrison's boys, and once he knew that, he knew it wasn't nothing
good going to happen to him.

"Like a pig," said Harrison.  "Disgusting.  You look like a Red."

"You put me in a hole in the ground," said Measure.  "I ain't about to
come out clean."

"I gave you one long night to think about it, boy," said Harrison.

"Now you got to make up your mind.  There's two ways you can be useful
to me.  One is alive, you telling all about how they torture your
brother to death, him screaming every second.  You make it a good story,
and you tell all about how Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet were there, getting
You tell a story like that, and it's worth keeping you alive."

"Ta-Kumsaw saved my life from your Chok-Taw Reds," said Measure.

"That's the only story I'll tell.  Except to mention how you wanted me
to tell another story."

"That's what I thought," said Harrison.  "Fact is, even if you lied to
me and promised to tell the story my way, I reckon I wouldn't've
believed you.  So we both agree-it's the other choice."

Measure knew Harrison meant to produce his body, with the evidence of
torture on it.  Dead, he couldn't tell anybody who did the cutting and
burning.  Well, thought Measure, you'll see I die as brave as any man.

But because he wasn't one to welcome death with both hands, he thought
he'd give talking a bit more of a try.  "You let me go and call off this
war, Harrison, and I'll keep my mouth shut.  Just let me wander in, and
you allow as how it was all a terrible mistake and take your boys on
home and leave Prophetstown in peace, and I won't tell a word otherwise.
That's a lie I'm glad to tell."

Harrison hesitated just a moment, and Measure allowed himself to hope he
might actually have some spark of godliness left in him, to turn away
from the sin of murder before it was fully done.  Then Harrison smiled,
shook his head, and waved his hand at a big ugly riverman standing right
up against the wall.

"Mike Fink, this here's a renegade White boy, who has joined in with all
the evil doings of Ta-Kumsaw and his gang of child-killers and
wife-rapers.  I hope you'll break several of his bones."

Fink stood there, contemplating.  "I reckon he'll make a powerful lot of
noise, Gov."

"Well, jam in a gag on him." Harrison took a kerchief out of his own
coat pocket.  "Here, stuff this in his mouth and tie it there."

Fink complied.  Measure tried to keep his eyes off him, tried to calm
the dread that made his belly so tight and his bladder so full.

The kerchief filled his mouth so full he choked on it.  He only got
control of himself by breathing slow and steady through his nose.

Fink tied his own red scarf so tight around Measure's face that it
forced the gag down into his throat even farther; again it took all his
concentration just to breathe evenly and stop from gagging and retching.
If he did that, he'd sure breathe that kerchief right down into his
lungs, and then he would die.

Which was a crazy thought, seeing as how Harrison meant to have him dead
no matter what.  Maybe choking on a kerchief would be better than the
pain Fink meant to cause.  But Measure had too strong a spark of life to
choose to die like that.  Pain or not, when he died he'd go out gasping,
not smothering himself just to get off easy.

"Breaking his bones ain't the way Reds do it." Fink was being helpful.
"They usually cut and burn."

"Well, we don't have time for cutting, and you can burn the body after
he's dead.  The point of this is to have a colorful corpse, Mike, not to
cause this boy pain.  We're not savages, or at least some of us aren't."

Mike chuckled, then reached out, took Measure by the shoulder, and
kicked his feet out from under him.  Measure never felt so helpless in
his life as in that moment when he fell.  Fink didn't have an inch of
height or reach on him, and Measure knew a few wrassling tricks, but
Fink never even tried to grapple with him.  Just a grab and a kick, and
Measure was on the floor.

"Don't you need to tie him first?" asked Harrison.

In answer, Fink picked up Measure's left leg so fast and high that
Measure slid across the floor and his buttocks lifted right into the
air.

No chance to get leverage, no chance to kick.  Then Fink brought
Measure's leg down across his own thigh hard and sharp.  His leg bones
snapped like dry kindling wood.  Measure screamed into the gag, then
nearly inhaled the kerchief gasping for breath.  He never felt pain like
that in all his life.  For one crazy moment he thought, This is how
Alvin felt when that millstone fell on his leg.

"Not in here," said Harrison.  "Take him out back.  Do it in the root
cellar."

"How many bones you want me to break?" asked Fink.

"All of them."

Fink picked Measure up by an arm and a leg and practically tossed him up
over his shoulders.  Despite the pain, Measure tried to lay in a punch
or two, but Fink jerked down on his arm, breaking it right at the elbow.

Measure was barely conscious the rest of the way outside.  He heard
somebody in the distance call, "Who you got there!"

Fink yelled back, "Caught us a Red spy, sneaking around!"

The voice from the distance sounded familiar to Measure, but he couldn't
concentrate well enough to remember who it was.  "Tear him apart!" he
shouted.

Fink didn't answer.  He didn't set Measure down to open the root cellar
doors, even though they were low and at a slant, so you had to reach out
and down, then pull them up.  Fink just hooked the toe of his boot under
the door and flipped it up.  It moved so fast it banged on the ground
and rebounded so as to nearly close again, but by then Fink was already
stepping into the cellar; the door hit his thigh and bounced right open
again.  Measure just heard it as banging and a little jostling, which
made his leg and his elbow hurt all the more.

Why haven't I fainted yet, he wondered.  Now's as good a time as any.

But he never did faint.  Both legs broken above and below the knee, his
fingers bent back and disjointed, his hands crushed, his arms broken
above and below the elbows-through all that he stayed awake, though the
pain eventually got kind of far away, more like the memory of pain than
pain itself.  If you hear one cymbal crash, it's loud; two or three
cymbal crashes at once are louder yet.  But along about the twentieth
cymbal crash, it don't get louder, YOU just get dearer, and you hardly
hear any of them at all.  That's how it was for Measure.

There was a sound of cheering in the distance.

Somebody ran up.  "Governor says finish up real quick, he wants you
right away."

"I'll be done in a minute," said Fink.  "Except for the burning."

"Save it till later," the man said.  "Hurry!"

Fink dropped Measure, then stomped his chest till his ribs were pretty
much broke, bending in and Out any which way.  Then he picked him up by
the arm and the hair and bit off his ear.  Measure felt it tear away
with one last desperate surge of anger.  Then Fink gave his head a sharp
twist.  Measure heard his own neck snap.  Fink flung him onto the
potatoes.  He rolled down the backside and into the hole he dug.  Only
when his face was in the dirt did the Pain stop and darkness come.

Fink flipped the doors shut with his foot, slid the bar into place, and
headed back to the house.  The cheering out front was louder.

Harrison met him coming out of his office.  "Never mind about that now,"
Harrison said.  "There's no need for a corpse to keep things hot around
here.  The cannon just got here, and we'll attack in the morning."
Harrison rushed out to the front porch, and Mike Fink followed him.
Cannon?  What did cannons have to do with needing or not needing a
corpse?  What did he think Mike was, an assassin?  Killing Hooch was one
thing, and killing a man in a fair fight was something else.  But
killing a young man with a gag in his mouth, that was altogether
different.  When he bit off that ear it just didn't feel right.  It
wasn't no trophy of a fair fight.  Took the heart right out of him.  He
didn't even bother biting off the other ear.

Mike stood there beside Harrison, watching the horses pull the four
cannon right along, brisk as you please.  He knew how Harrison would use
the guns, he'd heard him planning it.  Two here, two there, so they rake
the whole Red city from both sides.  Grape and canister,

to rip and tear the bodies of the Reds, women and children right
along with the men.

It ain't my kind of a fight, thought Mike.  Like that man out back.

No challenge at all, like stomping baby frogs.  You can do it, and not
Eight-Face Mound think twice.  But you don't pick up the dead frogs,
stuff them, and hang them on the wall, you just don't do that.

It ain't my kind of fight.

There was a different feel to the land around Licking River.

Alvin didn't notice right off, mostly cause he was running with his wick
trimmed, so to speak.  Didn't notice much at all.  It was one long dream
as he ran.  But asTa-Kumsaw led him into the Land of Flints, there was a
change in the dream.  All around him, no matter what he saw in his
dream, there was little sparks of deep-black fire.  Not like the
nothingness that always lurked at the edges of his vision.  Not like the
deep black that sucked light into itself and never let it go.  No, this
black shone, it gave off sparks.

And when they stopped running, and Alvin came to hisself again, those
black fires may have faded just a bit but they were still there.

Without so much as thinking, Alvin walked toward one, a black blaze m a
sea of green, reached down and picked it up.  A flint.  A good big one.

"A twenty-arrow flint," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"It shines black and burns cold," said Alvin.

Ta-Kumsaw nodded.  "You want to be a Red boy?  Then make arrowheads with
me."

Alvin caught on quick.  He had worked with stone before.  when he cut a
millstone, he wanted smooth, flat surfaces.  With flint, it was the
edge, not the face that counted.  His first two arrowheads were clumsy,
but then he was able to feel his way into the stone and find the natural
creases and folds, and then break them apart.  For his fourth arrowhead,
he didn't chip at all.  Just used his fingers and gently pulled the
arrowhead away from the flint.

Ta-Kumsaw's face showed no expression.  That's what most White folks
thought he looked like all the time.  They thought Red men, and most
especially Ta-Kumsaw, never felt nothing cause they never let nobody see
their feelings.  Alvin had seen him laugh, though, and cry, an d all the
other faces that a man can show.  So he knowed that when Ta-Kumsaw
showed nothing on his face, that meant he was feeling a whole lot of
things.

"I worked with stone a lot before," said Alvin.  He felt like he was
sort of apologizing.

"Flint isn't stone, " said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Pebbles in the river, boulders,
those are stone.  This is living rock, rock with fire in it, the hard
earth that the land gives to us freely.  Not hewn out and tortured the
way White men do with iron." He held up Alvin's fourth arrowhead, the
one he cajoled out of the flint with his fingers.

"Steel can never have an edge this sharp."

"It's just about as perfect an edge as I ever saw," said Al "No chip
marks," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "No pressing.  A Red man would see this flint
and say, The land grew the flint this way."

"But you know better," said Al.  "You know it's just a knack I got."

"A knack bends the land," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Like a snag in the river
churns the water on the river's face.  So it is with the land when a
White uses his knack.  Not you."

Alvin puzzled on that for a minute.  "You mean you can see where other
folks did their doodlebug or beseeching or hex or charm?"

"Like the bad stink when a sick man loosens his bowel," said TaKumsaw.
"But you-what you do is clean.  Like part of the land.  I thought I
would teach you how to be Red.  Instead the land gives you arrowheads
like a gift."

Again, Alvin felt like apologizing.  It seemed to make Ta-Kumsaw angry,
that he could do the things he did.  "It ain't like I asked anybody for
this," he said.  "I was just the seventh son of a seventh son, and the
thirteenth child."

"These numberseven, thirteen-you Whites care about them, but they're
nothing in the land.  The land has true numbers.  One, two, three, four,
five, six-these numbers you can find when you stand in the forest and
look around you.  Where is seven?  Where is thirteen?"

"Maybe that's why they're so strong," said Alvin.  "Maybe cause they
ain't natural."

"Then why does the land love this unnatural thing that you do?"

"I don't know, Ta-Kumsaw.  I'm only ten going on eleven."

Ta-Kumsaw laughed.  "Ten?  Eleven?  Very weak numbers."

They spent the night there, in the borders of the Land of Flints.

Kumsaw told Alvin the story of that place, how it was the best flint
country in the whole land.  No matter how many flints the Reds came and
took away, more always came out of the ground, just lying there to get
picked up.  In years gone by, every now and then some tribe would try to
own the place.  They'd bring their warriors and kill anyone else who came
for flints.  That way they figured they'd have arrows and the other
tribes wouldn't have any.  But it never worked right.  Cause as soon as
that tribe won its battles and held the land, the flints just plain
disappeared.  Not a one.  Members of that tribe would search and search,
and never find a thing.  They'd go away, and another tribe would come
in, and there'd be flints again, as many as ever.

"It belongs to everybody, this place.  All Reds are at peace here.

No g, no war, no quarrels-or the tribe has no flints."

"I wish the whole world was a place like that," said Alvin.

"Listen to my brother long enough, White boy, and you'll start to think
it is.  No, no, don't explain to me.  Don't defend him.  He takes his
road, I take mine.  I think his way will kill more people, Red or White,
than mine."

In the night, Alvin dreamed.  He saw himself walk all the way around
Eight-Face Mound, until he found a place where a path seemed to lead up
the steep hill.  He climbed, then, and came to the top.  The
silver-leafed trees shook in the breeze, blinding him as the sun shone
off them.  He walked to one tree, and in it there was a nest of
redbirds.  Every tree the same, a single redbird nest.

Except one tree.  It was different from the others.  It was older,
gnarled, with spreading branches instead of the up-reaching kind.

Like a fruit tree.  And the leaves were gold, not silver, so they didn't
shine so bright, but they were soft and deep.  In the tree, he saw round
white fruit, and he knew that it was ripe.  But when he reached out his
hand to take the fruit, and eat it, he could hear laughter, jeering.  He
looked around him and saw everybody he ever knowed in his whole LIFE,
laughing at him.  Except one-Taleswapper.

Taleswapper was standing there, and he said, "Eat." Alvin reached up and
plucked a single fruit out of the tree and took it to his lips and bit
into it.  It was juicy and firm, and the taste was sweet and bitter,
salt and sour all at once, so strong it made him tingle all over-but
good, a taste he wanted to hold inside him forever.

He was about to take a second bite when he saw that the fruit was gone
from his hand, and not a one hung from the tree.  "One bite is all you
need for now," said Taleswapper.  "Remember how it tastes."

"I'll never forget," said Alvin.

Everybody was still laughing, louder than ever; but Alvin paid them no
mind.  He'd took him a bite of the fruit, and all he wanted now was to
bring his family to the same tree, and let them eat; to bring everybody
he ever knowed, and even strangers, too, and let just taste it, Alvin
figured, they'd know.

them taste it.  If they'd j "What would they know?" asked Taleswapper.

Al couldn't think what it was.  "Just know," he said.  "Know everything.
Everything that's good."

That's right," said Taleswapper.  "With the first bite, you know.

"What about the second bite?"

"With the second bite, you live forever," said Taleswapper.  "And that
isn't a thing you'd better plan on doing, my boy.  Don't ever imagine
you can live forever."

Alvin woke up that morning with the taste of the fruit still in his
mouth.  He had to force himself to believe that it was just a dream.

Ta-Kumsaw was already up.  He had a low fire going, and he had called
two fish out of the Licking River.  Now they were spitted with sticks
down their mouths.  He handed one to Alvin.

But Alvin didn't want to eat.  If he did, the taste of the fruit would
go out of his mouth.  He'd begin to forget, and he wanted to remember.
Oh, he knowed that he'd have to eat sometimes body can get remarkable
thin saying no to food all the time.  But today, for now, he didn't want
to eat.

Still, he held the spit and watched the trout sizzle.  Ta-Kumsaw talked,
telling him about calling fish and other animals when you need to eat.
Asking them to come.  If the land wants you to eat, then they come; or
maybe some other animal, it doesn't matter, just so you eat what the
land gives you.  Alvin thought about the fish he was roasting.

Didn't the land know he wasn't going to eat this morning?

Or did it send this fish to tell him he ought to eat after all?

Neither one.  Because just at the moment the fish were ready to eat,
they heard the crashing and thumping that told them a White man was
coming.

Ta-Kumsaw sat very still, but he didn't so much as pull out his knife.
"If the land brings a White man here, then he isn't my enemy," said
Ta-Kumsaw.

In a few seconds, the White man stepped into the clearing.  His hair was
white, where he wasn't bald.  He was carrying his hat.  He had a
slack-looking pouch over his shoulder, and no weapon at all.  Alvin knew
right off what was in that pouch.  A change of clothes, a few snatches
of food, and a book.  A third of the book contained single sentences,
where folks had written down the most important thing they ever saw
happen with their own eyes.  The last two-thirds of the book, though,
were sealed with a leather strap.  That was where Taleswapper wrote down
his own stories, the ones he believed and thought were important.

Cause that's who it was, Taleswapper, who Alvin never thought to see
again in his life.  And suddenly, seeing that old friend, Alvin knew why
two fish came at Ta-Kumsaw's call.  "Taleswapper," Alvin said, "I hope
you're hungry, cause I got a fish here that I roasted for you."

Taleswapper smiled.  "I'm right glad to see you, Alvin, and right glad
to see that fish.  " Alvin handed him the spit.  Taleswapper sat him
down in the grass, across the fire from Alvin and Ta-Kumsaw.

"Thank you kindly, Alvin," said Taleswapper.  He pulled out his knife
and neatly began flaking off slices of fish.  They sizzled his lips, but
he just licked and smacked and made short work of the trout.

Ta-Kumsaw also ate his, and Alvin watched them both.  Ta-Kumsaw never
took his eyes off Taleswapper.

"This is Taleswapper," Alvin said.  "He's the man who taught me how to
heal."

"I didn't teach you," said Taleswapper.  "I just gave You some idea how
to teach yourself.  And persuaded you that you ought to try.

Taleswapper directed his next sentence at Ta-Kumsaw.  "He was set to let
himself die before he'd use his knack to heal himself, can you believe
that?"

"And this is Ta-Kumsaw," said Alvin.

"Oh, I knew that the minute I saw you, Do you know what a legend you are
among White people?  You're like Saladin during the Crusade-they admire
you more than they admire their own leaders, even though they know
you're sworn to fight until you've driven the last White man out of
America."

Ta-Kumsaw said nothing.

"I've met maybe two dozen children named after you, most of them boys,
all of them White.  And stories-about you saving White captives from
being burned to death, about you bringing food to people you drove out
of their homes, so they wouldn't starve.  I even believe some of those
stories."

Ta-Kumsaw finished his fish and laid the spit in the fire.

"I also heard a story as I was coming here, about how you captured two
Whites from Vigor Church and sent their bloody torn-up clothes to their
parents.  How you tortured them to death to show how you meant to
destroy every White-man, woman, and child.  How you said the time for
being civilized was past, and now you'd use pure terror to drive the
White man out of America."

For the first time since Taleswapper arrived, Ta-Kumsaw spoke.

"Did you believe that story?"

"Well, I didn't," said Taleswapper.  "But that's because I already knew
the truth.  You see, I got a message from a girl I knew-a young lady
now, she is.  It was a letter." He took a folded letter from his coat,
three sheets of paper covered with writing.  He handed them toTa
-Kumsaw.

Without looking at it, Ta-Kumsaw handed the letter to Alvin.

"Read it to me," he said.

"But you can read English," said Alvin.

"Not here," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Alvin looked at the letter, at all three pages of it, and to his
surprise; he couldn't read it either.  The letters all looked familiar.

When b, studied them out, he could even name them-T-H-E-M-A-K-E-B
N-E-E-D-S-Y-0-U, that's how it started, but it made no sense to 4..

at all, he couldn't even say for sure what language it was in.  "I can
read it either," he said, and handed it back to Taleswapper.

Taleswapper studied it for a minute, then laughed and put it back into
his coat pocket.  "Well, that's a story for my book.  A place whei a man
can't read."

To Alvin's surprise, Ta-Kumsaw smiled.  "Even you?"

"I know what it says, because I read it before," said Taleswappei "But I
can't make out a single word of it today.  Even when I know what the
word is supposed to be.  What is this place?"

"We're in the Land of Flints," said Alvin.

"We're in the shadow of Eight-Face Mound," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"I didn't think a White man could get here," said Taleswapper.

"Neither did I," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "But here is a White boy, and there is
a White man."

"I dreamed you last night," said Alvin.  "I dreamed I was on top of
Eight-Face Mound, and you were with me, explaining things to me."

"Don't count on it," said Taleswapper.  "I doubt there's a thing on
Eight-Face Mound that I could explain to anybody."

"How did you come here," asked Ta-Kumsaw, "if you didn't know
you were coming to the Land of Flints?"

"She told me to come up the Musky-Ingum, and when I saw a white boulder
on the right, I should take the fork that led left.  She said I'd find
Alvin Miller Junior sitting with Ta-Kumsaw by a fire, roasting fish.

"Who told you all this?" asked Alvin.

"A woman," said Taleswapper.  "A torch.  She told me you saw her in a
vision, Alvin, inside a crystal tower, not more than a week ago by now.
She was the one who pulled the caul from your face, when you were born.
She's been watching you ever since, in the way a torch sees.

She went inside that tower with you and saw out of your eyes."

"The Prophet said someone was with us," said Alvin.

"She looked out of his eye, too," said Taleswapper, "and she saw all his
futures.  The Prophet will die.  Tomorrow morning.  Shot by your own
father's gun, Alvin."

"No!" cried Alvin.

"Unless," said Taleswapper.  "Unless Measure comes in time to show your
father that he's alive, that Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet never harmed him,
or you either."

"But Measure left days ago!"

"That's right, Alvin.  But he got captured by Governor Harrison's men.
Harrison has him, and today, maybe even right now, one of Harrison's men
is killing him.  Breaking his bones, breaking his neck.

Tomorrow Harrison will attack Prophetstown with his cannon, killing
everybody.  Every soul.  So much blood that the Tippy-Canoe will flow
scarlet and the Wobbish will flow red clear to the Ohio."

Ta-Kumsaw leaped to his feet.  "I have to go back.  I have to-"

"You know how far you are," said Taleswapper.  "You know where your
warriors are.  Even if you ran all night and all day, as fast as you
Reds can go-"

"Noon tomorrow," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"He'll be dead already," said Taleswapper.

Ta-Kumsaw shouted in anguish, so loud that several birds cried out and
flew away from the meadow.

"Now, hold your horses, just wait a minute.  If there were nothing we
could do, she wouldn't very well have sent me on this chase, now, would
she?  Don't you see we're acting out a plan that's bigger than all of
us?  Why did it happen that Alvin and Measure were the two boys that
Harrison's hired Chok-Taw kidnapped?  How do you happen to be here, and
me also, at the very day when we're most needed?"

"They need us there, " said Ta-Kumsaw.

"I don't think so," said Taleswapper.  "I think that if they needed us
there, then there we'd be.  They need us here.

"You're like my brother, trying to make me fit into his plans!"

"I wish I were like your brother.  He has visions and sees what's going
on, while all I get is a letter from a torch.  But here I am, and here
you are, and if we weren't supposed to be here, we just plain wouldn't,
whether you like it or not."

Alvin didn't like this talk of what was supposed to happen.  Who was
doing all this supposing?  What did Taleswapper mean-they were all
puppets on sticks?  Was somebody making them move any old way, whatever
he felt ought to happen?  "If somebody's so all-fired in charge of
everything," said Alvin, "he hasn't been doing too good a job of it,
getting us into a fix like this."

"You really don't take to religion, do you, Taleswapper grinned.

boy?"

"I just don't think anybody's making us do anything."

"Nor did I say so," said Taleswapper.  "I'm just saying things never get
so bad we can't do something to make them better."

"Well I'll be glad to take suggestions.  What did this torch lady think
I ought to do?" asked Alvin.

"She said you're supposed to climb the mountain and heal Meare.

Don't ask me more than that-that's all she said.  There isn't a so
mountain worthy of the name in these parts, and Measure's in the root
cellar behind Vinegar Riley's hous' "I know that place," said Alvin.

"I been there.  But I can't-I mean I've never tried to heal somebody who
wasn't right there in front of me.

"Enough tag," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Eight-Face Mound called you m a dream,
White boy.  This man came to tell you to go up the mountain.

Everything begins when you climb the Mound.  If you can."

"Some things end on Eight-Face Mound," said Taleswapper.

"What does a White man know about this place?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"Not a thing," said Taleswapper.  "But I knelt by the bed of a dying
Irrakwa woman, many years ago, and she told me that the most important
thing in her life was, she was the last Irrakwa ever to stand inside
Eight-Face Mound."

"The Irrakwa have all turned White in their hearts," said Ta-Kurnsaw.
"Eight-Face Mound would never let them in now."

"But I'm White," said Alvin.

"Very good problem," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "The Mound will tell you the
answer.  Maybe the answer is you don't go up and everybody dies.

Come."

He led them along the path the land opened up for them, until they came
to a steep hill, thickly grown with trees and brambles.  There was no
path.  "This is Red Man's Face," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "This is where Red men
climb.  The path is gone.  You can't climb here."

"Where, then?" asked Alvin.

"How do I know?" said Ta-Kumsaw.  "The story is that if you climb a
different face, you find a different Mound.  The story is that if you
climb the Builders' Face, you find their ancient city, still alive on
the Mound.  If you climb the Beasts' Face, you find a land where a giant
buffalo is king, a strange animal with horns that come out of his mouth
and a nose like a terrible snake, and huge cougars with teeth as long as
spears all bow before him and worship.  Who knows if these stories are
true?  No one climbs those faces now."

"Is there a White Man's Face?" asked Alvin.

"Red Man, Medicine, Builder, Beast.  Four other faces we don't know
their names," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Maybe one of them is White Man's Face.
Come."

He led them around the hill.  The Mound rose on their left hand.

No path opened.  Alvin recognized everything they saw.  His dream last
night was true, at least this much: Taleswapper was with him, and he
circled the Mound before climbing.

They came to the last of the unknown faces.  No path.  Alvin made as if
to go on to the next face.

"No use," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "All eight faces, none will let us up.

The next is Red Man's Face again."

"I know," said Alvin.  "But here's the path."

There it was, straight as an arrow.  Right on the edge shared by Red
Man's Face and the unknown face beside it.

"You are half Red," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Go on up," said Taleswapper.

"In my dream you were with me up there," said Alvin.

"Maybe so," said Taleswapper.  "But the fact is, I can't see this path
the two of you are talking about.  It looks just like all the rest of
the faces.  So I reckon I'm not invited."

"Go," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Hurry."

"You come with me, then," said Alvin.  "You see the path, don't
you?"

"I didn't dream of the Mound," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "And what you see there,
it will be half what the Red man sees, and half a new place that I
should never see.  Go now, don't waste time anymore.  My brother and
your brother will die unless you do whatever it is the land brought you
here to do."

,i'm thirsty," said Al.

"Drink there," said Ta-Kumsaw, "if the Mound offers you water.

Eat if the Mound offers you food."

Al set his feet on the path and scrambled up the hill.  It was steep,
but there were roots to grab, plenty of footholds, and before long the
path crested, leveled, and the underbrush ended.

He had thought the Mound was a single hill, with eight slopes.

Now, though, he could see that each of the eight slopes was a separate
Mound, arranged to form a deep bowl in the middle.  The valley seemed
much too large, the farthest Mounds much too far away.

Hadn't Alvin walked around the entire Mound this morning with TaKumsaw
and Taleswapper?  Eight-Face Mound was much more inside than it seemed
to be outside.

He walked carefully down the grassy slope.  it was tufted, irregular.

the grass cool, the soil moist and firm.  it seemed much farther
goindown than it had been going up.  When he finally reached the vallel,
w, with silver-leafed trees, jul, floor, he stood on the verge of a
meado like in his dream.  So his dream had been true, showing him a r,.

place that he could not have imagined.

But how was he supposed to find Measure and heal him?  What di the Mound
have to do with anything at all?  It was afternoon now.

they'd taken so long circling the Mound-Measure might already be dying,
and he didn't have any idea how to go about helping him.

He couldn't think of anything to do but walk.  He thought he'd cross the
valley and see one of the other mounds, but it was the strangest thing.
No matter how far he walked, no matter how many silver-leafed trees he
passed, the mound he walked toward was always just as far away.  it made
him afraid-would he be trapped up here forever?-and he hurried back in
the direction he started from.  In just a few minutes he reached the
place where his footprints came down the slope.  Surely he had walked
away from that spot for much longer than that.  A couple more tries
convinced him that the valley went on forever in every direction except
the one he came from.  In that direction, it was just like he was always
in the very center of the Mound, no matter how far he'd walked to get
where he was.

Alvin looked for the gold-leafed tree with the pure white fruit, but he
couldn't find it, and he wasn't surprised.  The taste of the fruit was
still in his mouth from the dream the night before.  He wouldn't get
another taste of it, waking or dreaming, because the second bite would
make him live forever.  He didn't mind much, not getting that bite.
Death didn't breathe all that heavy down the neck of a boy his age.

He heard water.  A brook, clear cold water flowing rapidly over stones.
It was impossible, of course.  The valley of Eight-Face Mound was
completely enclosed.  If water ran so fast here, why didn't the valley
fill right up to make a lake?  Why wasn't there a single stream running
off the mound outside?  Where would such a stream come from, anyway? The
mound was man-made, like all the other mounds scattered all through the
country, though none of the others was so old.  You don't get Springs
coming out of man-made hills.  It made him suspicious of this water, to
have it be so impossible.  Come to think of it, though, quite a few
impossible things had happened to him in his life, and this was far from
being the most peculiar.

Ta-Kumsaw said to drink if the mound offered him water, so he knelt and
drank, plunging his face right into the water and sucking the water
straight into his mouth.  It didn't take away the taste of the ruit.  If
anything, it was stronger after he drank.

He knelt on the bank, studying the opposite shore of the brook.

the water was flowing differently there.  In fact, it was lapping the
.,bore like ocean waves, and once that thought occurred to Alvin he saw
that the shape of the opposite shore was just like the map of the cast
coast that Armor-of-God showed him.  The memory came back clear and
sharp.  Here where the shore bowed outward, that was Carolina in the
Crown Colonies.  This deep bay was the Chase-a-pick, and here was the
mouth of the Potty-Mack, which made the border between the United States
and the Crown Colonies.

Alvin stood and stepped across the stream.

It was just grass.  He didn't see no rivers or towns, no boundaries, no
roads.  But from the coast, he could pretty much guess where the Ohio
country was, and where this very mound would be.  He took two steps, and
all of a sudden there he saw Ta-Kumsaw and Taleswapper, setting on the
ground in front of him, looking up at him as surprised as could be.

"You climbed up after all," said Alvin.

"Nothing of the sort," said Taleswapper.  "We've been right here since
you left."

"Why did you come back down?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"But I ain't down at all," said Alvin.  "I'm down here in the valley of
the mound."

"Valley?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"We're down here below the mound," said Taleswapper.

Then Alvin understood.  Not so as to put it into words, but well enough
to use it, to use what the mound had given him.  He could travel across
the face of the land like this, a hundred miles in a step, and see the
people that he needed to see.  The people that he knew.

Measure.  Alvin touched his forehead in salute to the two men who waited
for him, then took a small step.  They disappeared.

He found the town of Vigor Church easy enough.  First person h, saw was
Armor-of-God, kneeling in prayer.  Alvin didn't say nothii@, to him, for
fear Armor might take it as a vision of the dead.  Wh(, i would Armor
be, though?  In his own house?  In that case VineFi, Riley's place would
be back this way, east of town.  He turned arourii He saw his own
father, setting with Mother.  Pa was smoothing some musket balls he'd
cast.  And Ma was whispering to him, urgent.  She was angry, and so was
Pa.  "Women and children, thai what they are in that town.  Even if the
Prophet and Ta-Kumsi\ killed our boys, them women and children there
didn't do it.  You'll be no better than them if you raise a hand against
them.  I won't see you come back into this house, I'll never see you
again if you kill one s(@i, of them.  I swear it, Alvin Miller."

Pa just kept on polishing, except once when he said, "They kill my
boys."

Alvin tried to answer, opened his mouth to say, "But I ain't dead.

Pal" It didn't work.  He couldn't say a word.  He wasn't brought up here
to give a vision to his parents, neither.  It was Measure he had to
find, or Pa's own musket ball would'kill the Shining Man.

It wasn't far, not even a step.  Alvin just inched his feet forward, and
Ma and Pa disappeared.  He caught a glimpse of Calm and David, shooting
their guns-probably at targets.  And Wastenot and Wantnot, ramming
something-ramming shot down the barrel of a cannon.

Glimpses of other folks, though because he didn't know or care about
them he didn't see them clear.  Finally he saw Measure.

He had to be dead.  His neck was broke, judging from the angle of his
head, and his arms and legs were all broke, too.  Alvin didn't dare
move, or he'd travel a mile in an instant, and Measure would disappear
just like the others.  Alvin just stood there, and sent his spark out
into the body of his brother, lying before him on the ground.

Alvin never felt such pain in all his life.  It wasn't Measure's pain,
it was his own.  It was Alvin's sense of how things ought to be, of the
right shape of things; inside Measure's body, nothing was going right.

Parts of him were dying, the blood was packed into his belly and
crushing his own life out, his brain wasn't connected to his body no
more, it was the most terrible mess Alvin ever saw, everything wrong, so
wrong that it hurt him to see it, a pain so sharp he cried out.  But
Measure didn't hear him.  Measure was beyond hearing.  If Measure wasn't
dead he was half an inch from being dead, and that was sure.

Alvin went to his heart first.  It was still pumping, but there wasn't
much blood left in the veins; it was all lost in Measure's chest and
belly.  That was the first thing Alvin had to mend, heal up the blood
vessels and get the blood back where it belonged, flowing in its
channels.

Time, it all took time.  All the broken ribs, the cut-up organs.

All the bones, joining them without so much as a hand to help move
something into the right place-some of the bones were so out of line
that he couldn't heal them at all.  He'd have to wait until Measure woke
up enough to help him.

So Alvin got inside Measure's brain, the nerves running down his spine,
and healed it all, put it back the way it had to be.

Measure woke with one long, terrible scream of agony.  He was alive and
the pain was back, sharper and clearer than it ever was before.  I'm
sorry, Measure.  I can't heal you up without letting the pain come back.
And I got to heal you, or too many innocent folks are dead.

Alvin didn't even notice that it was already night, and half his work
still lay ahead of him.

Tippy-Canoe

In Prophetstown, no one but the children slept that night.  The adults
all felt the circling White army; the hidings and hexes cast by the
White troops were like trumpets and banners to the land-sense of the
Reds.

Not all of them found they had the courage to keep their oath, now that
iron-and-fire death was hours away.  But they kept the oath this far:
They gathered their families and slipped out of Prophetstown, passing
silently between companies of White soldiers, who neither heard nor saw
them.  Knowing they could not die without defending themselves, they
left, so that not one Red would mar the perfection of the Prophet's
refusal to fight.

Tenskwa-Tawa was not surprised that some left; he was surprised that so
many stayed.  Almost all.  So many who believed in him, so many who
would prove that trust in blood.  He dreaded the morning; the pain of a
single murder close at hand had cursed him with the black noise for many
years.  True, it was his father who was killed, so the pain was more;
but did he love the people of Prophetstown any less than he had loved
his father?

Yet he had to fend off the black noise, keep his wits about him, or all
their deaths would be in vain.  if their dying accomplished nothing, he
wouldn't have them do it.  So many times he had searched the crystal
tower, trying to find some way to approach this day, some path that
would lead to something good.  The best that he could find was the land
divided, Red west of the Mizzipy, White to the east.

Even that, though, could be found only through the narrowest of paths.
So much depended on the White boys, so much on TenskwaTawa, so much on
White Murderer Harrison himself.  For in all the paths in which Harrison
showed any mercy, the massacre of TippyCanoe did nothing to stop the
destruction of the Reds, and, with them, the land.  In all those paths,
the Red men dwindled, confined to tiny preserves of desolate land, until
the whole land was White, and therefore brutalized into submission,
stripped and cut and ravished, giving vast amounts of food that was only
in imitation of the true harvest, poisoned into life by alchemical
trickery.  Even the White man suffered in those visions of the future,
but it would be many generations before he realized what he had done.
Yet here-Prophetstown-there was a day-tomorrow-when the future could be
turned onto an unlikely path, but a better one.  One that would lead to
a living land after all, even if it was truncated; one that would lead
someday to a crystal city catching sunlight and turning it into visions
of truth for all who lived within it.

That was Tenskwa-Tawa's hope, that he could cling to the bright vision
through all of tomorrow's pain, and so turn that pain, that blood, that
black noise of murder, to an event that would change the world.

Even before the first detectable rays of light rose above the horizon,
Tenskwa-Tawa felt the coming dawn.  He felt it partly in the stirring of
life to the east.  He could feel it from farther off than any other Red.

He felt it also, though, from the movements among the Whites as they
prepared to light the matches for their cannon.  Four fires, hidden and
therefore revealed by spells and witchery.  Four cannon, poised to rake
the city, end to end.

Tenskwa-Tawa walked through the city, humming softly.  They heard him,
and awakened their children.  The White men thought to kill them in
their sleep, faceless within their wigwams and lodges.

Instead, they emerged in the darkness, walking surefooted to the broad
meadow of the meeting ground.  There wasn't room enough for all of them
even to sit.  They stood, families together, father and mother with
their children in the circle of their embrace, waiting for the White man
to spill their blood.

"The earth will not soak up your blood," Tenskwa-Tawa had promised them.
"It will flow into the river, and I will hold it there, all the power of
all your lives and all your deaths, and I will use it to keep the land
alive, and bind the White man to the lands he has already captured and
begun to kill."

So now Tenskwa-Tawa made his way to the bank of the TippyCanoe, watching
the meadow fill up with his people, of whom so many would die before him
because they believed in his words.

"Stand with me today, Mr.  Miller," said General Harrison.  "It's your
kin whose blood we'll avenge today.  I want you to have the honor of
firing the first bullet in this war."

Mike Fink watched as the hot-eyed miller carefully rammed wad and shot
down his musket barrel.  Mike knew the thirst for murder in his eyes. It
was a kind of madness that came on a man, and it made him dangerous,
made him able to do things beyond his normal reach.

Mike was just as glad that miller didn't know just when and how his boy
had died.  Oh, Governor Bill hadn't never told him right out who that
young man was, but Mike Fink wasn't a boy in short pants, and he knew
all right.  Harrison played a deep game, but one thing was sure.  He'd
do anything to raise himself higher and put more land and people under
his control.  And Mike Fink knew that Harrison would only keep him
around as long as he was useful.

The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as
a murderer.  He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what
happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as
murder, it was a fair fight.  Like how he killed HoochHooch didn't have
to be so careless.  Hooch could have noticed Mike wasn't on the shore
with the other poleboys, Hooch could have been watchful and wary, and if
he had been, why, Mike Fink might well have died.  So Hooch lost his
life because he lost the contest-the contest he and Mike were both
playing for.

But that .  boy yesterday, he wasn't a player.  He wasn't in the contest
at all.  He just wanted to go home.  Mike Fink never wrassled a man who
didn't want a fight, and he never killed a man who wasn't set to kill
him first if he got a chance.  Yesterday was the first time he had ever
killed somebody just cause he was told to, and he didn't like it, didn't
like it one bit.  Mike could see now that Governor Bill thought he had
killed Hooch that same way, just because he was told to.

But it wasn't so.  And today Mike Fink looked at the young man's father,
with all that rage in his eyes, and he said to that man-but silently, so
nobody could hear-he said, I'm with you, I agree with you that the man
who killed your boy should die.

Trouble was, Mike Fink was that man.  And he was plain ashamed.

Same thing with them Red men in Prophetstown.  What kind of contest was
it, to wake them up with grapeshot whistling through their own houses,
setting them afire, cutting into their bodies, the bodies of children
and women and old men?

Not my kind of fight, thought Mike Fink.

The first light of dawn came into the sky.  Prophetstown was still
nothing but shadows, but it was time.  Alvin Miller aimed his musket
right into the thick of the houses, and then he fired.

A few seconds later, the cannons banged out their answer.  Maybe a few
more seconds, and the first flame appeared in the town.

The cannons fired again.  Yet not a soul ran screaming out of the
wigwams.  Not even the ones that were afire.

Didn't anybody else notice it?  Didn't they realize that the Reds were
all gone out of Prophetstown?  And if they were gone, that meant they
knew all about this morning's attack.  And if they knew, that meant they
might be ready, lying in ambush.  Or maybe they all escaped, or
maybeMike Fink's lucky amulet was nearly burning him, it felt so hot.

He knew what that meant.  Time to go.  Something real bad was going to
happen to him if he stayed.

So he slid off down the line of soldiers-or what passed for soldiers,
since there hadn't been more than a day or two for training some of
these raw farmers.  Nobody paid no heed to Mike Fink.  They were too
busy watching the wigwams burn.  Some of them had finally noticed that
nobody seemed to be in the Red city, and they were talking about it,
worried.  Mike said nothing, kept moving along the line, down toward the
creek.

The cannon were all on the high ground; they sounded farther away.

Mike emerged from the trees into the cleared ground that ran down to the
river.  There he stopped short and stared.  The dawn was still just a
grey streak in the distance, but there was no mistaking what he saw.

Thousands and thousands of Reds, standing shoulder to shoulder in the
meadow.  Some were crying softly-no doubt stray shrapnel and musket
balls had come this far, since two of the cannons were on the opposite
side of the city from here, firing this direction.

But they weren't making a move to defend themselves.  It wasn't an
ambush.  They had no weapons.  These Red folks were all lined up to die.

There was maybe a dozen canoes up and down the bank of the river.

Mike Fink pushed one out into the water and rolled himself aboard.

Downstream, that's where he'd go, all the way down the Wobbish to the
Ohio.  It wasn't war today, it was massacre, and that just wasn't Mike
Fink's kind of fight.  Nearly everybody's got a thing so bad he just
won't do it.

In the darkness of the root cellar, Measure couldn't see if Alvin was
really there or not.  But he could hear his voice, soft but urgent,
riding in over the crest of the pain.  "I'm trying to fix you, Measure,
but I need your help."

Measure couldn't answer.  Speech wasn't one of the things he could
manage right at the moment.

"I've fixed your neck, and some of your ribs, and the guts that got tore
up," said Alvin.  "And your left arm bones were pretty much in a line,
so they're all right, can you feel that?"

It was true that there wasn't no pain coming from Measure's left arm. He
moved it.  It jostled the whole rest of his body, but it could move, it
had some strength in it.

"Your ribs," said Alvin.  "Poking out.  You got to push them back in
place."

Measure pushed on one and nearly fainted from the pain.  "I can't."

"You got to."

"Make it not hurt."

"Measure, I don't know how.  Not without making it so you can't move.
You just got to stand it.  Everything you get back in place, I can fix
it, and then it won't hurt no more, but first you got to straighten it,
you got to."

"You do it."

"I can't."

"Just reach out and do it, Alvin, you're big for ten, you can do it."

"I can't.  "I once cut your bone for you, to save your life, I once did
that."

"Measure, I can't do it cause I ain't there.  " This made no sense to
Measure.  So he knew he was dreaming.

Well, if he was dreaming, why didn't he come up with some dream where
things didn't hurt so bad?

"Push on the bone, Measure."

Alvin just wouldn't go away.  So Measure pushed, and it hurt him.

But Alvin was as good as his word.  Soon after, the place where he
straightened out the bone didn't'hurt no more.

It took so long.  He was so tore up that it seemed there just wasn't no
end to the pain.  But in between times, while Alvin was making things
heal up where he just fixed the bones, Measure explained to Alvin what
had happened to him, and Alvin told him what he knew, and pretty soon
Measure understood that there was a lot more to this than saving the
life of one young man in a root cellar.

Finally, finally it was over.  Measure couldn't hardly believe it.

He had hurt so much for so many hours that it felt downright strange not
to hurt anywhere.

He heard the thump, thump of cannon firing.  "Can you hear that, Alvin?"
he asked.

Alvin couldn't.

"The shooting's started.  The cannon.  "Then run, Measure.  Go as fast
as You can."

"Alvin, I'm in a root cellar.  They barred the door."

Alvin cussed with a couple of words that Measure didn't know the boy had
ever heard.

"Alvin, I got me a hole half-dug here in the back.  You got such a knack
with stone, I wondered if You could loosen things up for me here, so I
could dig out real fast.  And that's how it worked out.  Measure rolled
himself into the hole and just closed his eyes and pawed at the dirt
above his head.  It was nothing like digging the day before, rubbing his
fingers raw on the dirt.  It just fell away, slid off him; when he
reached up to dig more, the dirt slipped under his shoulders, and there
it firmed right up, so that he didn't even have to think about moving
the dirt out of the hole, it was just filling up underneath him.  He
kicked, and his legs jostled the dirt loose, so his whole body was
rising up the same way.

Swimming through dirt, that's what I'm doing, he thought, and he started
to laugh, it was so easy and so strange.

His laugh was finished in the open air.  He was on top, just behind the
root cellar.  The sky was pretty light-the sun would be up in just a
minute or so.  The booming of the cannon had stopped.  Did that mean it
was over, too late?  Maybe, though, they were just letting the guns
cool.  Or moving them to another place, Or maybe the Reds even managed
to capture the gunsBut would that be good news?  Right or wrong, his
brothers and his father were with them guns, and if the Reds won this
battle, some of his kin might die.  It was one thing to know that the
Reds were in the right and the Whites in the wrong; it was something
else to wish defeat on your own family, defeat and maybe death.  He had
to stop the battle, and so he ran, like he never done before.  Alvin's
voice was gone, now, but Measure didn't need to be encouraged.  He fair
to flew down that road.

He met two people on the way.  One was Mrs.  Hatch, who was driving her
wagon along the road, loaded down with supplies.  When she saw Measure,
she screamed-he was wearing a loincloth and filthy as could be, and she
couldn't be blamed for thinking he was a Red all set to scalp her.  She
was off that wagon and running before Measure could so much as call her
name.  Well, that was fine with him.  He nearly tore the horse from the
wagon, he worked so fast, and then he was riding bareback, galloping
along the road hoping that the horse wouldn't trip and spill him.

The other person he met along the way was Armor-of-God.  Armor was
kneeling in the middle of the common green, out front of his store,
praying his heart out while the cannon roared and the muskets crackled
across the river.  Measure hailed him, and Armor looked up with a face
like as if he'd seen Jesus resurrected.  "Measure!" he shouted.

"Stop, stop!"

Measure was all set to go on, to say he had no time, but then Armor was
out in the middle of the way, and the horse was shy to go around him, so
he did stop.  "Measure, are you an angel or alive?"

"Alive, no thanks to Harrison.  Tried to murder me, he did.  I'm alive
and so is Alvin.  This whole thing was Harrison's doing, and I've got to
put a stop to it."

"Well you can't go like that," said Armor.  "Wait, I said!  You can't
just show up wearing a loincloth and covered up with dirt like that,
somebody's going to think you're a Red and shoot you on the spot!"

"Then hop on this horse behind me, and give me your clothing on the
way!"

So Measure hoisted Armor-of-God onto the horse behind him, and they rode
out to the river crossing.

Peter Ferryman's wife was there to run the winch.  One look at Measure
was enough to tell her all she needed to know.  "Hurry," she said. "It's
so bad, the river's running scarlet."

On the ferry, Armor stripped off his clothes while Measure ducked
himself in the water, blood and all, to wash some of the dirt away.  He
didn't come out clean, but at least he looked somewhat like a White man.
Still wet, he put on Armor's shirt and trousers, and then his waistcoat.
They didn't fit too good, Armor being a smaller man, but Measure
shrugged on the coat all the same.  While he did, he said, "Sorry to
leave you with just your siimmeohns."

"I'd stand naked half the day in front of all the ladies in church if it
would stop this massacre," said Armor.  If he said more, Measure didn't
hear it, cause he was already on his way.

Nothing was the way Alvin Miller Senior thought that it would be.

He'd imagined shooting his musket at the same screaming savages who cut
up and killed his boys.  But the city turned up empty, and they found
the Reds all gathered in Speaking Meadow, just like they was ready for a
sermon from the Prophet.  Miller never knowed there was so many Reds in
Prophetstown, cause he never seen them all in the same place like this.
But they were Reds, weren't they?  So he shot his musket all the same,
just like the other men, firing and reloading, hardly looking at whether
his shot hit anything.  How could he miss, them all standing together so
close?  The bloodlust was on him then, he was crazy with anger and the
power to kill.  He didn't notice how some of the other men were getting
quieter.  Shooting less often.  He just loaded and fired, loaded and
fired, stepping a yard or two closer every time, out from the cover of
the forest, out into the open; only when the cannon got moved into place
did he stop shooting, make way for them, watched them mow great swaths
through the mass of Reds.

That was the first time he really noticed what all was happening to the
Reds, what they were doing, what they weren't doing.  They weren't
screaming.  They weren't fighting back.  They were just standing there,
men and women and children, just looking out at the White men who were
killing them.  Not a one even turned his back to the hail of shrapnel.
Not a parent tried to shield a child from the blast.

They just stood, waited, died.

The grapeshot carved gaps in the crowd; the only thing to stop the spray
of metal was human bodies.  Miller saw them fall.  Them as could, got up
again, or at least knelt, or raised their heads above the mass of
corpses so that the next blast would take them and kill them.

What is it, do they want to die?

Miller looked around him.  He and the men with him were standing in a
sea of corpses--they had already walked out to where the outer edges of
the crowd of Reds had been.  Right at his feet, the body of a boy no
older than Alvin lay curled, his eye blown out by a musket ball.

Maybe my own musket baH, thought Miller.  Maybe I killed this boy.

During the lulls between cannon volleys, Miller could hear men crying.
Not the Reds, the ones still living, huddled in an ever-smaller mass
down toward the river.  No, the men crying were his neighbors, White men
standing beside him, or behind the line.  Some of them were talking,
pleading.  Stop it, they said.  Please, stop it.

Please stop.  Were they talking to the cannon?  Or to the Red men and
women, who insisted on standing there, not trying to escape, not crying
out in fear?  Or to their children, who faced the guns as bravely their
parents?  Or did they speak to the terrible gnawing pain in as their own
hearts, to see what they had done, were doing, would yet do?

Miller noticed that the blood didn't soak into the grass of the meadow.
As it poured out of the wounds of those most recently hit, it formed
rivulets, streams, great sheets of blood flowing down the slope of the
meadow, toward the Tippy-Canoe Creek.  The morning sunlight on this
bright clear day shone vivid red from the water of the creek.

While he was watching, all at once the water of the creek went smooth as
glass.  The sunlight didn't dance on the water now, it reflected like a
mirror, near blinding him.  But he could still see a solitary Red man
walking on the water, just like Jesus in the story, standing on the
water in the middle of the creek.

It wasn't just a whimper behind him anymore.  It was a shout, from more
and more men.  Stop shooting!  Stop it!  Put down your guns!  And then
others, talking about the man standing on the water.

A bugle sounded.  The men fell silent.  "Time to finish them, men!"

shouted Harrison.  He was on a prancing stallion at the head of the
meadow, leading the way down the blood-slick hill.  None of the farmer
folk were with him, but his uniformed soldiers formed a line and came
along, bayonets fixed.  Where once ten thousand Reds had stood, there
was just a field of bodies, and maybe a thousand, a ragged remnant,
gathered near the water at the bottom of the hill.

That was the moment when a tall young White man ran from the wood at the
bottom of the hill, dressed in a suit too small, his feet bare, his coat
and waistcoat all unbuttoned, his hair wet and tousled, and face grimy
and wet.  But Miller knew him, knew him before he heard his voice.

"Measure!" he cried.  "It's my boy Measure!"

He threw down his musket and ran out into the field of corpses, down the
hill toward his son.

"My boy Measure!  He's alive!  You're alive!"

Then he slipped in the blood, or maybe he tripped on a body, but
whatever happened he fell, his hands splashing into a river of blood,
spattering his chest and face.

He heard Measure's voice, not ten yards away, shouting out so every man
could hear him.  "The Reds who captured me were hired by Harrison.
Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa saved me, When I came home two days ago,
Harrison's soldiers captured me and wouldn't let me tell you the truth.
He even tried to kill me." Measure spoke slow and clear, so every word
carried, every sound was understood.  "He knew all the time.  This whole
thing, Harrison planned it all along.  The Reds are innocent.  You're
killing innocent people."

Miller stood up from the bloody field and raised his hands high over his
head, thick blood running from his scarlet hands.  A cry was wrung from
his throat, forced out by anguish, by despair.  "What have I done!  What
have I done!" The cry was echoed by a dozen, a hundred, three hundred
voices.

And there was General Harrison on his prancing horse, out in front of
everybody.  Even his own soldiers had thrown down their guns by now.

"It's a he!" cried Harrison.  "I never saw this boy!  Someone has played
a terrible trick on me!"

"It ain't no trick!" shouted Measure.

"Here's his kerchief-they stuffed it in my mouth yesterday, to gag me
while they broke my bones!"

Miller could see the kerchief clearly in his son's hand.  It had the H
embroidered in large, clear letters in the corner.  Every man in that
army had seen his handkerchiefs.

And now some of Harrison's own soldiers spoke up.  "It's true!  We
brought this boy to Harrison two days ago."

"We didn't know he was one of the boys they all said the Reds had
killed!"

A high, howling cry floated over the meadow.  They all looked down to
where the one-eyed Prophet stood on the solid, scarlet water of the
Tippy-Canoe.

"Come to me, my people!" he said.

The surviving Reds walked, slowly, steadily toward the water.

They walked across it, then gathered on the other side.

"all my people, come!"

The corpses rustled, moved.  The White men standing among them cried out
in terror.  But the dead were not rising up to walknly the wounded who
still breathed, they were the ones who rose up, staggered.

Some of them tried to carry children, babies-they had no strength for
it.

Miller saw and felt the blood on his own hands.  He had to do something,
didn't he?  So he reached out to a struggling woman, whose husband
leaned against her for support, meaning to take the baby from her arms
and carry it for her.  But when he came near, she looked into his face,
and he saw his own reflection in her eyes-his face haggard, White,
spattered with blood, his hands dripping with blood.  Tiny as it was, he
saw that reflection as clear as if it had been on a mirror held in front
of his own face.  He couldn't touch her baby, not with hands like his.

Some of the other White men on the hill also tried to help, but they
must have seen something like what Miller saw, and they recoiled as if
they had been burned.

Maybe a thousand wounded got up and tried to reach the creek.

Many of them collapsed and died before they got there.  Those that
reached the water walked, staggered, crawled across; they were helped by
the Reds on the other side.

Miller noticed something peculiar.  All those wounded Reds, all the
uninjured ones, they had walked on this meadow, they had walked across
the blood-red river, and yet there wasn't a spot of blood on their hands
or feet.

"All my people, all who died-Come home, says the land!"

All around them, the meadow was strewn with bodies-by far the majority
of those who had stood there as living families only an hour before.
Now, at the Prophet's words, these bodies seemed to shudder, to crumble;
they collapsed and sank into the grass of the meadow.  It took perhaps a
minute, and they were gone, the grass springing up lush and green.  The
last of the blood skittered down the slope like beads of water on a hot
griddle and became part of the bright red creek.

"Come to me, my friend Measure." The Prophet spoke quietly, and held out
his hand.

Measure turned his back on his father and walked down the grassy slope
to the water's edge.

"Walk to me," said the Prophet.

"I can't walk on the blood of your people," he said.

"They gave their blood to lift you up," said the Prophet.  "Come to me,
or take the curse that will fall on every White man in that meadow."

"I reckon I'll stay here, then," said Measure.  "If I'd've been in their
place, I don't figure I'd've done a thing different than what they did,
If they're guilty, so am I."

The Prophet nodded.

Every White man there felt something warm and wet and sticky on his
hands.  Some of them cried out when they saw.  From elbow to hands, they
dripped with blood.  Some tried to wipe it off on their shirts.

Some searched for wounds that might be bleeding, but there were no
wounds.  Just bloody hands.

"Do you want your hands to be clean of the blood of my people?"

asked the Prophet.  He wasn't shouting anymore, but they all heard him,
every word.  And yes, yes, they wanted their hands to be clean.

"Then go home and tell this story to your wives and children, to your
neighbors, to your friends.  Tell the whole story.  Leave nothing out.
Don't say that someone fooled you-you all knew when you fired on people
who had no weapons that what you did was murder.  No matter whether you
thought some of us might have committed some crime.  When you shot at
babies in their mothers' arms, little children, old men and women, you
were murdering us because we were Red.

So tell the story as it happened, and if you tell it true, your hands
will be clean."

There wasn't a man on that meadow who wasn't weeping or trembling or
faint with shame.  To tell of this day's work to their wives and
children, their parents, their brothers and sisters, that seemed
unbearable.  But if they didn't, these bloody hands would tell the story
for them.  It was more than they could bear to think of.

But the Prophet wasn't through.  "If some stranger comes along, and you
don't tell him the whole story before you sleep, then the blood will
come back on your hands, and stay there until you do tell him.

That's how it will be for the rest of your lives-every man and woman
that you meet will have to hear the true story from your lips, or your
hands will be filthy again.  And if you ever, for any reason, kill
another human being, then your hands and face will drip with blood
forever, even in the grave."

They nodded, they agreed.  It was justice, simple justice.  They
couldn't give back the lives of those they killed, but they could make
sure no lie was ever told about the way that they were killed.  No one
could ever claim that Tippy-Canoe was a victory, or even a battle.  It
was a massacre, and White men committed it, and not one Red raised a
hand in violence or defense.  No excuse, no softening; it would be
known.

Only one thing remained-the guilt of the man on the prancing stallion.

"White Murderer Harrison!" called the Prophet.  "Come to me!"

Harrison shook his head, tried to turn his horse; the reins slipped from
his bloody hands, and the horse walked briskly down the hill.

All the White men watched him silently, hating him for how he lied to
them, stirred them up, found the murder in their hearts and called it
forth.  The horse brought him to the water's edge.  He looked downward
at the one-eyed Red who had once sat under his table and begged for
drops of whiskey from his cup.

"Your curse is the same," said the Prophet, "except that your story is
much longer and uglier to tell.  And you won't wait for strangers to
come along before you speak-every day of your life you'll have to find
someone who has never heard the story from your lips before, and tell it
to him-every day!-or your hands will drip with blood.

And if you decide to hide, and live with blood-soaked hands rather than
find new people to tell, you'll feel the pain of my people's wounds, one
new wound each day, until you tell the story again, once for every day
you missed.  Don't try to kill yourself, either-you can't do it.  You'll
wander from one end of this White man's land to the other.  People will
see you coming and hide, dreading the sound of your voice; you'll beg
them to stop and listen to you.  They'll even forget your old name, and
call you by the name you earned today.

Tippy-Canoe.  That's your new name, White Murderer Harrison.

Your true name, till you die a natural death as an old, old man."

Harrison bent onto the mane of the horse and wept into his bloody hands.
But his were tears of fury, not grief or shame.  Tears of rage that all
his plans had gone awry.  He would kill the Prophet even now, if he
could.  He would search far and wide for some witch or wizard who could
break this curse.  He couldn't bear to let this miserable oneeyed Red
defeat him.

Measure spoke to the Prophet from the shore.  "Where will you go now,
Tenskwa-Tawa?"

"West," said Tenskwa-Tawa.  "My people, all who still believe in me,
we'll go west of the Mizzipy.  When you tell your story, tell White men
this-that west of the Mizzipy is Red man's land.  Don't come there.

The land can't bear the touch of a White man's foot.  You breathe out
death; your touc is poison; your words are ies; the living land won't
have you."

He turned his back, walked to the Reds waiting for him on the other
shore, and helped an injured child walk up the far slope into the trees.
Behind him, the water of the Tippy-Canoe began to flow again.

Miller walked down the slope to where his son stood on the bank of the
creek.  "Measure," he said, "Measure, Measure."

Measure turned and reached out his hands to embrace his father.

"Alvin's alive, Father, far to the east of us.  He's with Ta-Kumsaw, and
he-" But Miller hushed him, held his son's hands out.

They dripped blood, just like Miller's own.  Miller shook his head.

"It's my fault," he said.  "AB my fault."

"Not all, Father," said Measure.  "There's fault enough for everyone to
share."

"But not for you, Son.  That's my shame on your hands."

"Well, then, maybe you'll feel it less, for having two of us to carry
it." Measure reached out and took his father by the shoulders, held him
close.  "We've seen the worst that men can do, Pa, and been the worst
that men can be.  But that don't mean that someday we won't see the
best, too.  And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can
still be pretty good, can't we?"

Maybe, thought Miller.  But he doubted it.  Or maybe he just doubted
that he'd ever believe it, even if it were true.  He'd never look into
his own heart again and like what he found there.

They waited there on the riverbank for Miller's other sons.  They came
with bloody hands-David, Calm, Wastenot, Wantnot.  David held his hands
in front of him and wept.  "I wish that I had died with Vigor in the
Hatrack River!"

"No you don't," said Calm.

"I'd be dead, but I'd be clean."

The twins said nothing, but held each other's cold and slimy hands.

"We need to go home," said Measure.

"No," said Miller.

"They'll be worried," said Measure.  "Ma, the girls, Cally."

Miller remembered his parting from Faith.  "She said that if 1-if this-
"I know how Ma talks, but I also know your children need their pa, and
she won't keep you out."

I I to tell her.  What we did."

"Yes, and the girls and Cally, too.  We each have to tell them, and Calm
and David have their wives to tell.  Best do it now, and clean our
hands, and get on with our lives.  All of us at once, all of us
together.  And I have a story to tell you, too, about me and Alvin.

When we've done with this tale, I'll tell mine, is that good?

Will you stay for that?"

Armor met them at the Wobbish.  The ferry was already on the other side,
still unloading, and other men had took all the boats they used for
crossing last night.  So they stood and waited.

Measure stripped off his bloody coat and trousers, but Armor wouldn't
put them on.  Armor didn't make no accusations, but none of the others
would look at their brother-in-law.  Measure took him aside and told him
about the curse while the ferry was slowly drawn back across the river.
Armor listened, then walked to Miller, whose back was to him, looking at
the far shore.

"Father," said Annor-of-God.

"You were right, Armor," said Miller, still not looking at him.

He held up his hands.  "Here it is, the proof that you were right."

"Measure tells me that I have to hear the story once from all of you,"
said Armor, turning to include them all in his speech.  "But then you'll
never hear another word of it from me.  I'm still your son and brother,
if you'll have me; my wife is your daughter and your sister, and you're
the only kin I have out here."

"To your shame," whispered David.

"Don't punish me because my hands are clean," said Armor.

Calm held out a bloody hand.  Armor took it without hesitation, shook
firmly, then let go.

"Look at that," said Calm.  "You touch us, it comes off on you."

In answer, Armor held out that same stained hand to Miller.  After a
while, Miller took it.  The handshake lasted till the ferry came.

Then they headed on home.

Two-Soul Man

Taleswapper woke at dawn, instantly aware that something was wrong.  It
was Ta-Kumsaw, sitting on the grass, his face toward the west, rocking
back and forth and breathing heavily, as if he was enduring a dull and
heavy ache.  Was he ill?

No.  Alvin had failed.  The slaughter had begun.  Ta-Kumsaw's pain was
not from his own body.  It was Ta-Kumsaw's people dying, somewhere afar
off, and what he felt was not grief or pity, it was the pain of their
deaths.  Even for a Red man as gifted asTa-Kumsaw, to feel death from so
far away meant that many, many souls had gone on to their reward.

As he had so many times before, Taleswapper addressed a few silent words
to God, which always came down to this question: Why do you put us to so
much trouble, when it all comes to nought in the end?

Taleswapper couldn't bear the futility of it.  Ta-Kumsaw and Alvin
racing across country in their way, Taleswapper making the best time a
White man can make, and Alvin going onto Eight-Face Mound, and what does
it come to?  Does it save a life?  So many are dying now that Ta-Kumsaw
can feel it from clear away by the Wobbish.

And, as usual, God had nothing much to say to Taleswapper when his
questioning was done.

Taleswapper had no wish to interrupt Ta-Kumsaw.  Or rather he guessed
that Ta-Kumsaw had no particular wish to get into conversation with a
White man at this particular moment.  Yet he felt a vision growing
within him.  Not a vision such as prophets were rumored to see, not a
vision of inward eyes.  To Taleswapper visions came as words, and he did
not know what the vision was until his own words told him.  Even then,
he knew that he was not a prophet; his visions were never such as would
change the world, only the sort of thing that records it, that
understands the world.  Now, however, he took no thought of whether his
visions were worthy or not.  It came, and he must record it.  Yet
because the writing of words had been taken from him in this place, he
could not write it down.  What was there, then, but to speak the words
aloud?

So Taleswapper spoke, forming the words into couplets as he said them
because that was how visions ought to be expressed, in poetry.

it was a confusing tale at first, and Taleswapper could not decide
whether it was God or Satan whose terrible light blinded him as the
words tumbled forth.  He only knew that whichever one it was, whichever
one had brought such slaughter to the world, he richly deserved
Taleswapper's anger, and so he wasn't bashful about lashing him with
language.

It all came down to these words rushing forth in a stream so intense
that Taleswapper hardly breathed, certainly made no sensible break in
the rhythms of his speech, his voice growing louder and louder as the
lines were wrung from him and dashed out against the harsh wall of air
around him, as if he dared God to hear him and resent his resentment:

When I had my defiance given The sun stood trembling in heaven The moon
that glowed remote below Became leprous and white as snow And every soul
of men on the earth Felt affliction and sorrow and sickness and dearth
God flamed in my path and the Sun was hot With the bows of my mind and
the arrows of thought My bowstring fierce with ardor breathes My arrows
glow in their golden sheaves My brothers and father march before The
heavens drop with human gore'Stop!

It was Ta-Kumsaw.  Taleswapper waited with his mouth open, more words,
more anguish waiting to pour from him.  But Ta-Kumsaw was not to be
disobeyed.

"It's finished," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"All dead?" whispered Taleswapper.

"I can't feel life from here," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "I can feel deaththe
world is torn like an old cloth, it can never be mended."

Despair gave way immediately to cold hate.  "But it can be cleaned."

"If I could have prevented it, Ta-Kumsaw-"

"Yes, you're a good man, Taleswapper.  There are others, too, among your
kind.

Armor-of-God Weaver is such a man.  And if all White men came like you,
to learn this land, then there'd be no war between us."

"There is no war between you and meTa-Kumsaw."

"Can you change the color of your skin?  Can I change mine?"

"It isn't our skin, but our hearts-"

"When we stand with all the Red men on one side of the field, and all
the White men on the other side of the field, where will you stand?"

"In the middle, pleading with both sides to-"

"You will stand with your people, and I will stand with mine."

How could Taleswapper argue with him?  Perhaps he would have the courage
to refuse such a choice.  Perhaps not.  "Pray God it never comes to such
a pass.  "It already has, Taleswapper." Ta-Kumsaw nodded.  "From this
day's work, I will have no trouble gathering my army of Red men at
last."

The words leapt from Taleswapper before he could stop them: "Then it's a
terrible work you've chosen, if the death of so many good folk helps it
along!"

Ta-Kumsaw answered with a roar, springing on Taleswapper all at once,
knocking him back, flat on the grass of the meadow.  Ta-Kumsaw's right
hand clutched Taleswapper's hair; his left pressed against Taleswapper's
throat.  "all White men will die, all who don't escape across the seal"
Yet it was not murder he intended.  Even in his rage, Ta-Kumsaw did not
press so hard as to strangle Taleswapper.  After a moment the Red man
pushed off and rolled away, burying his face in the grass, his arms and
legs spread out to touch the earth with as much of his body as he could.

"I'm sorry," Taleswapper whispered.  "I was wrong to say that."

"Lofla-Wossiky!" cried Ta-Kumsaw.  "I did not want to be right, my
brother!"

"Is he alive?" asked Taleswapper.

"I don't know," said Ta-Kumsaw.  He turned his head to press his cheek
against the grass; his eyes, though, bored at Taleswapper as if
to kill him with a look.  "Taleswapper, the words you were saying.

What did they mean?  What did you see?"

"I saw nothing," said Taleswapper.  And then, though he only learned the
truth as the words came out, he said, "It was Alvin's vision I was
speaking.  It's what he saw.  My brothers and father march before.  The
heavens drop with human gore.  His vision, my poem.

"And where is the boy?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.  "All night on that Mound, and
where is he now?" Ta-Kumsaw jumped to his feet, orienting himself toward
Eight-Face Mound, toward the very center of it.  "No one stays there
through the whole night, and now the sun is rising and he hasn't come."
Ta-Kumsaw abruptly turned to face Taleswapper.  "He can't come down."

"What do you mean?"

"He needs me," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "I can feel it.  A terrible wound is in
him.  All his strength is bleeding into the earth."

"What's on that hill!  What wounded him?"

"Who knows what a White boy finds inside?" said Ta-Kumsaw.

Then he turned to face the Mound again, as if he had felt a new
summoning.  "Yes," he said, then walked quickly toward the Mound.

Taleswapper followed, saying nothing about the incongruity-TaKumsaw
vowing to make war against Whites until all were dead or gone from this
land, and yet hurrying back to Eight-Face Mound to save a White boy.

They stood together at the place where Alvin climbed.

"Can you see the place?" asked Taleswapper.

"There is no path," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"But you saw it yesterday," said Taleswapper.

"Yesterday there was a path."

"Then some other way," said Taleswapper.  "Your own way onto the Mound."

"Another way would not take me to the same place."

"Come now, Ta-Kumsaw, the Mound is big, but not so big you can't find
someone up there in an hour of looking."

Ta-Kumsaw gazed disdainfully at Taleswapper.

Abashed, Taleswapper spoke less confidently.  "So you have to take the
same path to reach the same place?"

"How do I know?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.  "I never heard of one going up the
Mound, and another following by the same path."

"Don't you ever go here in twos or threes?"

"This is the place where the land speaks to all creatures who live here.
The speech of the land is grass and trees; the adornment is beasts and
birds.  Taleswapper noted that when he wished tog Ta-Kumsaw could speak
the English language like any White man.  NO: like a well educated White
man.  Adornment.  Where in the Mo country could he learn a word like
that?  "So we can't get in?"

Ta-Kumsaw's face showed no expression.

"Well, I Say we go up anyway.  We know the road he took-letgs take it,
whether we can see it or not."

Ta-Kumsaw said nothing.

"e you just going to stand here, then, and let him die up there?"

In answer, Ta-Kumsaw took a single step that brought him face to
face-no, breast to breast-with Taleswapper.  Ta-Kumsaw gripped his hand,
threw his other arm around TaleswaPper, held him close.

Their legs were tangled; Taleswapper for a moment imagined how they must
look, if there had been anyone to see them-whether Someone would know
which leg belonged to which man, they were so close together.  He felt
the Red man's heart beating, its rhythm more commanding within
Taleswapper's body than the unsensed beat of his own hot pulse.  "We are
not two men, whispered Ta-Kumsaw.  ,Not Red and White men here, with
blood between us.  We are one man with two souls, a Red soul and a White
soul, one man."

"All right," said Taleswapper.  "Let it be as you say.'

Still holding Taleswapper tightly, Ta-Kumsaw turned within the embrace;
their heads pressed against each other, their ears so closejoined
Taleswapper could hear nothing but Ta-Kumsaw's Pulse like the Pounding
of ocean waves inside his ear.  But now, their bodies so tightly joined
that they seemed to have a single heartbeat, T wap

ales

Per could see a clear path leading up the face of the Mound.

"Do you- began Ta-Kumsaw.

"I see it," said Taleswapper.

"Stay this close to me," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Now we are like Alvin I Red
soul and a White soul in a single body."

It was awkward, even ridiculous, to attempt to climb the Mound this way.
Yet when their movement up the path jostled them apart, even the tiniest
fraction, the path seemed to grow more difficult, hidden behind an
errant growth of some vine, some bush, some dangling limb.

SO Taleswapper clung toTa-Kumsaw as tightly as the Red man clung to him,
and together they made their difficult way up the hill.

At the top Taleswapper was astonished to see that instead of a single
Mound, they were at the crest of a ring of eight separate Mounds, with
an octagonal valley between them.  More important, Ta-Kumsaw was also
surprised.  He seemed uncertain; his grip on Taleswapper was not as
tight; he was no longer in control.

"Where does a White man go in this place?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"Down, of course," said Taleswapper.  "When a White man sees a valley,
he goes down into it, to find what's there."

"Is this how it always is for you?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.  "Not knowing where
you are, where anything is?"

Only then did Taleswapper realize that Ta-Kumsaw lacked his land-sense
here.  He was as blind as a White man in this place.

"Let's go down," said Taleswapper.  "And look-we don't have to cling so
tightly now.  It's a grassy hill, and we don't need a path."

They crossed a stream and found him in a meadow, with a mist low on the
ground around them.  Alvin was not injured, but he lay trembling-as if
fevered, though his brow was cool-and his breathing was shallow and
quick.  AsTa-Kumsaw had said: dying.

Taleswapper touched him, caressed him, then shook him, trying to wake
the boy.  Alvin showed no sign that he was aware of them.

TaKumsaw was no help.  He sat beside the boy, holding his hand, whining
so softly that Taleswapper doubted he knew he was making a sound.

But Taleswapper was not one to give in to despair, if in fact that was
what Ta-Kumsaw was feeling.  He looked around.  Nearby was a tree,
looking like spring, its leaves so yellow-green that in the light of
dawn they might have been made on thin-hammered gold.  Hanging from the
tree was a light-colored fruit.  No, a white fruit.  And suddenly, as
soon as he saw it, Taleswapper smelled it, pungent and sweet, so that he
could almost taste it.

He acted, not thinking what he would do, but doing it.  He walked to the
tree, plucked the fruit, carried it back to Alvin where he lay on the
ground, a child so small.  Taleswapper passed it under Alvin's nose, so
the odor of it might be like smelling salts, and revive him.

Alvin's breathing suddenly became great deep gasps.  His eyes opened,
his lips parted, and from gritted teeth came a whine almost exactly like
Ta-Kumsaw's keening; almost exactly like a kicked dog.

"Take a bite," said Taleswapper.

Ta-Kumsaw reached out, snatched Alvin's lower jaw in one hand and upper
jaw in the other, his fingers interlaced at Alvin's teeth, and with
great effort Prised Alvin's jaws apart.  Taleswapper thrust the fruit
between Alvin's teeth; Ta-Kumsaw forced the jaws closed again.

The fruit broke open, spilling clear fluid into Alvin's mouth and
dribbling down his cheek into the grass.  Slowly, with great effort,
Alvin began to chew.  Tears flowed from his eyes.  He swallowed.

Suddenly he reached out his hands, caught Taleswapper by the neck and
TaKumsaw by the hair, and pulled himself up to a sitting position.

Clinging to them both, drawing their faces so close to his that they all
breathed each other's breath, Alvin wept until their faces all were wet,
and because Ta-Kumsaw and Taleswapper were also weeping, none could be
sure whose tears cast a glaze across the skin of each man's face.

Alvin said little, but enough.  He told them all that happened at
Tippy-Canoe Creek that day, of blood in the river, a thousand survivors
crossing on the water made smooth and hard; blood on White men's hands,
and on one man's hands in particular.

"Not enough," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Taleswapper offered no argument.  It was not for a White man to tell
Ta-Kumsaw that the killers of his people had received a punishment
exactly proportioned to their sin.  Besides, Taleswapper wasn't sure he
believed it himself.

Alvin told them how he had spent the evening and the night before,
restoring Measure from the edge of death; and how he spent the morning,
taking away the immeasurable agony as nine thousand innocent deaths
shouted in the Prophet's mind-nine thousand times that one black shout
that years before had maddened him.  Which was harder-healing Measure or
healing Lolla-Wossiky?  ,it was like you said," Alvin whispered to
Taleswapper.  "I just can't build that brick wall faster than it breaks
down.  Then, exhausted but at peace now, Alvin slept.

Taleswapper and Ta-Kumsaw faced each other, Alvin curled between them,
his breathing soft and slow.

"I know his wound now," Ta-Kumsaw said.  "His grief is for his own
people, with their bloody hands."

"His grief was for the dead and the living too," said Taleswapper.

"If I know Alvin, his deepest wound was thinking that he failed, that if
he'd just tried harder, he might have got Measure there in time to stop
it before the first shot was fired."

"White men grieve for White men," Ta-Kumsaw said.

"Lie to yourself if you like," said Taleswapper, "but lies don't fool
me.  "But Red men don't grieve at all," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Red men will
put White blood into the ground for the blood spilled today."

"I thought you served the land," said Taleswapper.  "Don't you realize
what happened today?  Don't you remember where we are?

You've seen a part of Eight-Face Mound you never knew existed, and why?
Because the land let us into this place together, because-" Ta-Kumsaw
held up one hand.  "To save this boy."

"Because Red and White can share this land if we-" Ta-Kumsaw reached out
his hand and touched his fingers to Taleswapper's lips.

"I'm not a farmer who wants to hear stories of faraway places,"
Ta-Kumsaw said.  "Go tell your tales to someone who wants to hear them."

Taleswapper slapped Ta-Kumsaw's hand away.  He had meant merely to push
the Red man's arm, but instead he struck with too much force, throwing
Ta-Kumsaw off balance.  Ta-Kumsaw immediately leapt to his feet;
Taleswapper did the same.

"Here is where it starts!" shouted Ta-Kumsaw.

Between them, at their feet, Alvin stirred.

"A Red man angered you, and you struck him, just like a White man, no
patience-"

"You told me to be silent, you said my tales were-"

"Words, that's what I gave you, words and a soft touch, and you answered
me with a blow." Ta-Kumsaw smiled.  It was a terrifying smile, like a
tiger's teeth out of the darkness of the jungle, his eyes glowing, his
skin bright as flame.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"White man never means anything, just couldn't help himself, it was all
a mistake.  That's what you think, isn't it, White Liar!  Alvin's people
killed my people because of a mistake, because they thought two White
boys were dead.  For the sake of two White boys they lashed out, just
like you did, and they killed nine thousand of my people, babies and
mothers, old men and stripling boys, their cannon-"

"I heard what Alvin said."

"Don't you like my story?  Don't you want to hear it?  You are White,
Taleswapper.  You are like all White men, quick to ask forgiveness, slow
to give it; always expecting patience, but flaring up like a spark when
the wind rises-you burn down a forest because you tripped on a root!"
Ta-Kumsaw turned and began to walk quickly back the way they came.

"How can you leave without me!" cried Taleswapper after him.

"We have to leave here together!"

Ta-Kumsaw stopped, turned around, tipped back his head, and laughed
without mirth.  "I don't need a path to get down, White Liar!"

Then he was off again, running.

Alvin was awake, of course.

"I'm sorry, Alvin," said Taleswapper.  "I didn't mean-" He touched you
like "No," said Alvin.  "Let me guess what he did.

this." Alvin touched Taleswapper's lips, just asTa-Kumsaw had.

"Yes- "That's what a ShawNee mama does to shut up a little boy who's
making too much noise.  But I'll bet if one Red man did that to
another-he was provoking you."

"I shouldn't have hit him."

"Then he would've done something else till you did."

Taleswapper had nothing to answer to that.  Seemed to him the boy was
probably right.  Certainly right.  The one thing Ta-Kumsaw could not
bear today was being a White man's companion in peace.

Alvin slept again.  Taleswapper explored, but found nothing strange.
Just stillness and peace.  He couldn't even tell now which tree it was
the fruit came from.  They all looked silvery green to him now, and no
matter how far he walked in any direction, he ended up no farther from
Alvin than a few minutes' walk.  A strange place, not a place a man
could map in his mind, not a place that a man could master.

Here the land gives you what it wants to give, and no more.

It was near sunset when Alvin roused again, and Taleswapper helped him
to his feet.

"I'm walking like a newborn colt," said Alvin.  "I feel so weak."

"You only did half the labors of Hercules in the last twenty-four
hours," said Taleswapper.

"Her what?"

"Hercules.  A Greek."

"I got to find Ta-Kumsaw," said Alvin.  "I shouldn't have let him go,
but I was so tired."

"You're White, too," said Taleswapper.  "Think he'll want you with him?"

"Tenskwa-Tawa prophesied," said Alvin.  "As long as I'm with him,
Ta-Kumsaw won't die."

Taleswapper supported Alvin as they walked to the one place that let
them approach; they climbed the gentle grassy rise between Mounds and
crested the hill.  They stopped and looked down.  Taleswapper saw no
path-just thorns, vines, bushes, brambles.  "I can't get down through
that."

Alvin looked up at him, puzzled.  "There's a path as plain as day."

"For you, maybe," said Taleswapper.  "Not for me."

"You got in here," said Alvin.

"With Ta-Kumsaw," said Taleswapper.

"He got out."

"I'm no Red man."

"I'll lead."

Alvin started out with a few bold steps, as easy as if he was on a
Surfday jaunt on the commons.  But to Taleswapper it looked like the
briars opened wide for him and closed up tight right after.  "Alvin!"

he called.  "Stay with me!"

Alvin came and took him by the hand.  "Follow tight behind," he said.

Taleswapper tried, but still the brambles snapped back and tore at his
face, cut him sore.  With Alvin going before, Taleswapper could make his
way, but he felt like he was being flayed from behind.  Even deerskin
was no match for thorns like daggers, limbs that snapped back at him
like a ho'sun's lash.  He could feel blood running down his arms, his
back, his legs.  "I can't go any more, Alvin!" said Taleswapper.

"I see him," said Alvin.

"Who?"

"Ta-Kumsaw.  Wait here."

He let go of Taleswapper's hand; he was gone for a moment, and
Taleswapper was alone with the brambles.  He tried not to move, but even
his breathing seemed to provoke more stings and stabs.

Alvin was back.  He took Taleswapper by the hand.  "Follow me tight. One
more step."

Taleswapper steeled himself and took the step.

"Down," said Alvin.

Taleswapper obeyed Alvin's tugging and knelt, though he feared that he'd
never be able to rise again through the briars that closed over his
head.

Then Alvin led his hand until it touched another hand, and suddenly the
brambles cleared a little, and Taleswapper could see TaKumsaw lying
there, blood seeping from hundreds of wounds on his nearly naked body.
"He got this far alone," said Alvin.

Ta-Kumsaw opened his eyes, rage burning.  "Leave me here," he whispered.

In answer, Taleswapper cradled Ta-Kumsaw's head in his other arm.

As more of their bodies touched, the briars seemed to sag and fall away;
now Taleswapper could see a kind of path where he hadn't seen one
before.

"No," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"We can't get down from here without each other's help," said
Taleswapper.  "Like it or not, if you're going to get your vengeance
against the White man, you need a White man's help."

"Then leave me here," whispered Ta-Kumsaw.  "Save your people by leaving
me to die."

"I can't get down without you," said Taleswapper.

"Good," said Ta-Kumsaw.

Taleswapper noticed that Ta-Kumsaw's wounds looked much fewer.

And those that were left were scabbed over, nearly healed.

Then he realized that his own injuries didn't hurt anymore.  He looked
around.  Alvin sat nearby, leaning against a tree trunk, his eyes
closed, looking like somebody just flogged him, he was so spent and
dreary.

"Look what we cost him, healing us," said Taleswapper, Ta-Kumsaw's face
showed his surprise, for once; surprise, then anger.  "I didn't ask you
to heal me!" he cried.  He tore himself out of Taleswapper's grasp and
tried to reach toward Alvin.  But suddenly there were brambles twining
around his arm, and Ta-Kumsaw cried out, not in pain, but in fury.  "I
won't be forced!" he cried.

"Why should you be the only man who isn't?" said Taleswapper.

"I'll do what I set out to do, and nothing else, whatever the land say!"

"The words of the blacksmith in his forge," said Taleswapper.

"The farmer cutting down the trees, he says that."

"Don't you dare compare me to a White man!"

But the brambles bound him tight, till Taleswapper again made his
painful way toTa-Kumsaw, and embraced him.  Again Taleswapper felt his
own wounds heal, saw Ta-Kumsaw's vanish as quickly as the vines
themselves had let go and dropped away.  Alvin was looking at them with
such pleading, as if to say, How much more strength will you steal from
me, before you do what you know you have to do?

With a  anguished cry, Ta-Kumsaw turned and embraced Taleswapper as
fully as before.  Together they made their way down a wide path to the
bottom of the Mound.  Alvin stumbled after them.

They slept that night where they had the night before, but it was a
troubled sleep.  In the morning, Taleswapper wordlessly packed up his
few goods, including the book whose letters made no sense.  Then he
kissed Alvin on the head and walked away.  He said nought to TaKumsaw,
and Ta-Kumsaw said no more to him.  They both knew what the land had
said, and they both knew that for the first time in his life, Ta-Kumsaw
was going against what was good for the land and satisfying a different
need.  Taleswapper didn't even try to argue against him anymore.  He
knew that Ta-Kumsaw would follow his path no matter what, no matter if
it left him pierced with a thousand bleeding wounds.  He only hoped that
Alvin had the strength to stay with him all the way, and keep him alive
when all hope was gone.

About noon, after walking almost due west all morning, Taleswapper
stopped and pulled his book out of his pack.  To his relief, he could
read the words again.  He unsealed the back two-thirds of the book, the
pages where he did his own writing, and spent the rest of the afternoon
writing all that had happened to him, all that Alvin had told him, all
that he feared for the future.  He also wrote the words of the poem that
had come to him the morning before, the verses that came from his mouth
but Alvin's vision.  The poem was still -Ight and true, but even as he
read the words in his book, the power of them faded.  It was the closest
he had ever come to being a prophet himself; but now the gift had left
him.  It was never his gift at all, anyway.  Just as he and Ta-Kumsaw
had walked on the meadow without seeing anything special, never guessing
that for Alvin it had been a map of the whole continent, so now
Taleswapper had the words written down in his book and had no notion
anymore of the power behind them.

Taleswapper couldn't travel like a Red man, through the night, sleeping
on his feet.  So it took him more than a few days to get all the way
west to the town of Vigor Church, where he knew there'd be a lot of
folks with a long and bitter tale to tell him.  If ever a folk needed
such a man as Taleswapper to hear their tale, it was them.  Yet if ever
there was a story that Taleswapper was loath to listen to, it was
theirs.  Still, he didn't shy from calling on them.  He could bear it.

There'd be plenty more dark tales to tell before Ta-Kumsaw was through;
might as well get started now, so as not to fall behind.

La Fayette

Gilbert de La Fayette sat at his vast table, looking into the grain of
the wood.  Several letters lay before him.  One was a letter from de
Maurepas to King Charles.  Obviously, Freddie had been won over by
Napoleon.  The letter was full of praise for the little general and his
brilliant strategy.

So soon we are going to win the decisive victory, Your Majesty, and
glorify your name.  General Bonaparte refuses to be bound by European
military tradition.  He is training our troops to fight like Reds, even
as he lures the so-called Americans into fighting in the open field,
like Europeans.  As Andrew Jackson gathers his American army, we also
gather an army of men who have better claim to the name American.
Ta-Kumsaw's ten thousand will stand with us as we destroy the ten
thousand of Old Hickory.  Ta-Kumsaw will thus avenge the blood of the
slaughter at Tippy-Canoe, while we destroy the American army and
subjugate the land from the Ohio to Huron Lake.

In all this, we loyally give the glory to Your Majesty, for it was your
insight in sending General Bonaparte here that has made this great
conquest possible.  And if you now send us two thousand more Frenchmen,
to stiffen our line and provoke the Americans into further rashness,
your act will be seen as the key intervention in our battle.

It was an outrageous letter for a mere Comte-and one out of favor -to
send to his King.  Yet Gilbert knew how the letter would be received.
For King Charles was also under Napoleon's spell, and he would read
praise of the little Corsican with agreement, with joy.

If only Napoleon were only a vain posturer with a gift for seducing the
loyalty of his betters.  Then La Fayette could watch his inevitable
destruction without soiling his own hands.  Napoleon and de Maurepas
would lead the French army to disaster, such a disaster as might well
bring down a government, and lead to a curbing of the King's authority,
even an expulsion of the monarchy, as the English so wisely did a
century and a half before.

But Napoleon was exactly what he seduced Freddie and Charlie into
thinking he was: a brilliant general.  Gilbert knew that Napoleon's plan
would succeed.  The Americans would march northward, convinced that they
faced only Reds.  At the last moment, they would find themselves in
combat with the French army, disciplined, wellarmed, and fanatically
loyal to Napoleon.  The Americans would be forced to array themselves
like a European army.  Under their attack, the French would slowly,
carefully retreat.  When American discipline collapsed in the pursuit,
then the Reds would attack in devastating numbers, completely
surrounding the Americans.  Not one American would escape alive-and
almost no French lives would be lost.

It was audacious.  It was dangerous.  It involved exposing French troops
to serious risk of destruction, as they would be vastly outnumbered by
the Americans.  It required implicit trust in the Reds.

But Gilbert knew that Napoleon's trust in Ta-Kumsaw was justified.

Ta-Kumsaw would have his revenge.  De Maurepas would have his escape
from Detroit.  Even La Fayette could probably claim enough credit from
such a victory to come home and live in comfort and dignity on his
ancestral lands.  Above all, Napoleon would become the most loved and
trusted figure in the military.  King Charles would surely grant him a
title and lands, and send him out a-conquering in Europe, making King
Charles ever richer and more powerful and the people ever more willing
to endure his tyranny.

So Gilbert carefully tore de Maurepas's letter into tiny fragments.

The second letter was from Napoleon himself to Gilbert.  It was candid,
even brutal, in its assessment of the situation.  Napoleon had come to
realize that while Gilbert de La Fayette was immune to his intoxicating
charm, he was a sincere admirer and, indeed, a friend.  I am your
friend, Napoleon.  Yet I am more a friend of France than of any man. And
the path I have in mind for you is far greater than being the mere toady
of a stupid King.

Gilbert reread the key paragraph of Napoleon's letter.

De Maurepas merely echoes what I say, which is comfortable but tedious.
I shudder to think what would happen if he were ever in command.  His
idea of alliance with the Reds is to put them in uniform and stand them
in rows like ninepins.  What foohshnessl How can King Charles consider
himself anything but a halfwit, forcing me to serve under such an idiot
as Freddie?  But to Charles, Freddie no doubt seems like the soul of
witafter all, he does know how to appreciate the ballet.  In Spain I won
a victory for Charles that he did not deserve, and yet he is so
spineless that he lets his jealous courtiers maneuver me to Canada,
where my allies are savages and my officers are fools.

Charlie doesn't deserve the victory I'll bring him.  But then, Gilbert
my friend, the royal blood has grown thin and weak in the years since
Louis Fourteen.  I'd urge you to burn this letter, except that Charlie
loves me so well that I think he could read it word for word and not
take offense!  And if he did take offense, how would he dare punish me?

What would his stature be in Europe, if I hadn't helped old Wooden-head
to a case of dysentery so I could win the war in Spain, instead of
losing it, as would surely have happened without me?

Napoleon's vanity was insufferable, but primarily because it was so
fully justified.  Every word in this letter was true, if rash; but
Gilbert had carefully cultivated this candor in Napoleon.  Napoleon had
obviously longed for someone to admire him sincerely, without Napoleon
diddling with his affections.  He had found such a one-truly he had -in
Gilbert, the only real friend Napoleon would ever have.  And yet.

And yet.

Gilbert carefully folded Napoleon's letter and enclosed it in his own, a
simple note that said: Your Majesty, please do not be harsh with this
gifted young man.  He has the arrogance of youth; there is no treason in
his heart, I know it.  Nevertheless, I will be guided by you, as always,
for you will always know the proper balance between justice and mercy.
Your humble servant, Gilbert.

King Charles would be livid, of course.  Even if Napoleon was right, and
Charlie was inclined to be indulgent, the courtiers would never let such
an opportunity pass.  There would be such a howl for Napoleon's head
that even King Charles could not resist cashiering the boy.

Another letter, the most painful one, was again in Gilbert's own hand,
this time addressed to Frederic, Comte de Maurepas.  Gilbert had written
it long ago, almost as soon as Napoleon arrived in Canada.

Soon it would be time to send it.

On the eve of such momentous events, my dear Freddie, I think you should
wear this amulet.  It was given me by a holy man to fend the lies and
deceptions of Satan.  Wear it at all times, my friend, for I think your
need for it is greater far than mine.

Freddie need not know that the "holy man" was Robespierre-de Maurepas
would certainly never wear it then.  Gilbert drew the amulet from the
bosom of his shirt, where it dangled on a golden chain.

What will de Maurepas do when Napoleon has no power over him?

Why, he will act his true self again, that is what he will do.

Gilbert had sat thus for half an hour, knowing that the time of decision
had arrived.  The amulet would not be sent yetnly at the cusp of events
would Napoleon suddenly lose his influence over Freddie.  But the letter
to the King must be sent now, if there was to be time for it to reach
Versailles, and the inevitable response to return to Canada before the
springtime battle with the Americans.

Am I a traitor, to work for the defeat of my King and country?

No, I am not, most certainly I am not.  For if I thought it would do my
beloved France even an ounce of good, I would help Napoleon win his
victory over the Americans, even if it meant crippling the cause of
liberty in this new land.  For though I am a Feuillant, a democrat, even
a Jacobin in my darkest heart, and even though my love for America is
greater than that of any man save perhaps Franklin or Washington, who
are dead, or Jefferson among the livingespite all that, I am a Frenchman
first, and what care I for liberty in any corner of God's world, if
there is none in France?

No, I do this because a terrible, humiliating defeat in Canada is
exactly what France needs, especially if it can be seen that the defeat
is caused by King Charles's direct intervention.  Such a direct
intervention as removing popular and brilliant Bonaparte from command on
the eve of battle, and replacing him with an ass like de Maurepas, all
for the sake of Charlie's own vanity.

For there was one last letter, this one in code, seemingly innocuous in
its babbling about hunting and the tedium of life in Niagara.  But
hidden within it was the entire text of both Napoleon's and Frederic's
letters, to be published to withering effect as soon as the news of
French defeat reached Paris.  Almost as quickly as Napoleon's original
letter reached the King, Robespierre would have this ciphered letter in
his hands.

But what of my oath to the king?  What sort of plotting is this?

I was meant to be a general, to lead armies in battle; or a Governor, to
move the machinery of state for the good of the people. Instead I am
reduced to plotting, backstabbing, deception, betrayal.  I am a Brutus,
willing to betray all for the sake of a loyalty to the people.

And yet-I pray that history will be kind to me, and let it be known that
but for me King Charles would have called himself Charlemagne Second and
used Napoleon to subjugate Europe in a new French Empire.

Instead, with God's help, because of me France will set an example of
peacefulness and liberty to all the world.

He lit his wax candle, let it drip to fasten closed the letter to the
King and the letter to his trusted neighbor, and then pressed his seal
into both.  He called in his aide, who put them in the mail pouch, then
left to carry them to the ship-the last ship that was sure to make it
down the river and on to France before winter.

Only the letter to de Maurepas remained, that and the amulet.

How I regret having you, e sat to t ainu .  I only I, too, could have
been deceived by Napoleon, and rejoiced as he made his inevitable way
into history.  Instead I am thwarting him, for how can a general, be he
as brilliant as Caesar, possibly thrive in the democracy Robespierre and
I will create in France?

All seeds are planted, all traps are set.

For another hour Gilbert de La Fayette sat trembling in his chair.

Then he arose, dressed in his finest clothing, and spent the evening
watching a wretched farce by a first-rate company, the finest that poor
Niagara could get from Mother France.  At the end he stood and
applauded, which, because he was Governor, guaranteed the company
financial success in Canada; applauded long and vigorously, as the rest
of the audience was forced to keep applauding with him; clapped his
hands until his arms were sore, until the amulet was slick with sweat on
his chest, until he felt the heat of his exertion burning through his
shoulders and back, until he could clap no more.

Becca LOOM

Winter'd been going on half Alvin's life, it seemed like.  Used to be he
liked snowy times, peeking out his window through the craze of frost,
looking at the sun dazzling off the smooth unbroken sea of snow.

But then, in those days he could always get inside where it was warm,
eat Ma's cooking, sleep in a soft bed.  Not that he was suffering so
much now; what with learning Red ways for doing things, Alvin wasn't bad
Off.

It had just been going on for too many months.  Almost a year since that
spring morning when Alvin set out with Measure for the trip to Hatrack
River.  That had seemed such a long journey then; now, to Alvin, it was
no more than a day's jaunt by comparison with the traveling he had done.
They been south so far the Reds spoke Spanish more than English when
they talked White man talk.  They been west to the foggy bottom lands
near the Mizzipy.  They talked to Cree-El, Chok-Taw, the "uncivilized"
Cherriky folk of the bayou country.

And north to the highest reaches of the Mizzipy where the lakes were so
many and all hooked on that you could go everywhere by canoe.

It went the same with every village they visited.  "We know about you,
Ta-Kumsaw, you come to talk war.  We don't want war.  But-if the White
man comes here, we fight."

And then Ta-Kumsaw explaining that by the time the White man comes to
their village, it's too late, they'll be alone, and the Whites will be
like a hailstorm, pounding them into the dirt.  "We must make ourselves
into one army.  We still can be stronger than they are if we do."

It was never enough.  A few young men would nod, would wish to say yes,
but the old men, they didn't want war, they didn't want glory, they
wanted peace and quiet, and the White man was still far away, still a
rumor.

Then Ta-Kumsaw would turn to Alvin, and say, "Tell them what happened at
Tippy-Canoe."

By the third telling, Alvin knew what would happen when he told the tale
the tenth time, the hundredth time, every time.  Knew it as soon as the
Reds seated around the fire turned to look at him, with distaste because
he was White, with interest because he was the White boy who traveled
with Ta-Kumsaw.  No matter how simple he made the tale, no matter how he
included the fact that the Whites of Wobbish Territory thought that
Ta-Kumsaw had kidnapped and tortured him and Measure, the Reds still
listened to it with grief and grim fury.  And at the end, the old men
would be gripping handfuls of soil in their hands, tearing at the ground
as if to turn loose some terrible beast inside the earth; and the young
men would be drawing their sharp-edged knives gently across their own
thighs, drawing faint lines of blood, teaching their knives to be
thirsty, teaching their own bodies to seek out pain and love it.

"When the snow is gone from the banks of the Ohio," said TaKumsaw.

"We will be there," said the young men, and the old men nodded their
consent.  The same in every village, every tribe.  Oh, sometimes a few
spoke of the Prophet and urged peace; they were scorned as "old women";
though as far as Alvin could see, the old women seemed most savage of
all in their hate.

Yet Alvin never complained that Ta-Kumsaw was using him to heat up anger
against his own race.  After all, the story Alvin had to tell was true,
wasn't it?  He couldn't deny to tell it, not to anybody, not for any
reason, no more than his family could deny to speak under the Prophet's
curse.  Not that blood would appear on Alvin's hands if he refused to
tell.  He just felt like the same burden was on him like it was on all
the Whites who beheld the massacre at TippyCanoe.  The story of
Tippy-Canoe was true, and if every Red who heard that tale became filled
with hate and wanted vengeance, wanted to kill every White man who
didn't sail back to Europe, why, would that be a reason for Alvin to try
to keep them from knowing?  Or wasn't that their natural right, to know
the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or
evil, as they chose?

Not that Alvin could talk about natural rights and such out loud.

There wasn't much chance for conversation.  Sure enough, he was always
with Ta-Kumsaw, never more than an arm's length off.  But Ta-Kumsaw
almost never spoke to Alvin, and when he did it was things like "Catch a
fish" or "Come with me now." Ta-Kumsaw made it plain that he had no
friendship for Alvin now, and in fact he didn't much want a White along
with him.  Ta-Kumsaw walked fast, in his Red man's way, and never looked
back to see if Alvin was with him or not.  The only time he ever seemed
to care that Alvin was there was when he turned to him and said, "Tell
what happened at TippyCanoe."

One time, after they left a village so bet up against Whites they were
looking with interest at Alvin's own scalp, Alvin got to feeling defiant
and he said, "Why don't you have me tell them about how you and I and
Taleswapper all got into Eight-Face Mound?" TaKumsaw's only answer was
to walk so fast that Alvin had to run all day just keeping up.

Traveling with Ta-Kumsaw was like traveling alone, when it came to
company.  Alvin couldn't remember ever being so lonely in his life.

So why don't I leave, he asked himself.  Why do I keep going with him?
It ain't like it's fun, and I'm helping him start a war against my own
folks, and it's getting colder all the time, like as if the sun gave up
shining and the world was supposed to be grey bare trees and blinding
snow from one end to the other, and he don't even want me here.

Why did Alvin go on?  It was partly Tenskwa-Tawa's prophecy that
Ta-Kumsaw never would die if Alvin stuck close by.  Alvin might not like
Ta-Kumsaw's company, but Alvin knew he was a great and good man, and if
Alvin could somehow help keep him alive, then it was his duty to give it
a try as best he could.

But it was also more than that, more than the duty he felt to the
Prophet, to care for his brother; more than the need he felt to act out
the terrible punishment of his family by telling the tale of TippyCanoe
all over the Red man's country.  Alvin couldn't exactly find it in words
to tell himself inside his head as he ran along through the Woods, lost
in a halfway dream, the green of the forest guiding his footsteps and
filling his head with the music of the earth.  No, that wasn't a word
time.  But it was a time of understanding without words, of having a
sense of rightness about what he was doing, a feeling that Alvin was
like the oil on the axle of a wagon wheel that was carrying great events
forward.  I might just get myself all used up, I might get burned away
by the heat of the wheel rubbing on the axle, but the world is changing,
and somehow I'm part of what's helping it go forward.

Ta-Kumsaw's building something, bringing together Red men to make
something out of them.

It was the first time Alvin understood that something could be built out
of people, that when Ta-Kumsaw talked them Reds into feeling with one
heart and acting with one mind, they became something bigger than just a
few people; and building something like that, it was against the
Unmaker, wasn't it?  Just like Alvin always used to make little baskets
by weaving grass.  The grass was nothing but grass by itself, but all
wove together it was something more than grass.

Ta-Kumsaw's making something new where there wasn't nothing, but the new
thing won't come to be without me.

That filled him with fear of helping make something he didn't
understand; but it also filled him with eagerness to see the future.

So he pressed on, pushed forward, wore himself down, talked to Reds who
started out suspicious and ended up filled with hate, and stared most of
every day at the back of Ta-Kumsaw, running ahead of him ever deeper
into the forest.  The green of the wood turned gold and red, then black
with the rains of autumn on the bare trees, and finally grey and white
and still.  And all his worry, all his discouragement, all his
confusion, all his grief for the terrible things he saw coming and the
terrible things he'd seen in the past-all turned into a weary distaste
for winter, an impatience for the season to change, for the snow to melt
and spring to come, and then summer.

Summer, when he could look back and think of all this as the past.

Summer, when he'd know pretty much how it all turned out, for good or
ill, and not have this sickening snow-white dread in the back of his
mind, masking all his other feelings the way snow masked the earth
beneath it.

Until one day Alvin noticed that the air was somewhat warm, and the snow
had slacked off the grass and dirt and was purely gone from the tree
limbs, and there was a flash of red where a certain bird was getting
itself ready to find him a wife and nestle in for egg season.

And on that very day, Ta-Kumsaw turned eastward, up over a ridge of
hills, and stood perched atop a rock looking down on a valley of White
men's farms in the northern part of the White man's state of Appalachee.

It was a sight Alvin had never seen before in his life.  Not like the
French city of Detroit, people all packed in together, nor like the
sparse settlements of the Wobbish country, with each farm carved out
like a gouge in the greenwood forest.  Here the trees were all
disciplined, lined up in rows to mark off one farmer's field from
another.

Only on the hills skirting the valley were the trees somewhat wild
again.  And as the ground softened today, there were farmers out h open
with their plows, just as gentle and shallow on cutting the dirt the
face of the earth as those Red warriors' flint knives against their
thighs, teaching the blade to thirst, teaching the earth to bear, so
that like the blood that seeped upward under the Red men's knives, the
wheat or maize or rye or oats would seep upward, make a thin film of
life across the skin of the earth, an open wound all summer until
harvest blades made another kind of cut.  Then the snow again, it would
form like a scab, to heal the earth until the next year's injury.

This whole valley was like that, broken like an old horse.

I shouldn't feel like this, thought Alvin.  I should be glad to see
White lands again.  There was curls of smoke from a hundred chimneys up
and down the valley.  There was folks there, children getting outside to
play after being penned up the whole of winter, men sweating into the
chilly air of early spring as they did their tasks, hardworking animals
raising a steam from their nostrils and off their hot, heaving flanks.
This was like home, wasn't it?  This was what Armor and Father and every
other White man wanted to turn the Wobbish country into, wasn't it? This
was civilization, one household butting up into the next one, all elbows
jostling, all the land parceled out till nobody had no doubt at all who
owned every inch of it, who had the right to use it and who was
trespassing and better move along.

But after this year of being with Reds practically every minute and
hardly seeing a White man except for Measure, for a while, and
Taleswapper for a day or two, why, Alvin didn't see that valley with
White eyes.  He saw it like a Red man, and so to Alvin it looked like
the end of the world.

"What're we doing here?" Alvin asked Ta-Kumsaw.

In answer, Ta-Kumsaw just walked right down from the mountain and on
into the White man's valley, just like he had a right.  Alvin couldn't
figure, but he followed tight.

To Alvin's surprise, as they traipsed right through a field halfplowed,
the farmer didn't so much as yell at them to mind the furrows, he just
looked up, squinted at them, and then waved.  "Howdy.

Ikel" he called.

Ike?

And Ta-Kumsaw raised his hand in greeting and walked on.

Alvin like to laughed out loud.  Ta-Kumsaw, being known to civilized
farmers in a place like this, known so well that a White man could tell
who he was at such a distance!  Ta-Kumsaw, the most ferocious hater of
Whites in all the woodland, being called by a White man's name?

But Alvin knew better than to ask for explanation.  He just followed
close behind till Ta-Kumsaw finally came to where he was going.

It looked to be a house like any other house, maybe a speck older.

Big, anyway, and added onto in a jumbly way.  Maybe that corner of the
house was the original cabin, with a stone foundation, and then they
added that wing onto it bigger than the log house, so the cabin no doubt
got turned into a kitchen, and then another wing across the front of the
cabin, only this time two stories high, with an attic, and then an
add-on in the back of the cabin, right across the roof of it, keeping
the gable shape and framing it with shaped timbers, which were
white-washed clean enough once, but now were peeling off the paint and
showing grey wood through.  The whole history of this valley in that
house-desperately just throwing up enough of a cabin to keep rain off
between battling the forest; then a measure of peace to add a room or
two for comfort; then some prosperity, and more children, and a need to
put a grand two-story face on things, and finally three generations in
that house, and building not for pride but just for space, just for
rooms to put folks into.

Such a house it was, a house that held the whole story of the White
man's victorious war against the land in its shape.

And up walks Ta-Kumsaw to a small and shabby-looking door in the back,
and he doesn't so much as knock, he just opens the door and goes inside.

Well, Alvin saw that, and for the first time he didn't know what to do.
By habit he wanted to follow Ta-Kumsaw right into the house, the way
he'd followed him into a hundred mud-daubed Red man's huts.

But by even older habit he knew you don't just walk right into a house
like this, with a proper door and all.  You go round to the front and
knock polite, and wait for folks to invite you in.

So Alvin stood at the back door, which Ta-Kumsaw of course didn't even
bother to close, watching the first flies of spring wander into the
hallway.  He could almost hear his mother yelling about people leaving
doors open so the flies would come in and drive everybody crazy all
night, buzzing when folks are trying to sleep.  And so Alvin, thinking
that way, did what Ma always had them do: he stepped inside and closed
the door behind him.

But he dared go no farther into the house than that back hall, with some
heavy coats on pegs and dirt-crusted boots in a jumble by the.

door.  It felt too strange to move.  He'd been hearing the greensong of
the forest for so many months that it was deafening, the silence when it
was near gone, near completely killed by the cacophony of the jammering
LIFE on a White man's farm in spring.

"Isaac," said a woman's voice.

One of the White noises stopped.  Only then did Alvin realize that it
had been an actual noise he was hearing with his ears, not the
lifenoises he heard with his Red senses.  He tried to remember what it
was.  A rhythm, and banging, regular rhythm like-like a loom.  It was a
loom he'd been hearing.  Ta-Kumsaw must've just walked hisself right
into the room where some woman was weaving.  Only he wasn't no stranger
here, she knew him by the same name as that farmer fellow out in the
fields.  Isaac.

"Isaac," she said again, whoever she was.

"Becca," said Ta-Kumsaw.

A simple name, no reason for Alvin's heart to start a-pounding.

But the way Ta-Kumsaw said it, the way he spoke-it was such a tone of
voice that was meant to make hearts pound.  And more: TaKumsaw spoke it,
not with the strange-twisted vowels of Red men talking English, but with
as true an accent as if he was from England.

Why, he sounded more like Reverend Thrower than Alvin would have thought
possible.

No, no, it wasn't Ta-Kumsaw at all, it was another man, a White man in
the same room with the White woman, that's all.  And Alvin walked softly
down the hall to find where the voices were, to see the White man whose
presence would explain all.

Instead he stood in an open door and looked into a room where TaKumsaw
stood holding a White woman by her shoulders, looking down into her
face, and her looking up into his.  Saying not a word, just looking at
each other.  Not a White man in the room.

"My people are gathering at the Ohio," said Ta-Kumsaw, in his strange
English-sounding voice.  , "I know," said the woman.  "It's already in
the fabric." Then she turned to look at Alvin in the doorway.  "And you
didn't come alone."

Alvin never saw eyes like hers before.  He was still too young to hanker
after women like he remembered Wastenot and Wantnot doing when they both
hit fourteen at a gallop.  So it wasn't any kind of
man-wishing-for-a-woman feeling that he had, looking at her eyes.  He
just looked into them like he sometimes looked into a fire, watching the
flames dance, not asking for them to make sense, just watching the sheer
randomness of it.  That was what her eyes were like, as if those eyes
had seen a hundred thousand things happen, and they were all still
swirling around inside those eyes, and no one had ever bothered or maybe
even known how to get those visions out and make sensible stories out of
them.

And Alvin feared mightily that she had some Power of witchery that she
used to turn Ta-Kumsaw into a White man.

"My name is Becca," said the woman.

"His name is Alvin," said Ta-Kumsaw; or rather, said Isaac, for it sure
didn't sound like Ta-Kumsaw anymore.  "He's a miller's son from the
Wobbish country."

"He's that thread I saw running through the fabric out of place."

She smiled at Alvin.  "Come here," she said.  "I want to see the
legendary Boy Renegado."

"Who's that?" asked Alvin.  "The Boy Rainy God-"

"Renegado.

There are stories all through Appalachee, don't you know that? About
Ta-Kumsaw, who appears one day in the OshKontsy country and the next day
in a village on the banks of the Yazoo, stirring up Reds to do massacre
and torture.  And always with him is a White boy who urges the Reds to
be ever more brutal, who teaches them the secret methods of torture that
used to be practiced by the Papist Inquisitions in Spain and Italy.
"That ain't so," said Alvin.

She smiled.  The flames of her eyes danced.

"They must hate me," said Alvin.  "I don't even know what a Inkyzitchum
is."

"Inquisition," said Isaac.

Alvin felt a sick dread in his heart.  If folks were telling such tales
about him, why, folks would regard him as a criminal, a monster,
practically.  "I'm only going along with-"

"I know what you're doing, and why," said Becca.  "Around here we all
know Isaac well enough to disbelieve such lies about him and you both."

But Alvin didn't care about "around here." What he cared about was back
home in Wobbish country.

"Don't worry yourself," said Becca.  "Nobody knows who this legendary
White boy is.  Certainly not one of the two Innocents that Ta-Kumsaw
chopped to bits in the forest.  Certainly not Alvin or Measure.  Which
one are you, by the way?"

"Alvin," said Isaac.

"Oh, yes," said Becca.  "You already told me that.  I have such a hard
time holding people's names in my head."

"Ta-Kumsaw didn't chop nobody up."

"As you might guess, Alvin, we didn't believe that story here, either."

"Oh." Alvin didn't know what to say, and since he'd been living like a
Red for so long, he did what Reds do when they have nothing to say,
something that a White man hardly ever thinks of doing.  He said nary a
thing at all.

"Bread and cheese?" asked Becca.

"You're too kind.  Thank you," said Isaac.

If that didn't beat all.  Ta-Kumsaw saying thank you like a fine
gentleman.  Not that he wasn't noble and fair-spoke among his kind.

But in White man's language he was always so cold, so unflowered in A
his talk.  Till now.  Witchery.

Becca rang a little bell.

"It's simple fare, but we live simply in this house.  And I especially
in this room.  Which is fitting-it's such a simple place."

Alvin looked around.  She was right.  It only just now occurred to him
that this room was the original log cabin, with its one remaining window
casting southern light into the room.  Around it the walls were all
still rough old wood; he just hadn't noticed, from all the cloth draped
here and there, hanging on hooks, piled up on furniture, rolled up in
bolts.  A strange kind of cloth, lots of color in it but the color
making no pattern or sense, just weaving this way, that way, changing
shades and colors, a broad streak of blue, a few narrow strands of
green, all twisting in and out of each other.

Somebody came into the room to answer Becca's bell, an older man from
the sound of his voice; she sent him for food, but Alvin didn't even
know what he looked like, he couldn't take his eyes off the cloth.

What was so much cloth for?  Why would somebody make it such a bright
and ugly unorganized set of colors?

And where did it end?

He walked over to where maybe a dozen bolts of cloth were standing in a
corner, leaning on each other, and he realized that each bolt grew out
of the one before.  Somebody'd taken the end of cloth from one bolt and
wrapped it around itself to start the next one, so the cloth spooled off
the end of one bolt, then leapt up and plunged right own into the center
of the next, one after the other, making a chain of fabric.  It wasn't a
bunch of different cloths, it was all one cloth, rolled up until it was
almost too heavy to move, and then the next bolt started right up, with
never a scissor touching the cloth.  Alvin began to wander around the
room, his fingers tracing the pattern of the cloth, following its path
up over hooks on the wall, down into folds stacked up on the floor.  He
followed, he followed, until finally, just as the old man returned with
the bread and cheese, he found the end of the cloth.  It was feeding out
the front of Becca's loom.

All that time, Ta-Kumsaw had been talking to Becca in his Isaac voice,
and she to him in her deep melodious way of speech, which had just the
slightest hint of foreignness to it, like some of the Dutch in the area
around Vigor Church, who'd been in America all their lives but still had
a trace of the old country in their talk.  Only now, with Alvin standing
by the loom and the food on a low table with three chairs around it,
only now did he pay attention to what they were saying, and that only
because he wanted so badly to ask Becca what all this cloth was for,
seeing as how she must have been weaving at it for more than a year, to
have it so long, without never once taking shears to it to make
something out of it.  It was what Ma always called a shameful waste, to
have something and make no use of it, like Dally Framer's pretty singing
voice, which she sang with all day at home but wouldn't ever join in
singing hymns at church.

"]Eat," said Ta-Kumsaw.  And when he spoke so bluntly to Alvin, his
voice lost that Enghshness; he was the real Ta-Kumsaw again.  It set
Alvin's mind to rest, knowing that there wasn't some witchery at work,
that Ta-Kumsaw just had two different ways of talking; but of course
that also set more questions into Alvin's mind, about how TaKumsaw ever
learned such talk.  Alvin never even heard so much as a rumor about
Ta-Kumsaw having White friends in Appalachee, and you'd think a tale
like that would be known.  Though it wasn't hard to guess why Ta-Kumsaw
wouldn't want it noised around much.  What would all those bet-up Reds
think if they saw Ta-Kumsaw here and now?  What would it do
toTa-Kumsaw's war?

And come to think of it, how could Ta-Kumsaw wage such a war, if he had
true White friends like the folk of this valley?  Surely the land was
dead here, at least as the Reds knew it.  How could TaKumsaw bear it? It
left such a hunger in Alvin that even though he packed bread and cheese
down his throat till his belly poked out, he still felt a gnawing inside
him, a need to get back to the woodland and feel the song of the land
inside himself.

The meal was filled with Becca's pleasant chatter about doings in the
valley, her saying names that meant nothing to Alvin, except any one of
them could have been the name of a body back in Vigor Church-there was
even folks named Miller, which was natural, seeing how a valley this
size no doubt had more than one miller's worth of grain to grind.

The old man came back to clear away.

"Did you come to see my cloth?" asked Becca.

Ta-Kumsaw nodded.  "That's half why I came."

Becca smiled, and led him to the loom.  She sat on her weaving stool and
gathered the newest cloth up into her lap.  She started about three
yards from the lip of the loom.  "Here," she said.  "The gathen'na of
your folk to Prophetstown."

Alvin saw how she passed her hand over a whole bunch of threads that
seemed to climb out of their proper warp and migrate across the cloth to
gather up near the edge.

"Reds from every tribe," she said.  "The strongest of your people."

Even though the fibers tended to be greenish, they were indeed heavier
than most threads, strong and taut.  Becca fed the cloth farther down
her lap.  The gathering grew stronger and clearer, and the threads
turned brighter green.  How could threads change color that way?  And
how with the machinery of the loom could the warp shift like that?

"And now the Whites that gathered against them," she said.

And sure enough, another group of threads, tighter to start with, but
gathering, knotting up a little.  To Alvin's eyes it looked like the
cloth was a ruin, the threads all tangled and bunched-who'd wear a shirt
made of such stuff as that?-and the colors made no sense, all jumbled
together without no effort to make a pattern or any kind of regular
order.

Ta-Kumsaw reached out his hand and pulled the cloth toward himself.
Pulled until he exposed a place were all those pure green threads just
went slack and then stopped, most of them.  The warp of the cloth was
spare and thin, then, maybe one thread for every ten there used to be,
like a worn-down raggedy patch in the elbow of an old shirt, so when you
bent your elbow maybe a dozen threads made lines across your skin one
direction, and no threads at all the other way.

If the green threads stood for Prophetstown, there couldn't be no
mistake what was going on here.  "Tippy-Canoe," Alvin murmured.

Now he knew the order of this cloth.

Becca bent over the cloth and tears dropped from her eyes straight down
on it.

Tearless, Ta-Kumsaw pulled the cloth again, steadily.  Alvin saw the
rest of the green threads, the few that remained from the massacre at
Tippy-Canoe, migrate to the edge of the cloth and stop.  The cloth was
narrower by that many threads.  Only now there was another gathering,
and the threads were not green.  They were mostly black.

"Black with hate," said Becca.  "You are gathering your people with
hate."

"Can you imagine conducting a war with love?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"That's a reason to refuse to make war at all," she said gently.

"Don't talk like a White woman," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"But she is one," said Alvin, who thought she made perfect sense.

They both looked at Alvin, Ta-Kumsaw impassively, Becca withamusement?
Pity?  Then they returned to the cloth.

Very quickly they came to where the cloth hung over the beam, then fed
out of the loom.  Along the way, the black threads of TaKumsaw's army
worked closer together, knotted, intertwined.  And other threads, some
blue, some yellow, some black, all gathered in another place, the fabric
bunching up something awful.  It was thicker, but it didn't seem to
Alvin that it was a speck stronger.

Weaker, if anything.  Less useful.  Less trustworthy.

"This cloth ain't going to be worth much, if this goes on," said Alvin.

Becca smiled grimly.  "Truer words were never spoken, lad."

"If this is about a year's worth of story," said Alvin, 66 you must have
two hundred years all gathered up here."

Becca cocked her head.  "More than that," she said.

"How do you find out all that's going on, to make it all go into the
cloth?"

"Oh, Alvin, there's some things folks just do, without knowing how," she
said.

"And if you change the threads around, can't you make things go
different?" Alvin had in mind a careful rearrangement, spreading the
threads out more even-like, and getting those black threads farther
apart from each other.

"It doesn't work like that," she said.  "I don't make things happen,
with what I do here.  Things that happen, they change me.

Don't fret about it, Alvin."

"But there wasn't even White folks in this part of America more than two
hundred years ago.  How can this cloth go farther back?"

She sighed.  "Isaac, why did you bring him to plague me with questions?"

Ta-Kumsaw smiled at her.

"Will you keep it secret "Lad, will you tell no one?" she asked.

O?

who I am and what I d "I promise."

"I weave, Alvin.  That's all.  My whole family, from before we even
remember, we've been weavers."

"That your name, then?  Becca Weaver?  My brother-in-law, Armor-of-God,
his pa's a Weaver, and-"

"Nobody calls us weavers," said Becca.  "If they had any name for us at
all, they'd call us-no."

She wouldn't tell him.

"No, Alvin, I can't put such a burden on you.  Because you'd want to
come.  You'd want to come and see-"

"See what?" asked Alvin.

"Like Isaac here.  I should never have told him, either."

"He kept the secret, though.  Never breathed a word."

"He didn't keep it secret from himself, though.  He came to see."

"See what?" Alvin asked again.

"See how long are the threads a-flowing up into my IOOM."

Only then'did Alvin notice the back end of the loom, where the warp
threads were gathered into place by a rack of fine steel wires.

bite.  Cotton?

The threads weren't colored at all.  They were raw w Surely not wool.
Linen, maybe.  With all the colors in the finished cloth, he hadn't
really noticed what it was made of.

"Where do the colors come from?" asked Alvin.

No one answered.

"Some of the threads go slack."

"Some of them end," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"Many of them end," said Becca.  "And many begin.  It's the pattern of
life."

"What do you see, Alvin?" asked Ta-Kumsaw.

"If these black threads are your folk," said Alvin, "then I'd say
there's a battle coming, and a lot are going to die.  Not like
TippyCanoe, though.  Not as bad."

"That's what I see, too," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"And these other colors all bunched up, what are they?  An army of White
folk?"

"Word is that a man named Andrew Jackson of the western Tenm.zy country
is gathering up an army.  They call him Old Hickory."

"I know the man," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "He doesn't stay in the saddle too
well."

"He's been doing with White folks what you've been doing with Red,
Isaac.  He's been going up and down the western country, rousting people
out and haranguing them about the Red Menace.  About you, Isaac.

For every Red soldier you've gathered, he's recruited two Whites. And he
figures you'll go north, to join with a French army.

He knows all your plans."

"He knows nothing," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Alvin, tell me, how many threads
of this White army end?"

"A lot.  More, maybe.  I don't know.  It's about even."

"Then it tells me nothing."

"It tells you that you'll have your battle," said Becca.  "It tells you
that there'll be more blood and suffering in the world, thanks to you."

"But it says nothing of victory," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"It never does."

Alvin wondered if you could just tie another thread onto the end of one
of the broken ones, and save somebody's life.  He looked for the spools
of thread from which the warp was formed, but he couldn't find them. The
threads hung down from the back beam of the loom, taut like there was a
heavy weight hanging on them, but Alvin couldn't see where the threads
came from.  They didn't touch the floor.  They didn't exactly stop,
either.  He looked this far, and there they were, hanging tight and
long; and he looked this much farther, and there weren't no threads,
nothing there at all.  The threads were just coming out of nowhere, and
there was no way the human eye could see or make sense of how they
started.

But Alvin, he could see with other eyes, inward eyes, the way he studied
into the tiny workings of the human body, into the cold inward currents
of stone.  And with that hidden vision he looked into a single thread
and traced its shape, following how the fibers wound around and through,
twisting and gripping each other to make the strength of the yarn.  This
time he could just keep following the thread.  Just keep on following
until finally, far beyond the place where the threads all disappeared to
natural eyes, the thread ended.

Whosever soul that thread bespoke, he had a good long life ahead of him,
before he died.

All these threads must end, when the person dies.  And somehow a new
thread must start up when a baby got born.  Another thread coming out of
nowhere.

"It never ends," said Becca.  "I'll grow old and die, Alvin, but the
cloth will go on."

"Do you know which thread is you?"

I 'No," she said.  "I don't want to know."

"I reckon I'd like to see.  I want to know how many years I got."

"Many," said Ta-Kumsaw.  "Or few.  All that matters is what you do with
however many years you have."

"It does too matter how long I live," said Alvin.  "Don't go saying it
don't, cause you don't believe that yourself."

Becca laughed.

"Miss Becca," said Alvin, "what do you do this for, if you don't make
things happen?"

She shrugged.  "It's a work.  Everybody has a work to do, and this is
mine."

"You could go out and weave things for folks to wear."

"To wear and then wear Out " she said.  "And no, Alvin, I can't go on
"You mean you stay indoors all the time?"

"I stay here, always," she said.  "In this room, with my loom."

"I begged you once to go with me," said Isaac.

:'And I begged you once to stay." She smiled up at him.

"I can't live forever where the land is dead."

"And I can't live a moment away from my cloth.  The way the land lives
in your mind, Isaac, that is how the lives of all the souls of America
live in mine.  But I love you.  Even now."

Alvin felt like he shouldn't be there.  It was like they forgot he was
there, even though he'd just been talking to them.  It finally dawned on
him that they'd probably rather be alone.  So he moved away, walked over
to the cloth again, and again began tracing its path, the opposite
direction this time, scanning quickly but carefully, up the walls,
through the bolts and piles, searching for the earliest end of the
cloth.

Couldn't find it.  In fact, he must have been looking the wrong
direction or got himself twisted up, because Pretty soon he found
himself on the same familiar path he had followed, the path that first
led him to the loom.  He reversed direction, and after a short time he
found himself again on the path to the loom.  He could no more search
backward to find the oldest end of the cloth than he could search
forward to find where the newest threads were coming from.

He turned again toTa-Kumsaw and Becca.  Whatever whispered conversation
they had carried on was over.  Ta-Kumsaw sat crosslegged on the floor in
front of her, his head bowed.  She was stroking his hair with gentle
hands.

"This cloth is older than the oldest part of this house," said Alvin.

Becca didn't answer.

"'His cloth's been going on forever."

"As long as men and women have known how to weave, this cloth has passed
through the loom."

"But not this loom.  This loom's new," said Alvin.

"We change looms from time to time.  We build the new one around the
old.  It's what the men of our kind do."

"This cloth is older than the oldest White settlements in America," said
Alvin.

"It was once a part of a larger cloth.  But one day, back in our old
country, we saw a large portion of the threads moving off the edge of
the cloth.  MY great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather built a
new loom.  We had the threads we needed.  They pulled away from the old
cloth; we continued it from there.  It's still connected up-that's what
You're seeing."

"But now it's here."

"It's here and there.  Don't try to understand it, Alvin.  I gave up
long ago.  But isn't it good to know that all of the threads of life are
being woven into one great cloth?"

"Who's weaving the cloth for the Red folk that went West with
Tenskwa-Tawa?" asked Alvin.  "Those threads went off the cloth."

"That's not your business," said Becca.  "We'll just say that another
loom was built, and carried west.  "But Ta-Kumsaw said no White folk
would ever cross the river to the west.  The Prophet said it, too."

Ta-Kumsaw turned slowly on the floor, without getting up.

"Alvin," he said, "You're only a boy."

"And I was only a girl," Becca reminded him, 11 when I first loved You."
She turned to Alvin.  "It's my daughter who carried the loom into the
west.  She could go because she's only half White." She again stroked
Ta-Kumsaw's hair.  "Isaac is my husband.  My daughter Wieza is his
daughter."

"Mana-Tawa," said Ta-Kumsaw.

"I thought for a time that Isaac would choose to stay here, to live with
us.  But then I watched as his thread moved away from us, even though
his body still was with us.  I knew he would go to be with his people. I
knew why he had come to us, alone from the forest.

There is a hunger deeper than the Red man's hunger for the song of the
living forest, deeper than a blacksmith's yearning for the hot wet iron,
deeper even than a doodlebug's longing for the hollow heart of the
earth.  That hunger brought Ta-Kumsaw to our house.  My mother was still
the weaver at the loom then.  I taught Ta-Kumsaw to read and write; he
rushed through my father's library, andrea every other book in the
valley, and we sent for more books from Philadelphia and he read those.
He chose his own name, then, for the man who wrote the Principia.  When
we came of age, he married me.  I had a baby.  He left.  When Wieza was
three, he came back, built a loom, and took her west over the mountain
to live with his people."

"And you let your own daughter go?"

"Just like one of my ancestors sat at her old loom and let her daughter
go, across the ocean to this land, her with a new loom and her watchful
father beside her, yes, I let her go." Becca smiled sadly at Alvin.  "We
all have our work, but there's no good work that doesn't have its cost.
By the time Isaac took her, I was already in this room.

Everything that happened has been good."

"You didn't even ask how your daughter was doing when he got here!

You still haven't asked."

"I didn't have to ask," said Becca.  "No harm comes to the keepers of
the loom."

"Well, if your daughter's gone, who's going to take your place?"

" Perhaps another husband will come here, by and by.  One who'll stay in
this house, and make another loom for me, and yet another for a daughter
not yet born."

"And what happens to you then?"

"So many questions, Alvin," said Ta-Kumsaw.  But his voice was soft and
tired and English-sounding; Alvin wasn't in awe of the TaKumsaw who read
White men's books, and so he paid no heed to the mild rebuke.

"What happens to you when your daughter takes your place?"

"I don't know, said Becca.  "But the story is that we go to the place
where the threads come from."

"What do you do there?"

"We spin."

Alvin tried to imagine Becca's mother, and her grandmother, and the
women before that, all in a line, he tried to imagine how many there'd
be, all of them working their spinning wheels, winding out threads from
the spindle, yarn all raw and white, which would just go somewhere, go
on and disappear somewhere until it broke.  Or maybe when it broke they
held the whole thing, a whole human life, in their hands, and then
tossed it upward until it was caught by a passing wind, and then dropped
down and got snagged up in somebody's loom.  A life afloat on the wind,
then caught and woven into the cloth of humanity; born at some arbitrary
time, then struggling to find its way into the fabric, weaving into the
strength of it.

And as he imagined this, he also imagined that he understood something
about that fabric.  About the way it grew stronger the more tightly
woven in each thread became.  The ones that skipped about over the top
of the cloth, dipping into the weft only now and then, they added little
to the strength, though much to the color, of the cloth.

While some whose color hardly showed at all, they were deeply wound
among the threads, holding all together.  There was a goodness in those
hidden binding threads.  Forever from then on, Alvin would see some
quiet man or woman, little noticed and hardly thought of by others, who
nevertheless went a-weaving through the life of village, town, or city,
binding up, holding on, and Alvin would silently salute such folk, and
do them homage in his heart, because he knew how their lives kept the
cloth strong, the weave tight.

He also remembered the many threads that ended at the point here
Ta-Kumsaw's battle was to take place.  It was as if Ta-Kumsaw had taken
shears to the cloth.

",Mn't there a way to heal things up?" asked Alvin.  "Ain't there a hope
of keeping this battle from ever happening, so those threads don't all
get broke?"

Becca shook her head.  "Even if Isaac refused to go, the battle would
take place without him.  No, the threads aren't broken by anything Isaac
did.  They broke the moment some Red man chose a course of action that
would surely end in his death in battle; you and Isaac weren't going
around spreading death, if that's what worries you.  No more than Old
Hickory's been killing people.  You were just going spreading choices.
They didn't have to believe in you.  They didn't have to choose to die."

"But they didn't know that's what they was choosing."

"They knew," said Becca.  "We always know.  We don't admit it to
ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment,
Alvin, we see all the life before us and we understand how we chose,
every day of our lives, the manner of our death."

"What if something just happens to fall on somebody's head and mashes
him?"

"He chose to be in a place where such things happen.  And he wasn't
looking up."

"I don't believe it," said Alvin.  "I think folks can always change
what's coming, and I think some things happen that ain't nobody ever
chose to happen."

Beeca smiled at him, reached out her arm.  "Come here, Alvin.  Let me
hold you close to me.  I love your simple faith, child.  I want to hold
on to that faith, even if I can't believe it."

So she held him for a time, and her arm around him felt so much like his
own mama's, strong and gentle, that he cried a little.  In fact he cried
a good deal more than he would ever have meant to cry, if he'd meant to
cry at all.  And he knew better than to ask to see his own thread, even
though he imagined his thread would be easy to find -the one thread born
in the White man's section of the cloth, but migrating over and becoming
green.  Surely becoming green, like the Prophet's people did.

One thing he was also sure of, so sure that he didn't even ask..

though heaven knows he wasn't shy about asking any questions popped into
his head: He was sure that Becca knew which threa, i Ta-Kumsaw's, and
knew as well that his and Ta-Kumsaw's it were all bound up with each
other, for a while at least.  As le, Alvin was with him, Ta-Kumsaw'd be
alive.  Alvin knew that the was two endings to the prophecy: the one in
which Alvin died fir, leaving Ta-Kumsaw by himself, in which case he'd
die too; or the oil e in which neither one of them died and their
threads went on until they disappeared.  There might've been a third way
it could come out: Alvin might just up and leave Ta-Kumsaw.  But then if
he did that, he wouldn't be Alvin anymore, so there wasn't no point in
considering that as a possibility, cause it wasn't one.

Alvin slept the night on a mat on the library floor, after reading a few
pages in a book by a man named Adam Smith.  Where Ta-Kufii saw slept,
Alvin didn't know or care to ask.  What a man does with his wife is no
affair for children, Alvin knew; but he wondered if the main reason
Ta-Kumsaw had come back here wasn't his wish to see the loom, but the
hungering that Becca spoke of.  The need to make another daughter to
care for Becca's loom.  It wasn't a bad idea, in Alvin's mind, to have
the cloth of White America in the hands of a Red man's daughter.

In the morning Ta-Kumsaw led him away, back into the forest.

They did not speak of Becca, or anything else; it was back to the old
way, with Ta-Kumsaw speaking only to get things done.  Alvin never heard
him speak in his Isaac voice again, so that Alvin began to wonder if he
really heard it.

On the north bank of the Ohio, near where the Wobbish empties into it,
the Red army gathered, more Reds than Alvin knew existed in the whole
world.  More people than Alvin had ever imagined together in the same
place at the same time.

Because such a company was bound to get hungry, the animals also came to
them, sensing their need and what they all was born for.

Did the forest know that all its hopes of withstanding White men's axes
depended on Ta-Kumsaw's victory?" No, Alvin decided, the forest was just
doing what it always didmaking shift to feed its own.

It was raining and the breeze was cool on the morning they set out from
the Ohio, bound northward.  But what was rain to Red men?  The messenger
had come from the French in Detroit.  It was time to join forces, and
lure Old Hickory's army north.

Detroit

It was a glorious time for Frederic, Comte de Maurepas.  Far from living
in hell here in Detroit, with none of the amenities of Paris, he found
the exhilaration of, for once, being part of something larger than
himself.  War was afoot, the fort was stirring, the heathen Reds were
gathering from the far corners of the wilderness, and soon, under de
Maurepas's command, the French would destroy the ragtag American army
Old Chestnut had brought north of the Maw-Mee.

Old Willow?  Whatever they called him.

Of course a part of him was rather unnerved by all this.  Frederic had
never been a man of action, and now so much action was going on that he
could hardly fathom it.  It bothered him sometimes that Napoleon was
letting the savages fight from behind trees.  Surely Europeans, even the
barbarous Americans, should be courteous enough not to let the Reds take
unfair advantage of their ability to hide in the woods.  But never mind.
Napoleon was sure it would work out.  What could go wrong, really?
Everything was working as Napoleon said it would.  Even Governor La
Fayette, traitorous effete Feuillant dog that he was, seemed
enthusiastic about the battle ahead.  He had even sent another ship with
more troops, which Frederic had seen pull into harbor not ten minutes
ago.

"My lord," said Whoever-it-was, the servant who handled things in the
evening.  He was announcing somebody, of all things.

"Who?" Who is it visiting at such an ungodly hour?

"A messenger from the Governor."

"In," said Frederic.  He was feeling too pleasant to bother keepilia the
man cooling his heels for a while.  After all, it was evening-no need to
pretend to be hard at work at an hour like this.

After four o'clock, in fact!

The man came in, smart in his uniform.  A major officer, in fact.

Frederic should know his name, probably, but then he wasn't an\ Ik body,
hadn't even a cousin with a title.  So Frederic waited, not greeting
him.

The major held two letters in his hand.  He laid one on Frederic's
table.

"Is the other for me as well?"

"Yes, sir.  But I have the Governor's instructions to give you that one
first, to wait while you read it in my presence, and then decide whether
to give you the other."

"The Governor's instructions!  To make me wait to receive my mail until
I've read his letter first?"

"The second letter is not addressed to you, my lord," said the major.
"So it is not your mail.  But I think you will want to see it."

"What if I'm weary of work, and choose to read the letter tomorrow?"

"Then I have still another letter, which I will read to your soldiers if
you don't read the first letter within five minutes.  That third letter
relieves you of command and places me in charge of Fort Detroit, under
the authority of the Governor."

"Audacious!  Offensive!  To address me in this manner!"

"I but repeat the words of the Governor, my lord.  I urge you, read his
letter.  It can do you no harm, and not reading it will have devastating
effect."

Unbearable.  Who did the Governor think he was?  Well, in fact, he was a
Marquis.  But then, La Fayette was actually farther out of favor with
the King than-"

"Five minutes, my lord."

Seething, Frederic opened the letter.  It was heavy; when he unfolded
it, a metal amulet on a chain spilled onto the desk, clattering.

"What is this?"

"The letter, my lord."

Frederic scanned it quickly.  "An amulet!  Holy man!  What am I to make
of this?  Has La Fayette become superstitious?" Yet despite his bravado,
Frederic knew at once that he would put on the amulet.  A ward against
Satan!  He had heard of such amulets, priceless beyond compare, for all
had been touched by the finger of the Holy Mother herself, giving them
their power.  Could this be such a one?  He opened the chain and lowered
it over his head.

"Inside," said the major.

Frederic looked at him a moment in bafflement, then realized what was
expected and tucked the amulet into his shirt.  Now it was out of sight.

"There," he said.  "I'm wearing it."

"Excellent, my lord," said the major.  He held out the other letter.

It was not fastened shut, but it had been sealed, and Frederic was
astonished to see that it was His Majesty's great seal imprinted in the
wax.  It was addressed to the Marquis de La Fayette.  It contained the
order for Napoleon Bonaparte to be placed under immediate arrest, to be
returned to Paris in irons to stand trial for treason, sedition,
disloyalty, and malfeasance.

"Do you think your pleading moves me?" said de Maurepas.

"I should hope that the justice of my arguments would move you," said
Napoleon.  "Tomorrow will be the battle.  Ta-Kumsaw expects to take his
orders from me; only I understand fully what is expected of the French
army in this engagement."

"Only you?  What is this sudden vanity of yours, to believe that only
you are capable of command, that only you understand?"

"But of course you understand, my lord de Maurepas.  Only it is for you
to be concerned with the broader picture, while I-"

"Save your breath," said de Maurepas.  "I am no longer deceived.

Your witchery, your satanic influence, it floats past me like bubbles in
the air, it means nothing to me.  I am stronger than you thought.  I
have secret strengths!"

It's good that you do, since all you have in public is idiocy," said
Napoleon.  "The defeat you will suffer without me will mark you as the
champion fool in the history of the French army.  Whenever anyone
suffers an ignominious and avoidable disaster, they will laugh at him
and say that he committed a Maurepas!"

"Enough," said de Maurepas.  "Treason, sedition, malfeasance, and if
that weren't enough, now insubordination.  M.  Gufllotin will have
business with you, I'm quite certain, my vain little bantam cock.  Go,
try your spurs on His Majesty, see how deep they dig when your limbs are
in irons and your head is forfeit."

The betrayal was not obvious till morning, but then it was swift and
complete.  It began when the French quartermaster refused to issue
gunpowder toTa-Kumsaw's people.  "I have my orders," he said.

When Ta-Kumsaw tried to see Napoleon, they laughed at him.

"He won't see you now, or ever," he was told.

What about de Maurepas, then?

"He is a Comte.  He does not treat with savages.  He is not a lover of
beasts, like little Napoleon."

Only then did Alvin notice that all the Frenchman they were dealing with
today were the very ones that Napoleon had been circumventing; all the
officers Napoleon preferred and trusted were not to be found.  Napoleon
had fallen.

"Bows and arrows," said an officer.  "That's what your braves excel
with, isn't it?  With bullets you would cause more damage to your own
men than to the enemy."

Ta-Kumsaw's scouts told him that the American army would arrive by noon.
Ta-Kumsaw immediately deployed his men to harass the enemy.  But now,
without the range of muskets, they could do little more than annoy Old
Hickory's army with the stings of feeble arrows fired from too far off,
where they had meant to cripple the Americans with an irresistible storm
of metal.  And because the bowmen had to come so close to the Americans
in order to fire, many of them were killed.

"Don't stand near meTa-Kumsaw told Alvin.  "They all know of the
prophecy.  They'll think my courage only comes because I know I cannot
die.  " So Alvin stood farther off, but never so far that he didn't see
deeply into Ta-Kumsaw's body, ready to heat any wound.  What he could
not heal was the fear and anger and despair that already gathered in
TaKumsaw's soul.  Without gunpowder, without Napoleon, the sure victory
had become a chancy thing at best.

The basic tactics were successful.  Old Hickory spotted the trap at
once, but the terrain forced him to fall into it or retreat, and he knew
that retreat would be disaster.  So he marched his army boldly between
the hills filled with Reds, funneling into the narrow ground where
French cannon and musketry would rake the Americans while the Reds
killed any who tried to flee.  The victory would be complete.

Except that the Americans were supposed to be demoralized, confused, and
their numbers deeply reduced by the Red men shooting at them all the way
here.

The tactics were successful, except that when the American army came in
view of the French, and hesitated before the muzzles of nine cannon
loaded with canister, and two thousand muskets arrayed to sweep and
double-sweep the field, the French incomprehensibly began to move back.
It was as if they did not trust the impregnability of their own
position.  They did not even try to withdraw the cannon.

They retreated as if they feared immediate destruction.

The course of the battle was predictable, then.  Old Hickory knew what
to do with opportunity.  His soldiers ignored the Reds and fell on the
retreating Frenchmen, slaughtering all who did not run, seizing their
cannon and muskets, their powder and shot.  Within an hour they had used
the French artillery to break down the fortress walls in three places;
Americans streamed into Detroit; there was bloody fighting in the
streets.

Ta-Kumsaw should have left then.  He should have let the Americans
destroy the French, should have taken his men to safety.  Perhaps he
felt a duty to help the French, even after they had betrayed him.

Perhaps he saw a er of hope that with the Americans involved in battle,
his army of Reds might win a victory after all.  Or perhaps he knew that
never again would he have the power to gather all the fighting men of
every tribe; if he retreated now, with the battle unfought, who would
follow him again?  And if they would not follow him, they would follow
no one, and the White men would nibble their way to conquest, devouring
now this tribe, now that.  Ta-Kumsaw surely knew that it was either
victory now, however unlikely, or the struggle would be over for all
time, and any of his people who weren't slaughtered outright would
either escape into the west, a strange land to them, lacking in forest;
or would remain as a diminished people, living like White men instead of
Red, the forest forever silent.

Whether he hoped for victory or not, he could not surrender to such a
future, not without a fight.

So armed with bows and arrows, clubs and knives, the Reds attacked the
American army from behind.  At first they reaped the Whites in bloody
harvest, clubbing them to the ground, piercing them with flints.

Ta-Kumsaw shouted at them to take muskets, powder, ammunition from the
dead, and many Reds obeyed.  But then Old Hickory got the disciplined
core of his men into action.  The guns were turned.  And the Reds,
exposed on the open field, were felled in great swathes of grapeshot.

By evening, the sun going down, Detroit was on fire and the smoke filled
the nearby wood.  In that choking darkness stood Ta-Kumsaw with a few
hundred of his own ShawNee.  Other tribes made isolated stands here and
there; most despaired and fled into the forest, where no White man could
follow.  Old Hickory himself led the final assault against Ta-Kumsaw's
wooded fortress, bringing with him the thousand Americans who weren't
busy looting the French city and smashing the idols in the Papist
cathedral.

The bullets came from all directions, it seemed.  But through it all
Ta-Kumsaw stood upright, shouting to his men, urging them to fight on
with muskets stolen from fallen Americans in the first attack.  For
fifteen minutes that seemed like forever, Ta-Kumsaw fought like a
madman, and his ShawNee fought and died beside him.  Ta-Kumsaw's body
blossomed with scarlet wounds; blood streaked down his back and belly;
one arm hung limp by his side.  No one knew how he found the strength to
stand, he had so many wounds in him.  But TaKumsaw was made of flesh
like any other man, and at last he fell in the smoky dusk, bearing half
a dozen wounds, any one of which would surely have been fatal by itself.

When Ta-Kumsaw fell, the firing slackened.  It was as if the Americans
knew that they had only to kill that one man, and they would break the
spirit of the Red man, now and forever.  The dozen surviving ShawNee
warriors crept away in the smoke and the darkness, to bear the bitter
news of Ta-Kumsaw's death to every ShawNee village, and eventually to
every hut where Red men and women lived.

The great battle was hopeless; White men could not be trusted, French or
American, and so Ta-Kumsaw's great plan could never have succeeded.  Yet
the Red men remembered that at least for a time they had united under
one great man, had become a single people, had dreamed of victory.  So
Ta-Kumsaw was remembered in song as Red villages and families moved west
across the Mizzipy to join the Prophet; he was remembered in stories
told beside brick hearths, by families who wore clothing and worked at
jobs like white men, but still remembered that once there was another
way to live, and the greatest of all the forest Reds had been a man
called Ta-Kumsaw, who died trying to save the woodland and the ancient,
doomed Red way of life.

It was not only Reds who remembered Ta-Kumsaw.  Even as they fired
muskets at his shadowy figure in the woods, the American soldiers
admired him.  He was a great hero out of olden times.  Americans were
all farmers and shopkeepers at heart; Ta-Kumsaw lived.  bL story like
Achilles or Odysseus, Caesar or Hannibal, David or the Maccabees.  "He
can't die," they murmured as they saw him take bullets and still not
fall.  And when at last he did fall, they searched for his body and did
not find it.

"The ShawNee dragged him off," said Old Hickory, and that was that.  He
wouldn't even let them search for the Renegado Boy, figuring that such a
White traitor was no doubt as faithless as the French and snuck off
during the fight.  Leave be, said Old Hickory, and who was going to
argue with the old man?  He won them the victory, didn't he?

He broke the back of Red resistance once and for all, didn't he? Old
Hickory, Andy Jackson-they wanted to make him King but they'd have to
settle for President someday.  Yet in the meantime they could not forget
Ta-Kumsaw, and rumors spread that he was alive somewhere, crippled by
his wounds, waiting to get healed up and lead a great Red invasion from
across the Mizzipy, from the swamps of the South, or from some secret
hidden fastness in the Appalitchee Mountains.

All through the battle Alvin worked with all his might to keep TaKumsaw
alive.  As each new bullet tore through flesh, Alvin mended broken
arteries, trying to hold Ta-Kumsaw's blood inside him.  The pain he had
no time for, but Ta-Kumsaw seemed not to mind the savage mjunes he took.
Alvin crouched down in his hiding place between a standing tree and a
fallen one, his eyes closed, watching Ta-Kumsaw only with his inward
eyes, seeing his flesh from the inside out.  Alvin saw none of the
images that would haunt Ta-Kumsaw's legends.  Alvin never even noticed
as bullets sent a spray of leaf bits and chips of wood falling on him.
He even took a sharp stinging bullet in the back of his left hand and
hardly felt it, he was concentrating so hard on keeping Ta-Kumsaw on
eet.

But one thing Alvin saw: Beyond the edges of his vision, just out of
reach, there was the Uranaker like a transparent shadow, shimmering
fingers slicing through the wood.  Ta-Kumsaw, him Alvin could heal.

But who could heal the greenwood?  Who could heal the tearing apart of
tribe from tribe, Red from Red?  All that Ta-Kumsaw had built was
shivered apart in that single fraction of an hour, and all Alvin could
do was keep a single man alive.  A great man, true, a man who had
changed the world, who had built something, even if it was something
that in the end led to more harm and suffering; Ta-Kumsaw was a builder,
and yet even as Alvin saved his LIFE, he knew that Ta-Kumsaw's building
days were done.  Likely enough the Unmaker didn't begrudge Alvin his
friend's life.  What was Ta-Kumsaw, compared to what the Unmaker was
consuming at this feast?  Just like Taleswapper had said so long ago,
the Unmaker could tear down, eat through, use up, and crush things
faster than any one man could ever hope to build.

All the time, though Alvin scarcely noticed where Ta-Kumsaw was what
with worrying about what was going on inside him, the Red man circled
Alvin's hiding place like he was a dog tied to a tree, winding around
and getting closer and closer.  So when the bullets finally became too
much for Alvin and the blood flowed so fast from dozens of wounds that
Alvin couldn't stanch them all, it was into Alvin's sheltered place that
Ta-Kumsaw fell, sprawling across Alvin's body, knocking the wind out of
the boy.

Alvin scarce heard the search go on around him.  He was too busy healing
wounds, binding up torn flesh, connecting severed nerves and
straightening broken bones.  In desperation to save Ta-Kumsaw's life he
opened his eyes and cut into the Red man's flesh with his own flint
knife, prying bullets out and then healing up where he had cut.  And all
the time it was like the smoke gathered above them, making it impossible
for anyone to see into the little sheltered place where the Unmaker had
got Alvin holed up in hiding.

It was afternoon next day when Alvin awoke.  Ta-Kumsaw lay beside him,
weak and spent, but whole.  Alvin was filthy and itchy and he had to
void himself; gingerly he pulled himself out from under TaKumsaw, who
felt so light, as if he was half made of air.  The smoke was gone now,
but Alvin still felt invisible, walking around in broad daylight dressed
like a Red man.  He could hear drunken singing from the American camp
near the ruins of Detroit.  Stray smoke still drifted through the trees.
And everywhere Alvin walked were the bodies of Red men cast like wet
straw on the forest floor.  It stank of death.

Alvin found a brook and drank, trying not to imagine some dead body
lying in it upstream.  He washed his face and hands, dipped his head
into the water to cool his brain, the way he used to do at home after a
hard day's work.  Then he went back to wake Ta-Kumsaw and bring him here
to drink.

Ta-Kumsaw was already awake.  Already standing over the body of a fallen
friend.  His head was tipped back, his mouth open, as if he uttered a
cry so deep and loud that human ears couldn't hear the sound of it,
could only feel the earth trembling with the vibration of the shout.
Alvin ran to him and flung his arms around him, clinging to him like the
child he was, only it was Alvin doing the comforting, Alvin whispering,
"You done your best, you done all that could be done."

And Ta-Kumsaw answered not at all, though his silence was an answer,
too, like as if he was saying, I'm alive, which means I didn't do
enough.

They walked away in the afternoon, not even bothering to conceal
themselves.  Some White men later woke up with hangovers, swearing they
saw visions of Ta-Kumsaw and the Renegado Boy walking through the
corpses of the Red army, but nobody paid them mind.

And what did it matter?  Ta-Kumsaw wasn't no danger to the Whites now.
He'd broken against them like a great wave, but they stood against him;
he thought to shatter them, but they broke him and his people into
spray, and if some drops of it still clung, what did that matter?  They
had no power anymore.  It was all spent in one brutal, futile blow.

Alvin spoke not a word toTa-Kumsaw all the way south to the headwaters
of the My-Ammy, and Ta-Kumsaw spoke nary a word to him as they dug out a
canoe to get er.  'k yin made the wood soft in the right places, so it
took scarce half an hour, and another half hour to shape a good paddle.
Then they dragged the canoe to the river's edge.  Only with the canoe
half in the water did Ta-Kumsaw stop and turn to Alvin, reach out a hand
and touch his face.  "If all White men were true like you, Alvin, I
would never have been their enemy."

And as Alvin watched Ta-Kumsaw paddle steadily down the river out of
sight, it occurred to him that it just didn't feel like Ta-Kumsaw had
lost.  It was as if the battle wasn't about Ta-Kumsaw.  It was about
White men, and their worthiness to have this land.  They might think
they won, they might think the Red man slunk away or bowed his head in
defeat, but in fact it was the White man who lost, because when
Ta-Kumsaw paddled down the Wobbish to the Ohio, down the Ohio to the
Mizzipy, and crossed the fogs of the river to the other side, he was
taking the land with him, the greensong; what the White man had won with
so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but
the corpse of that land.  It was decay that the White man won.

It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it.

But I'm a White man, not a Red, whatever anybody might say.

And rotting underfoot or not, this land is all the land we have, and our
people all the people that we've got.  So Alvin walked along the shore
of the Wobbish, heading down river, knowing that where the ed

R Tippy-Canoe discharged itself into the larger stream, there he'd find
his pa and ma, his brothers and his sisters, all a-waiting there to find
out what had happened to him in the year since he set out to become a
prentice blacksmith back at Hatrack River.

Homecoming

Napoleon did not wear irons on his way back to France.  He sleptin the
second cabin, and ate at table with Governor La Fayette, who was only
too glad to have him.  In the hot afternoons of the Atlantic crossing,
La Fayette confided all his plans of revolution to Napoleon, his dearest
friend, and Napoleon offered helpful advice on how to make the
revolution go much faster and more effectively.

"The best thing about all these sad events," said La Fayette the day the
lookout first spied the coast of Bretagne, "is that we are friends now,
and the revolution is assured of success because you are a part of it.
To think that once I mistrusted you, figuring you to be a tool of the
King.  A tool of Charles!  But soon all France will know you for the
hero that you are, and blame the King and Freddie for the sacking of
Detroit.  All that territory in the hands of Protestants and savages,
while we are here to offer a better way, a truer leadership to the
people of France.  Ah, Napoleon, I have yearned for such a man as you
through all my years of planning for democracy.  All we have needed, we
Feuillants, was a leader, a man who could guide us, a man who could lead
France to true freedom." And La Fayette sighed and sank deeper into the
cushions of his chair.

Through all this Napoleon listened with satisfaction, yes, but also
sadness.  For he had thought that La Fayette was immune to his charm
because of some great inward strength.  Now he knew that it was only a
foolish amulet, that La Fayette was like any ordinary man when it came
to resisting Napoleon; and now that the amulet lay buried in a mass
grave outside Detroit, no doubt still chained to the moldering vertebrae
of Frederic de Maurepas, Napoleon knew that he would never find his
equal in this world, unless it was God himself, or Nature.

There would be no man to deny him, that much was sure.  So he listened
to La Fayette's babbling with a wistful longing for the kind of man he
once thought La Fayette could be.

The men on deck bustled and hurried and made ten thousand clumbing
noises, for they were heaving in to land; Napoleon was home in France at
last.

Ta-Kumsaw did not need to fear the thick fog that descended as he
reached the Ohio's mouth, pouring into the Mizzipy and getting lost in
those stronger currents.  He knew the way: west, and any shore would be
his refuge, his safety, the end of his life.

For that's all that he could see ahead of him now.  The land west of the
Mizzipy was his brother's land, the place where White man would not
come.  The land itself, the water, every living thing would work to bar
those White who were foolish enough to think that the Red men could be
defeated again.  But it was the Prophet's gifts the Red folk needed now,
not those of a warrior like Ta-Kumsaw.  He might be a figure of legend
in the east, among fallen Reds and foolish Whites, but in the west they
would know him for what he was.  A failure, a bloody-handed man who led
his people to destruction.

The water lapped at his canoe.  He heard a redbird singing not far off.
The fog grew whiter, dazzling; then broke, and the sun shone bright,
blinding him.  In three paddlestrokes his canoe nosed the shore, and
there, to his surprise, was a man silhouetted in the late afternoon sun,
standing on the bank.  The man sprang down and took the end of
Ta-Kumsaw's canoe and pulled it tight against the riverbank, then helped
Ta-Kumsaw out of the little boat.  Ta-Kumsaw couldn't see his face, his
eyes were so bedazzled; but he knew who it was all the same, from the
touch of the hand.  And then the voice, murmuring, "Let the canoe drift
away.  There'll be no more crossing to the other side, my brother."

"Lolla-Wossiky," cried Ta-Kumsaw.  Then he wept and knelt at his
brother's feet, clinging to his knees.  All the anguish, all the grief
spilled out of him, while above him Lolla-Wossiky, called TenskwaTawa,
called the Prophet, sang to him a song of melancholy, a song about the
death of bees.

Things were changed somewhat when Alvin of to town.  There was a sign
right out on the Wobbish Road, saying: Pass by, stranger, if you can.

Or hear a tale unfit for ears of man.

Well Alvin knew the purpose of that sip.  But he was no stranger

here.

or was he?  As he made his way along the little spur of the road toward
Vigor Church, he saw that new buildings had been put up new houses
built.  Folks were living pretty much cheek-by-jowl here now, and Vigor
Church was a proper town.  But no one greeted him in the road, and even
the children a-playing in the commons had no word for him; no doubt
their parents taught them not to welcome strangers, or maybe they just
were sick of hearing their fathers and older brothers telling their
awful tale to whatever stranger came to call.  Better not to welcome any
man or woman here.

And the past year had changed Alvin.  He was taller, yes, but also he
knew that his walk was different, more like a Red man, unaccustomed to
the feel of a White man's road beneath his feet, wishing for the
greenwood song, which was near extinguished in these parts.

Maybe I am a stranger here these days.  Maybe I seen and done too much
this last year to ever come back and be Alvin Junior anymore.

Even with the changes in the town, Alvin knew his way.  This much hadn't
changed-.  there was still bridges over every little stream on the
roadway up to his father's house.  Alvin tried to feel the old way, feel
the anger of the water against him.  But the black evil that once was
his enemy, it hardly knew him either, now that he walked like a Red man,
all at one with the living world.  Never mind, thought Alvin.  As the
land gets tame and broken, I'll be White again in my step, and the
Ummaker will find me.  Just as he broke the Red man's healing hold on
this land, he'll try to break me too, and if Ta-Kumsaw wasn't strong
enough or Tenskwa-Tawa wise enough to stand against the old Unmaker,
what will I ever do?

Just make my way, day by day, like the old hymn said.  Make my way, day
by day, Lord above, light and love, in my grief bring relief, fill my
cup, lift me up, heal my soul, make me whole.  Amen.  Amen.

Cally was a-standing there right on the porch, doing nothing, like as if
he was just watching out in case Alvin Junior should come home today,
and maybe that's what he was doing, maybe it was.  Anyway it was Cally
shouted out, Cally who knew him at once despite all changes in him.

"Alvin!  Ally!  Alvin Junior!  He's home!  You're home!"

First one to come at his call, running around the house with his sleeves
up and the ax still trailing from his hand, was Measure.  Soon as he saw
it was truly Alvin, he dropped the ax and took Alvin Junior
by the shoulders, looked him over for any harm, and Alvin done the same,
looking for any scars on Measure.  None at all, healed proper.

But Measure found some deeper injuries in Alvin, and softly said, "You
got older, Al." To which Alvin had nary a thing to say, it being true,
and for a moment they just stared into each other's eyes, each knowing
how far down the long road of the Red man's suffering and exile the
other had walked; no other White man could ever know what they knew.

Then Ma came out onto the porch and Pa out of the mill and up to the
house, and oh, there was hugging and kissing and crying and laughing and
shouting and silence.  They didn't kill the fatted calf, but there was a
young pig didn't see another sunrise.  Cally ran to the brothers' farms
and Armor-of-God's store and gave notice what was up, and soon all the
family was gathered to greet Alvin Junior, who they knew wasn't dead but
had given up hope of seeing again.

And then, as it was getting late, there came a time when Pa hid his
hands in his pockets, and the other menfolk all grew still, and then the
womenfolk, till Alvin nodded and said, "I know the tale you have to
tell.  So tell it now, all of you, and then I'll tell you my part in
it."

They did, and he did, and there was more weeping, of grief this time
instead of joy.  This valley of the Wobbish was all the home they'd ever
know now; it was the only way they could bear to live, all the folk
who'd done murder at Tippy-Canoe, was right among each other and seeing
no strangers.  Where could they go and live in peace, what with having
to tell all corners what it was they done?  "So we got to stay, Al
Junior.  But not you or Cally, you know.  And maybe your apprenticeship
is still a thing that we can do, what do you think?"

"Time to think of that later," said Ma.  "Time for all those questions
later.  He's home, that's all for now, you hear me?  He's home, who I
never thought to lay eyes on again.  Thank the Lord God that he didn't
make me a prophet, when I said I'd never lay eyes on my sweet little
Alvin anymore."

Alvin hugged his ma back just as hard as she hugged him.  He didn't tell
her that her prophecy was true.  That it wasn't her sweet little Alvin
who'd come home this time.  Let her find that out on her own.  Right now
it was enough that the year was over, that he'd seen the unwinding of
all the great changes, that now, however different it might be, however
bitter, life could go on in a steady path, with no more breaking of the
ground underfoot.

At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, d
beautiful, still bright and hopeful even though the still warm an forest
was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim.

Cause there's no fear of future in the song of life, just the
ever-joyful present moment.  That's all I want right now, thought Alvin.
The present moment, which is good enough.

PRENTICE ALVIN

The Tales of Alvin Maker: Part Three

					BY Orson Scott Card

Let me start my history of Alvin's apprenticeship where things first
began to go wrong.  It was a long way south, a man that Alvin had never
met nor never would meet in all his life.  Yet he it was who started
things moving down the path that would lead to Alvin doing what the law
called murder-on the very day that his prenticeship ended and he rightly
became a man.

It was a place in Appalachee, in 1811, before Appalachee signed the
Fugitive Slave Treaty and joined the United States.  It was near the
borders where Appalachee and the Crown Colonies meet, so there wasn't a
White man but aspired to own a passel of Black slaves to do his work for
him.

Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they
reckoned.  They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's
sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat
into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the
money-changer's table.  There was buying and selling of souls in that Pi
ace.  Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price
they paid for owning other folk.

Listen tight, and I'll tell you how the world looked from inside Cavil
Planter's heart.  But make sure the children are asleep, for this is a
part of my tale that children ought not to hear, for it deals with
hungers they don't understand too well, and I don't aim for this story
to teach them.

Cavil Planter was a godly man, a church-going man, a tithepayer.

All his slaves were baptized and given Christian names as soon as they
understood enough English to be taught the gospel.  He forbade them to
practice their dark arts-he never allowed them to slaughter so much as a
chicken themselves, lest they convert such an innocent act into a
sacrifice to some hideous god.  In all ways Cavil Planter served the
Lord as best he could.

So, how was the poor man rewarded for his righteousness?  His wife,
Dolores, she was beset with terrible aches and pains, her wrists and
fingers twisting like an old woman's.  By the time she was twenty-five
she went to sleep most nights crying, so that Cavil could not bear to
share the room with her.

He tried to help her.  Packs of cold water, soaks of hot water, powders
and potions, spending more than he could afford on those doctors with
their degrees from the University of Camelot, charlatan and bringing in
an endless parade of preachers with their eternal prayers and priests
with their hocum pocus incantations.  All of it accomplished nigh onto
nothing.  Every night he had to lie there listening to her cry until she
whimpered, whimper until her breath became a steady in and out, whining
just a little on the out-breath, a faint little wisp of pain.

It like to drove Cavil mad with pity and rage and despair.  For months
on end it seemed to him that he never slept at all.  Work all day, then
at night lie there praying for relief.  If not for her, then for him.

It was Dolores herself who gave him peace at night.  "You have work to
do each day, Cavil, and can't do it unless you sleep.  I can't keep
silent, and you can't bear to hear me.  Please-sleep in another room."

Cavil offered to stay anyway.  "I'm your husband, I belong here"he said
it, but she knew better.

"Go," she said.  She even raised her voice.  "Go!"

So he went, feeling ashamed of how relieved he felt.  He slept that
night without interruption, a whole five hours until dawn, slept NN ell
for the first time in months, perhaps years-and arose in the mot-,in
consumed with guilt for not keeping his proper place beside his kit In
due time, though, Cavil Planter became accustomed to sleel'ii alone.  He
visited his wife often, morning and night.  They took nieli together,
Cavil sitting on a chair in her room, his food on a smal I ;i( table,
Dolores lying in bed as a Black woman carefully spooned food into her
mouth while her hands sprawled on the bedsheets like dead crabs.

Even sleeping in another room, Cavil wasn't free of torment.

There rit would be no babies.  There would be no sons to raise up to
iiihe Cavil's fine plantation.  There would be no daughters to give a in
magnificent weddings.  The ballroom downstairs-when he brought Dolores
into the fine new house he had built for her, he had said, "Our
daughters will meet their beaux in this ballroom, and first touch their
hands, the way our hands first touched in your father's house."

Now Dolores never saw the ballroom.  She came downstairs only on Sundays
to go to church and on those rare days when new slaves were purchased,
so she could see to their baptism.

Everyone saw her on such occasions, and admired them both for their
courage and faith in adversity.  But the admiration of his neighbors was
scant comfort when Cavil surveyed the ruins of his dreams.

All that he prayed for-it's as if the Lord wrote down the list and then
in the margin noted "no, no, no" on every line.

The disappointments might have embittered a man of weaker faith.

But Cavil Planter was a godly, upright man, and whenever he had the
faintest thought that God might have treated him badly, he stopped
whatever he was doing and pulled the small psaltery from his pocket and
whispered aloud the words of the wise man.

In thee, 0 Lord, do I put my trust,Bow down thine ear to me; Be thou my
strong rockHe concentrated his mind firmly, and the doubts and
resentments quickly fled.  The Lord was with Cavil Planter, even in his
tribulations.

Until the morning he was reading in Genesis and he came upon the first
two verses of chapter 16.

Now Sarai Abram's wife bore him no children: and she had an handmaid, an
Egyptian, whose name was Hagar.

And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from
bearing.- I pray thee, go in unto my maid.- it may be that I may obtain
children by her.

At that moment the thought came into his mind, Abraham was a righteous
man, and so am 1.  Abraham's wife bore him no children, and mine
likewise has no hope.  There was an African slavewoman in their
household, as there are such women in mine.  Why shouldn't I do as
Abraham did, and father children by one of these?

The moment the thought came into his head, he shuddered in horror.

He'd heard gossip of White Spaniards and French and Portuguese in the
jungle islands to the south who lived openly with Black women-truly they
were the lowest kind of creature, like men who do with beasts.

Besides, how could a child of a Black woman ever be an heir to him?  A
-up boy could no more take possession of an Appalachee plantation than
fly.  Cavil just put the thought right out of his mind.

But as he sat at breakfast with his wife, the thought came back.

He found himself watching the Black woman who fed his wife.  Like Hagar,
this woman is Egyptian, isn't she?  He noticed how her body twisted
lithely at the waist as she bore the spoon from tray to mouth.

Noticed how as she leaned forward to hold the cup to the frail woman's
lips, the servant's breasts swung down to press against her blouse.
Noticed how her gentle fingers brushed crumbs and drops from Dolores's
lips.  He thought of those fingers touching him, and trembled slightly.
Yet it felt like an earthquake inside him.

He rushed from the room with hardly a word.  Outside the house, he
clutched his psaltery.

Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, And cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions.And my sin is ever before me.

Yet even as he whispered these words, he looked up and saw t field women
washing themselves at the trough.  There was the young girl he had
bought only a few days before, six hundred dollars even though she was
small, since she was probably breeding stock.  So fresh from the boat
she was that she hadn't learned a speck of Christian modesty.  She stood
there naked as a snake, leaning over the trough pouring cups of water
over her head and down her back.

Cavil stood transfixed, watching her.  What had only been a brief
thought of evil in his wife's bedroom now became a trance of lust.  He
had never seen anything so graceful as her blue-black thighs sliding
against each other, so inviting as her shiver when the water ran down
her body.

Was this the answer to his fervent psalm?  Was the Lord telling him that
it was indeed with him as it had been with Abraham?

Just as likely it was witchery.  Who knew what knacks these
freshfrom-Africa Blacks mights have?  She knows I'm here a-watching, and
she's tempting me.  These Blacks are truly the devil's own children, to
excite such evil thoughts in me.

He tore his gaze from the new girl and turned away, hiding his burning
eyes in the words of the book.  Only somehow the page had turned-when
did he turn it?-and he found himself reading in the Song of Solomon.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes That are twins, which feed among
the lilies.

"God help me," he whispered.  "Take this spell from me."

Day after day he whispered the same prayer, yet day after day he found
himself watching his slavewomen with desire, particularly that newbought
girl.  Why was it God seemed to be paying him no Mind?

Hadn't he always been a righteous man?  Wasn't he good to his wife?

Wasn't he honest in business?  Didn't he pay tithes and offerings?

Didn't he treat his slaves and horses well?  Why didn't the Lord God of
Heaven protect him and take this Black spell from him?

Yet even when he prayed, his very confessions became evil imaginings.  0
Lord, forgive me for thinking of my newbought girl standing in the door
of my bedroom, weeping at the caning she got from the overseer.  Forgive
me for imagining myself laying her on my own bed and lifting her skirts
to anoint them with a balm so powerful the welts on her thighs and
buttocks disappear before my eyes and she begins to giggle softly and
writhe slowly on the sheets and look over her shoulder at me, smiling,
and then she turns over and reaches out to me and-O Lord, forgive me,
save me!

Whenever this happened, though, he couldn't help but wonderwhy do such
thoughts come to me even when I pray?  Maybe I'm as righteous as
Abraham; maybe it's the Lord who sent these desires to me.  Didn't I
first think of this while I was reading scripture?  The Lord can work
miracles-what if I went in unto the newbought girl and she conceived,
and the Lord worked a miracle and the baby was born White?  all things
are possible to God.

This thought was both wonderful and terrible.  If only it were true!

Yet Abraham heard the voice of God, so he never had to wonder about what
God might want of him.  God never said a word to Cavil Planter.

And why not?  Why didn't God just tell him right out?  Take the

girl, she's yours!  Or, Touch her not, she is forbidden!  Just let me
hear your voice, Lord, so I'll know what to do!

Lord my rock,Unto thee will I cry, Be not silent to me, Lest, if thou be
silent to me, I become like them That go down into the pit.

On a certain day in 1810 that prayer was answered.

Cavil was kneeling in the curing shed, which was mostly empty, seeing
how last year's burly crop was long since sold and this year"s was still
a-greening in the field.  He'd been wrestling in prayer and confession
and dark imaginings until at last he cried out, "Is there no one to hear
my prayer?"

"Oh, I hear you right enough," said a stern voice.

Cavil was terrified at first, fearing that some stranger-his overseer,
or a neighbor-had overheard some terrible confession.  But when he
looked, he saw that it wasn't anyone he knew.  Still, he knew at once
what the man was.  From the strength in his arms, his sun-browned face,
and his open shirt-no jacket at all-he knew the man was no gentleman.
But he was no White trash, either, nor a tradesman.

The stern look in his face, the coldness of his eye, the tension in his
muscles like a spring tight-bound in a steel trap: He was plainly one of
those men whose whip and iron will keep discipline among the Black
fieldworkers.  An overseer.  Only he was stronger and more dangerous
than any overseer Cavil had ever seen.  He knew at once that this
overseer would get every ounce of work from the lazy apes who tried to
avoid work in the fields.  He knew that whoever's plantation was run by
this overseer would surely prosper.  But Cavil also knew that he would
never dare to hire such a man, for this overseer was so strong that
Cavil would soon forget who was man and who was master.

"Many have called me their master," said the stranger.  "I knew that you
would recognize me at once for what I am."

How had the man known the words that Cavil thought in the hidden reaches
of his mind?  "Then you are an overseer?"

"Just as there was one who was once called, not a master, but simply
Master, so am I not an overseer, but the Overseer."

"Why did you come here?"

"Because you called for me."

"How could I call for you, when I never saw you before in my llive?"

"If you call for the unseen, Cavil Planter, then of course you will see
what you never saw before."

Only now did Cavil fully understand what sort Of vision it was he saw,
there in his own burly curing shed.  A man whom many called their
master, come in answer to his prayer.

"Lord Jesus!" cried Cavil.

At once the Overseer recoiled, putting up his hand as if to fend off
Cavil's words.  "It is forbidden for any man to call me by that name!"
he cried.

In terror, Cavil bowed his head to the dirt.  "Forgive me, Over!

But if I am unworthy to say your name, how is it I can look upon your
face?  Or am I doomed to die today, unforgiven for my sins?"

"Woe unto you, fool," said the Overseer.  "Do you really believe that
you have looked upon my face?"

Cavil lifted his head and looked at the man.  "I see your eyes even now,
looking down at me."

"You see the face that you invented for me in your own mind, the body
conjured out of your own imagination.  Your feeble wits could never
Comprehend what you saw, if you saw what I truly am.  So your sanity
Protects itself by devising its own mask to put upon me.  If you see me
as an Overseer, it is because that is the guise you recognize as having
the greatness and power I possess.  It is the form that you at once love
and fear, the shape that makes you worship and recoff.  I have been
called by many names.  Angel of Light and Walking Man, Sudden Stranger
and Bright Visitor, Hidden One and Lion of War, Urumaker of Iron and
Water-bearer.  Today you have called me Overseer, and so, to you, that
is my name."

"Can I ever know your true name, or see your true face, Overseez., The
Overseer's face became dark and terrible, and he opened his mouth as if
to howl.  "Only one soul alive in all the world has ever seen my true
shape, and that one will surely die!"

The mighty words came like dry thunder and shook Cavil Planter to his
very root, so that he gripped the dirt of the shed floor lest he fly Off
into the air like dust whipped away in the wind before the storm.

"Do not strike me dead for my impertinence!" cried Cavil.

The Overseer's answer came gentle as morning sunlight.  "Strike on dead?
How could 1, when you are a man I have chosen to receive my most secret
teachings, a gospel unknown to priest or minister."

I The?"

"Already I have been teaching you, and you understood.  I know you
desire to do as I command.  But you lack faith.  You are not yet
completely mine."

Cavil's heart leapt within him.  Could it be that the Overseer meant to
give him what he gave to Abraham?  "Overseer, I am unworthy."

"Of course you are unworthy.  None is worthy of me, no, not one soul
upon this earth.  But still, if you obey, you may find favor in my eyes.
Oh, he will!  cried Cavil in his heart, yes, he will give me the womant
"Whatever you command, Overseer."

"Do you think I would give you Hagar because of your foolish lust and
your hunger for a child?  There is a greater purpose.  These Black
people are surely the sons and daughters of God, but in Africa they
lived under the power of the devil.  That terrible destroyer has
polluted their blood-why else do you think they are Black?  I can never
save them as long as each generation is born pure Black, for then the
devil owns them.  How can I reclaim them as my own, unless you help me?"

"Will my child be born White then, if I take the girl?"

"What matters to me is that the child will not be born pure Black.

Do you understand what I desire of you?  Not one Ishmael, but many
children; not one Hagar, but many women."

Cavil hardly dared to name the secretest desire of his heart.

"All of them?"

"I give them to you, Cavil Planter.  This evil generation is your
property.  With diligence, you can prepare another generation that will
belong to me."

"I will, Overseer!"

"You must tell no one that you saw me.  I speak only to those whose
desires already turn toward me, and my works, the ones who already
thirst for the water I bring."

"I'll speak no word to any man, Overseer!"

"Obey me, Cavil Planter, and I promise that at the end of your life you
will meet me again and know me for what I truly am.  In that moment I
will say to you, You are mine, Cavil Planter.  Come and be my true slave
rever."

"Gladly!" cried Cavil.  "Gladly!  Gladly!"

He flung out his arms and embraced the Overseer's legs.  But where he
should have touched the visitor, there was nothing.  He had van.

iked.

isn From that night on, Cavil Planter's slavewomen had no peace.

As Cavil had them brought to him by night, he tried to treat them with
the strength and mastery he had seen in the face of the fearful
Overseer.  They must look at me and see His face, thought Cavil, and
it's sure they did.

The first one he took unto himself was a certain newbought slavegirl who
had scarce a word of English.  She cried out in terror until he raised
the welts upon her that he had seen in his dreams.

Then, whimpering, she permitted him to do as the Overseer had commanded.
For a moment, that first time, he thought her whimpering was like
Dolores's voice when she wept so quietly in bed, and he felt the same
deep pity that he had felt for his beloved wife.  Almost he reached out
tenderly to the girl as he had once reached out to comfort Dolores.  But
then he remembered the face of the Overseer and thought, this Black girl
is His enemy; she is my property.  As surely as a man must plow and
plant the land God gave to him, I must not let this Black womb lie
fallow.

Hagar, he called her that first night.  You do not understand how I am
blessing you.

In the morning he looked in the mirror and saw something new in his
face.  A kind of fierceness.  A kind of terrible hidden strength.

Ah, thought Cavil, no one ever saw what I truly am, not even me. Only
now do I discover that what the Overseer is, I also am.

He never felt another moment's pity as he went about his nightly work.
Ashen cane in hand, he went to the women's cabin and pointed at the one
who was to come with him.  If any hung back, she learned from the cane
how much reluctance cost.  If any other Black, man or woman, spoke in
protest, the next day Cavil saw to it that the Overseer took it out of
them in blood.  No White guessed and no Black dared accuse him.

The newbought girl, his Hagar, was first to conceive.  He watched her
with pride as her belly began to grow.  Cavil knew then that the
Overseer had truly chosen him, and he took fierce joy in having such
Mastery.  There would be a child, his child.  And already the next step
was clear to him.  If his White blood was to save as many Black souls as
possible, then he could not keep his mix-up babes at home, could he?

He would sell them south, each to a different buyer, to a different
city, and then trust the Overseer to see that they in turn grew up and
spread his seed throughout all the unfortunate Black race.

And each morning he watched his wife eat her breakfast.  "Cavil, my
love," she said one day, "is something wrong?  There's something darker
in your face, a look of-rage, perhaps, or cruelty.  Have you quarreled
with someone?  I would not speak except you-you frighten me.

Tenderly he patted his wife's twisted hand as the Black woman watched
him under heavy-lidded eyes.  "I have no anger against an-, man or
woman," said Cavil gently.  "And what you call cruelty is nothing more
than mastery.  Ah, Dolores, how can you look in my face and call me
cruel?"

She wept.  "Forgive me," she cried.  "I imagined it.  You, the kindest
man I've ever heard of-the devil put such a vision in my mind, I know
it.  The devil can give false visions, you know, but only the wicked are
deceived.  Forgive me for my wickedness, Husband!"

until he had sent for the priest.  No wonder the Lord chose only men to
be his prophets. Women were too weak and compassionate to do the work of
the Overseer.

That's how it began.  That was the first footfall on this dark and
terrible path.  Nor Alvin nor Peggy ever knew this tale until I found it
out and told them both long after, and they recognized at once that it
was the start of all.

But I don't want you to think this was the whole cause of all the evil
that befell, for it wasn't.  There were other choices made, other
mistakes, other lies and other willing cruelties done.  A man might have
plenty of help finding the short path to hell, but no one else can make
him set foot upon it.

Runaway

Peggy woke up in the morning with a dream of Alvin Miller filling her
heart with all kinds of terrible desires.  She wanted to run from that
boy, and to stay and wait for him; to forget she knew him, and to watch
him always.

She lay there on her bed with her eyes almost closed, watching the grey
dawnlight steal into the attic room where she slept.  I'm holding
something, she noticed.  The corners of it clenched into her hands so
tight that when she let go her palm hurt like she been stung.  But she
wasn't stung.  It was just the box where she kept Alvin's birth caul.

Or maybe, thought Peggy, maybe she had been stung, stung deep, and only
just now did she feel the pain of it.

Peggy wanted to throw that box just as far from her as she could, bury
it deep and forget where she buried it, drown it underwater and pile
rocks on so it wouldn't float.

Oh, but I don't mean that, she said silently, I'm sorry for thinking
such a thing, I'm plain sorry, but he's coming now, after all these
years he's coming to Hatrack River and he won't be the boy I seen in all
the paths of his future, he won't be the man I see him turning into.

No, he's still just a boy, just eleven years old.  He's seen him enough
of life that somewise maybe he's a man inside, he's seen grief and pain
enough for someone five times his age, but it's still an eleven-year-old
boy he'll be when he walks into this town.

And I don't want to see no eleven-year-old Alvin come here.  He'll be
looking for me, right enough.  He knows who I am, though he never saw me
since he was two weeks old.  He knows I saw his future on the rainy dark
day when he was born, and so he'll come, and he'll say to me, "Peggy, I
know you're a torc , and I know you wrote in Taleswapper's book that I'm
to be a Maker.  So tell me what I'm supposed to be."

Peggy knew just what he'd say, and every way he might choose to say
it-hadn't she seen it a hundred times, a thousand times?  And she'd
teach him and he'd become a great man, a true Maker, andAnd then one
day, when he's a handsome figure of twenty-one and I'm a sharp-tongued
spinster of twenty-six he'll feel so grateful to me, so obligated, that
he'll propose himself for marriage to me as his bounden duty.  And 1,
being lovesick all these years, full of dreams of what he'll do and what
we'll be together, I'll say yes, and saddle him with a wife he wished he
didn't have to marry, and his eyes will hunger for other women all the
days of our lives togetherPeggy wished, oh she wished so deep, that she
didn't know for certain things would be that way.  But Peggy was a torch
right enough, the strongest torch she'd ever heard of, stronger even
than the folk hereabouts in Hatrack River ever guessed.

She sat up in bed and did not throw the box or hide it or break it or
bury it.  She opened it.  Inside lay the last scrap of Alvin's birth
caul, as dry and white as paper ash in a cold hearth.  Eleven years ago
when Peggy's mama served as midwife to pull baby Alvin out of the well
of life, and Alvin first sucked for breath in the damp air of Papa's
Hatrack River roadhouse, Peggy peeled that thin and bloody caul from the
baby's face so he could breathe.  Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh
son, and the thirteenth chfld-Peggy saw at once what the paths of his
life would be.  Death, that was where he was headed, death from a
hundred different accidents in a world that seemed bent on killing him
even before he was hardly alive.

She was Little Peggy then, a girl of five, but she'd been torching for
two years already, and in that time she never did a seeing on a birthing
child who had so many paths to death.  Peggy searched up all the paths
of his life, and found in all of them but one single way that boy could
live to be a man.

That was if she kept that birth caul, and watched him from afar off, and
whenever she saw death reaching out to take him, she'd use that can].
Take just a pinch of it and grind it between her fingers and whisper
what had to happen, see it in her mind.  And it would happen just the
way she said.  Hadn't she held him up from drowning?

Saved him from a wallowing buffalo?  Caught him from sliding off a roof?

She even split a roof beam once, when it was like to fall from fifty
feet up and squash him on the floor of a half-built church; she split
that beam neat as you please, so it fell on one side of him and the
other, with just a space for him to stand there in between.  And a
hundred other times when she acted so early that nobody ever even
guessed his life had been saved, even those times she saved him, using
the caul.

How did it work?  She hardly knew.  Except that it was his own power she
was using, the gift born right in him.  Over the years he'd learned
somewhat about his knack for making things and shaping them and holding
them together and splitting them apart.  Finally this last year, all
caught up in the wars between Red men and White, he'd taken charge of
saving his own life, so she hardly had to do a thing to save him
anymore.  Good thing, too.  There wasn't much of that can] left.

She closed the lid of the box.  I don't want to see him, thought Peggy.
I don't want to know any more about him.

But her fingers opened that lid right back up, cause of course she had
to know.  She'd lived half her life, it seemed like, touching that caul
and searching for his heartfire away far off in the northwest Wobbish
country, in the town of Vigor Church, seeing how he was doing, looking
up the paths of his future to see what danger lay in ambush.

And when she was sure he was safe, she'd look farther ahead, and see him
coming back one day to Hatrack River, where he was born, coming back and
looking into her face and saying, It was you who saved me all those
times, you who saw I was a Maker back afore a living soul thought such a
thing was possible.  And then she'd watch him learn the great depths of
his power, the work he had to do, the crystal city he had to build; she
saw him sire babies on her, and saw him touch the nursing infants she
held in her arms; she saw the ones they buried and the ones that lived;
and last of all she saw himTears came down her face.  I don't want to
know, she said.  I don't want to know all the roads of the future. Other
girls can dream of love, the joys of marriage, of being mothers to
strong healthy babes; but all my dreams have dying in them, too, and
pain, and fear, because my dreams are true dreams, I know more than a
body can know and still have any hope inside her soul.

Yet Peggy did hope.  Yes sir, you can be sure of it-she still clung to a
kind of desperate hope, because even knowing what's likely to come down
the pathways of a body's life, she still caught her some glimpses, some
clear plain visions of certain days, certain hours, certain passing
moments of joy so great it was worth the grief just to get there.

Trouble was those glimpses were so rare and small in the spreading
futures of Alvin's life that she couldn't find a road that led there.

All the pathways she could find easily, the plain ones, the ones most
likely to become real, those all led to Alvin wedding her without love,
out of gratitude and duty, a miserable marriage.  Like the story of Leah
in the Bible, whose beautiful husband Jacob hated her even though she
loved him dear and bore him more babies than his other wives and
would've died for him if he'd as much as asked her.

It's an evil thing God did to women, thought Peggy, to make us hanker
after husband and children till it leads us to a life of sacrifice and
misery and grief Was Eve's sin so terrible, that God should curse all
women with that mighty curse?  You will groan and bear children, said
Almighty Merciful God.  You will be eager for your husband, and he will
rule over you.

That was what was burning in her-eagerness for her husband.

Even though he was only an eleven-year-old boy who was looking, not for
a wife, but for a teacher.  He may be just a boy, thought Peggy, but I'm
a woman, and I've seen the man he'll be, and I yearn for him.

She pressed one hand against her breast; it felt so large and soft,
still somewhat out of place on her body, which used to be all sticks and
corners like a shanty cabin, and now was softening, like a calf being
fattened up for the return of the prodigal.

She shuddered, thinking what happened to the fatted calf, and once again
touched the caul, and looked.

In the distant town of Vigor Church, young Alvin was breakfasting his
last morning at his mother's table.  The pack he was to carry on his
journey to Hatrack River lay on the floor beside the table.  His
mother's tears flowed undisguised across her cheeks.  The boy loved his
mother, but'never for a moment did he feel sorry to be leaving.

His home was a dark place now, stained with too much innocent blood for
him to hanker to stay.  He was eager to be off, to start his life as a
prentice boy to the blacksmith of Hatrack River, and to find the torch
girl who saved his life when he was born.  He couldn't eat another bite.
He pushed back from the table, stood up, kissed his mamaPeggy let go the
caul and closed the lid of the box as tight and quick as if she was
trying to catch a fly inside.

Coming to find me.  Coming to start a life of misery together.  Go ahead
and cry, Faith Miller, but not because your little boy Alvin's on his
way east.  You cry for me, the woman whose life your boy will wreck. You
shed your tears for one more woman's lonely pain.

Peggy shuddered, shook off the bleak mood of the grey dawn, and dressed
herself quickly, ducking her head to avoid the low sloping crossbeams of
the attic roof.  Over the years she'd learned ways to push thoughts of
Alvin Miller Junior clean out of her mind, long enough to do her duty as
daughter in her parents' household and as torch for the people of the
country hereabouts.  She could go hours without thinking about that boy,
when she set her mind to it.  And though it was harder now, knowing he
was about to set his foot on the road toward her that very morning, she
still put thoughts of him aside.

Peggy opened the curtain of the south-facing window and sat before it,
leaning on the sill.  She looked out over the forest that still
stretched from the roadhouse, down the Hatrack River and on to the Ohio,
with only a few pig farms here and there to block the way.  Of course
she couldn't see the Ohio, not that many miles from here, not even in
the clear cool air of springtime.  But what her natural eyes couldn't
see, the burning torch in her could find easy enough.  To see the Ohio,
she had only to search for a far-off heartfire, then slip herself inside
that fellow's flame, and see out of his eyes as easy as she could see
out of her own.  And once there, once she had ahold of someone's
heartfire, she could see other things, too, not just what he saw, but
what he thought and felt and wished for.  And even more: Flickering away
in the brightest parts of the flame, often hidden by all the noise of
the fellow's present thought and wishes, she could see the paths ahead
of him, the choices coming to him, the life he'd make for himself if he
chose this or that or another way in the hours and days to come.

Peggy could see so much in other people's heartfires that she hardly was
acquainted with her own.

She thought of herself sometimes like that lone lookout boy at the
tip-top of a ship's mast.  Not that she ever saw her a ship in her whole
life, except the rafts on the Ohio and one time a canal boat on the
Irrakwa Canal.  But she read some books, as many as ever she could get
Doctor Whitley Physicker to bring back to her from his visits to Dekane.
So she knew about the lookout on the mast.  Clinging to the rigging,
arms half-wrapped in the lines so he didn't fall if there was a sudden
roll or pitch of the boat, or a gust of wind unlooked-for; froze blue in
winter, burnt red in summer; and nothing to do all day, all the long
long hours of his watch, but look out onto t e empty blue ocean.

If it was a pirate ship, the lookout watched for victims' sails.

If it was a whaler, he looked for blows and breaches.  Most ships, he
just looked for land, for shoals, for hidden sand bars; looked for
pirates or some sworn enemy of his nation's flag.

Most days he never saw a thing, not a thing, just waves and dipping sea
birds and fluffy clouds.

I am on a lookout perch, thought Peggy.  Sent up aloft some sixteen
years ago the day I was born, and kept here ever since, never once let
down below, never once allowed to rest within the narrow bunkspace of
the lowest deck, never once allowed to so much as close a hatch over my
head or a door behind my back.  Always, always I'm on watch, looking far
and near.  And because it isn't my natural eyes I look through, I can't
shut them, not even in sleep.

No escape from it at all.  Sitting here in the attic, she could see
without trying: Mother, known to others as Old Peg Guester, known to
herself as Margaret, cooking in the kitchen for the slew of guests due
in for one of her suppers.  Not like she has any particular knack for
cooking, either, so kitchen work is hard, she isn't like Gertie Smith
who can make salt pork taste a hundred different ways on a hundred
different days.  Peg Guester's knack is in womenstuff, midwifery and
house hexes, but to make a good inn takes good food and now Oldpappy's
gone she has to cook, so she thinks only of the kitchen and couldn't
hardly stand interruption, least of all from her daughter who mopes
around the house and hardly speaks at all and by and large that girl is
the most unpleasant, ill-favored child even though she started out so
sweet and promising, everything in life turns sour somehow.  .  .  .

Oh, that was such a joy, to know how little your own mama cared for you.
Never mind that Peggy also knew the fierce devotion that her mama had.
Knowing that a portion of love abides in your mama's heart doesn't take
away but half the sting of knowing her dislike for you as well.

And Papa, known to others as Horace Guester, keeper of the Hatrack River
Roadhouse.  A jolly fellow, Papa was, even now out in the dooryard
telling tales to a guest who was having trouble getting away from the
inn.  He and Papa always seemed to have something more to talk about,
and oh, that guest, a circuit lawyer from up Cleveland way, he fancied
Horace Guester was just about the finest most upstanding citizen he ever
met, if all folks was as good-hearted as old Horace there'd be no more
crime and no more lawyering in the upriver Ohio country.  Everybody felt
that way.  Everybody loved old Horace Guester.

But his daughter, Peggy the torch, she saw into his heartfire and knew
how he felt about it.  He saw those folks a-smiling at him and he said
to himself, If they knew what I really was they'd spit in the road at my
feet and walk away and forget they ever saw my face or knew my name.

Peggy sat there in her attic room and all the heartfires glowed, all of
them in town.  Her parents' most, cause she knew them best; the lodgers
who stayed in the roadhouse; and then the people of the town.

Makepeace Smith and his wife Gertie and their three snot-nose children
planning devihnent when they weren't puking or piddlingPeggy saw
Makepeace's pleasure in the shaping of iron, his loathing for his own
children, his disappointment as his wife changed from a fascinating
unattainable vision of beauty into a stringy-haired hag who screamed at
the children first and then came to use the same voice to scream at
Makepeace.

Pauley Wiseman, the sheriff, loving to make folks a-scared of him;
Whitley Physicker, angry at himself because his medicine didn't work
more than half the time, and every week he saw death he couldn't do a
thing about.  New folks, old folks, farmers and professionals, she saw
through their eyes and into their hearts.  She saw the marriage beds
that were cold at night and the adulteries kept secret in guilty hearts.
She saw the thievery of trusted clerks and friends and servants, and the
honorable hearts inside many who were despised and looked down on.

She saw it all, and said nothing.  Kept her mouth shut.  Talked to no
one.  Cause she wasn't going to lie.  She promised years before that
she'd never lie, and kept her word by keeping still.

Other folks didn't have her problem.  They could talk and tell the
truth.  But Peggy couldn't tell the truth.  She knew these folks too
well.  She knew what they all were scared of, what they all wanted, what
they all had done that they'd kill her or theirself if they once got a
notion that she knew.  Even the ones who never done a bad thing, they'd
be so ashamed to think she knew their secret dreams or private
craziness.  So she never could speak frankly to these folks, or
something would slip out, not even a word maybe, it might be just the
way she turned her head, the way she sidestepped some line of talk, and
they'd know that she knew, or just fear that she knew, or just fear.

Just fear alone, without even naming what it was, and it could undo
them, some of them, the weakest of them.

She was a lookout all the time, alone atop the mast, hanging to the
lines, seeing more than she ever wanted to, and never getting even a
minute to herself When it wasn't some baby being born, so she had to go
and do a seeing, then it was some folks in trouble somewhere that had to
be helped.  It didn't do her no good to sleep, neither.  She never slept
all the way.  Always a part of her was looking, and saw the fire
burning, saw it flash.

Like now.  Now this very moment, as she looked out over the forest,
there it was.  A heartfire burning ever so far off.

She swung herself close in-not her body, of course, her flesh stayed
right there in the attic-but being a torch she knew how to look close at
far-off heartfires.

It was a young woman.  No, a girl, even younger than herself.  And
strange inside, so she knew right off this girl first spoke a language
that wasn't English, even though she spoke and thought in English now.

It made her thoughts all twisty and queer.  But some things run deeper
than the tracks that words leave in your brain; Little Peggy didn't need
no help understanding that baby the girl held in her arms, and the way
she stood at the riverbank knowing she would die, and what a horror
waited for her back at the plantation, and what she'd done last night to
get away.

See the sun there, three fingers over the trees.  This runaway Black
slavegirl and her little bastard half-White boy-baby, see them standing
on the shore of the Ohio, half hid up in trees and bushes, watching as
the White men pole them rafts on down.  She a-scared, she know them dogs
can't find her but very soon they get them the runaway finder, very
worse thing, and how she ever cross that river with this boy-baby?

She cotch her a terrible thought: I leave this boy-baby, I hide him in
this rotten log, I swim and steal the boat and I come back to here.

That do the job, yes sir.

But then this Black girl who nobody never teach how to be a mama, she
know a good mama don't leave this baby who still gots to suck two-hand
times a day.  She whisper, Good mama don't leave a little boy-baby where
old fox or weasel or badger come and nibble off little parts and kill
him dead.  No ma'am not me.

So she just set down here a-hold of this baby, and watch t e river flow
on, might as well be the seashore cause she never get across.

Maybe some White folks help her?  Here on the Appalachee shore the White
folk hang them as help a slavegirl run away.  But this runaway Black
slavegirl hear stories on the plantation, about Whites who say nobody
better be own by nobody else.  Who say this Black girl better have that
same right like the White lady, she say no to any man be not her true
husband.  Who say this Black girl better can keep her baby, not let them
White boss promise he sell it on weaning day, they send this boy-baby to
grow up into a house slave in Drydenshire, kiss a White man's feet if he
say boo.

"Oh, your baby is so lucky, " they say to this slavegirl.  "He'll grow
up in a fine lord's mansion in the Crown Colonies, where they still have
a king-he might even see the King someday."

She don't say nothing, but she laugh inside.  She don't set no store to
see a king.  Her pa a king back in Africa, and they shoot him dead.

Them Portuguese slavers show her what it mean to be a king-it mean you
die quick like everybody, and spill blood red like everybody, and cry
out loud in pain and scared-oh, fine to be a king, and fine to see one.
Do them White folk believe this lie?

I don't believe them.  I say I believe them but I lie.  I never let them
take him my boy-baby.  A king grandson him, and I tell him every day he
growing up.  When he the tall king, ain't nobody hit him with the stick
or he hit them back, and nobody take his woman, spread her like a
slaughterpig and stick this half-White baby in her but he can't do
nothing, he sit in his cabin and cry.  No ma'am, no sir.

So she do the forbidden evil ugly bad thing.  She steal two candles and
hot them all soft by the cookfire.  She mash them like dough, she mash
in milk from her own teat after boy-baby suck, and she mash some of her
spit in the wax too, and then she push it and poke it and roll it in ash
till she see a poppet shape like Black slavegirl.

Her very own self.

Then she hide this Black slavegirl poppet and she go to Fat Fox and beg
him feathers off that big old blackbird he cotch him.

"Black slavegirl don't need her no feathers," say Fat Fox.

"I make a boogy for my boy-baby," she say.

Fat Fox laugh, he know she lie.  "Ain't no blackfeather boogy.  I never
heared of such a thing."

Black slavegirl, she say, "My papa king in Umbawana.  I know all secret
thing."

Fat Fox shake his head, he laugh, he laugh.  "What do you know, anyway?
You can't even talk English.  I'll give you all the blackbird feathers
you want, but when that baby stops sucking you come to me and I'll give
you another one, all Black this time."

She hate Fat Fox like White Boss, but he got him blackbird feathers so
she say, "Yes sir."

Two hands she fill up with feathers.  She laugh inside.  She far away
and dead before Fat Fox never put him no baby in her.

She cover Black slavegirl poppet with feathers till she little girlshape
bird.  Very strong thing, this poppet with her own milk and spit in it,
blackbird feathers on.  Very strong, suck all her life out, but boybaby,
he never kiss no White Boss feet, White Boss never lay no lash on him.

Dark night, moon not showing yet.  She slip out her cabin.

Boybaby suck so he make no sound.  She tie that baby to her teat so he
don't fall.  She toss that poppet on the fire.  Then all the power of
the feather come out, burning, burning, burning.  She feel this fire
pour into her.  She spread her wings, oh so wide, spread them, flap like
she see that big old blackbird flap.  She rise up into the air, high up
in that dark night, she rise and fly, far away north she fly, and when
that moon he come up, she keep him at her right hand so she get this
boybaby to land where White say Black girl never slave, half-te boybaby
never slave.

Come morning and the sun and she don't fly no more.  Oh, like dying,
like dying she think, walking her feet on the ground.  That bird with
her wing broke, she pray for Fat Fox to find her, she know that now.
After you fly, make you sad to walk, hurt you bad to walk, like a slave
with chains, that dirt under your feet.

But she walk with that boy-baby all morning and now she come to this
wide river.  This close I come, say runaway Black slavegirl.  I fly this
far, yes I fly this river across.  But that sun come up and I corn down
before this river.  Now I never cross, old finder find me somehow, whup
me half dead, take my boy-baby, sell him south.

Not me.  I trick them.  I die first.

No, I die second.

Other folks could argue about whether slavery was a mortal sin or just a
quaint custom.  Other folks could bicker on about how Emancipationists
were too crazy to put up with even though slavery was a real bad thing.
Other folks could look at Blacks and feel sorry for them but still be
somewhat glad they were mostly in Africa or in the Crown Colonies or in
Canada or somewhere else far and gone.  Peggy couldn't afford the luxury
of having opinions on the subject.  all she knew was that no heartfire
ever was in such pain as the soul of a Black who lived in the thin dark
shadow of the lash.

Peggy leaned out the attic window, called out: "Papa!"

He strode out from the front of the house, walked into the road, where
he could look up and see her window.  "You call me, Peggy?"

She just looked at him, said naught, and that was all the signal that he
needed.  He good-byed and fare-thee-welled that guest so fast the poor
old coot was halfway into the main part of town before he knew what hit
him.  Pa was already inside and up the stairs.

"A girl with a babe," she told him.  "On the far side of the Ohio,
scared and thinking of killing herself if she's caught."

"How far along the Ohio?"

"Just down from the Hatrack Mouth, near as I can guess.  Papa, I'm
coming with you."

"No you're not."

"Yes I am, Papa.  You'll never find her, not you nor ten more like you.
She's too scared of White men, and she's got cause."

Papa looked at her, unsure what to do.  He'd never let her come before,
but usually it was Black men what ran off.  But then, usually she found
them this side the Ohio, lost and scared, so it was safer.

Crossing into Appalachee, it was prison for sure if they were caught
helping a Black escape.  Prison if it wasn't a quick rope on a tree.

Emancipationists didn't fare well south of the Ohio, and still less the
kind of Emancipationist who helped run-off bucks and ewes and
pickaninnies get north to French country up in Canada.

"Too dangerous across the river," he said.

"All the more reason you need me.  To find her, and to spot if anyone
else happens along."

"Your mother would kill me if she knew I was taking you."

"Then I'll leave now, out the back."

"Tell her you're going to visit Mrs.  Smith-"

"I'll tell her nothing or I'll tell the truth, Papa."

"Then I'll stay up here and pray the good Lord saves my life by not
letting her notice you leaving.  We'll meet up at Hatrack Mouth come
sundown."

"Can't we-"

"No we can't, not a minute sooner," he said.  "Can't cross the river
till dark.  If they catch her or she dies afore we get there then it's
just too bad, cause we can't cross the Ohio in the daylight, bet your
life on that."

Noise in the forest, this scare Black slavegirl very bad.  Trees grab
her, owls screech out telling where they find her, this river just laugh
at her all along.  She can't move cause she fall in the dark, she hurt
this baby.  She can't stay cause they find her sure.  Flying don't fool
them finders, they look far and see her even a hand of hands away off.

A step for sure.  Oh, Lord God Jesus save me from this devil in the
dark.

A step, and breathing, and branches they brush aside.  But no lantern!
Whatever come it see me in the dark!  Oh, Lord God Moses Savior Abraham.

"Girl."

That voice, I hear that voice, I can't breathe.  Can you hear it, little
boy-baby?  Or do I dream this voice?  This lady voice, very soft lady
voice.  Devil got no lady voice, everybody know, ain't that so?

"Girl, I come to take you across the river and help you and your baby
get north and free."

I don't find no words no more, not slave words or Umbawa talk.

When I put on feathers do I lose my words?

"We got a good stout rowboat and two strong men to row.  I know you
understand me and I know you trust me and I know you want to come.

So you just set there, girl, you hold my hand, there, that's my hand,
you don't have to say a word, you just hold my hand.  There's some White
men but they're my friends and they won't touch you.

Nobody's going to touch you except me, you believe that, girl, you just
believe it."

Her hand it touch my skin very cool and soft like this lady voice.

This lady angel, this Holy Virgin Mother of God.

Lots of steps, heavy steps, and now lanterns and lights and big old
White men but this lady she just hold on my hand.

"Scared plumb to death."

"Look at this girl.  She's most wasted 'away to nothing."

"How many days she been without eatiniell Big men's voices like White
Boss who give her this baby.

"She only left her plantation last night," said the Lady.

How this White lady know?  She know everything, Eve the mama of all
babies.  No time to talk, no time to pray, move very quick, lean on this
White lady, walk and walk and walk to this boat it lie waiting in the
water just like I dream, O!  here the boat little boy-baby, boat lift us
cross the Jordan to the Promise Land.

They were halfway across the river when the Black girl started shaking
and crying and chattering.

"Hush her up," said Horace Guester.

"There's nobody near us," answered Peggy.  "No one to hear."

"What's she babbling about?" asked Po Doggly.  He was a pig farmer from
near Hatrack Mouth and for a moment Peggy thought he was talking about
her.  But no, it was the Black girl he meant.

"She's talking in her African tongue, I reckon," said Peggy.

"This girl is really something, how she got away."

"With a baby and all," agreed PoOh , the baby," said Peggy.  "I've got
to hold the baby."

"Why's that?" asked Papa.

"Because you're both going to have to carry her," she said.  'From shore
to the wagon, at least.  There's no way this child can walk another
step."

When they got to shore, they did just that.  Po's old wagon was no great
shakes for comfort-one old horseblanket was about as soft as it was
going to get-but they laid her out and if she minded she didn't say so.
Horace held the lantern high and looked at her.  "You're plumb right,
Peggy."

"What about?" she asked.

"Calling her a child.  I swear she couldn't be thirteen.  I swear it.

And her with a baby.  You sure this baby's hers?"

"I'm sure," said Peggy.

Po Doggly chuckled.  "Oh, you know them guineas, just like bunny
rabbits, the minute they can they do." Then he remembered that Peggy was
there.  "Begging your pardon, ma'am.  We don't never have ladies along
till tonight."

"It's her pardon you have to beg," said Peggy coldly.  "This child is a
mixup.  Her owner sired this boy without a by-your-leave.  I reckon you
understand me."

"I won't have you discussing such things," said Horace Guester.

His temper was hot, all right.  "Bad enough you coming along on this
without you knowing all this kind of thing about this poor girl, it
ain't right telling her secrets like that."

Peggy fell silent and stayed that way all the ride home.  That was what
happened whenever she spoke frankly which is why she almost never did.
The girl's suffering made her forget herself and talk too much.

Now Papa was thinking on about how much his daughter knew about this
Black girl in just a few minutes, and worrying how much she knew about
him.

Do you want to know what I know, Papa?  I know why you do this.

You're not like Po Doggly, Papa, who doesn't think much of Blacks but
hates seeing any wild thing cooped up.  He does this, helping slaves
make their way to Canada, cause he's just got that need in him to set
them free.  But you, Papa, you do it to pay back your secret sin.

Your pretty little secret who smiled at you like heartbreak in person
and you could've said no but you didn't, you said yes oh yes.

While Mama was expecting me, it was, and you were off in Dekane buying
supplies, you stayed there a week and had that woman must be ten times
in six days, I remember every one of those times as clear as you do, I
can feel you dreaming about her in the night.  Hot with shame, hotter
with desire, I know just how a man feels when he wants a woman so bad
his skin itches and he can't hold still.  All these years you've hated
yourself for what you did and hated yourself all the more for loving
that memory, and so you pay for it.  You risk going to jail or getting
hung up in a tree somewhere for the crows to pick, not because you love
the Black man but because you hope maybe doing good for God's children
might just set you free of your own secret love of evil.

And here's the funny thing, Papa.  If you knew I knew your secret you
would probably die, it might just kill you on the spot.  And yet if I
could tell you, just tell you that I know, then I could tell you
something else on top of that, I could say, Papa, don't you see that
it's your knack?  You who thinks he never had no knack, but you got one.

It's the knack for making folks feel loved.  They come to your inn and
they feel right to home.  Well you saw her, and she was hungry, that
woman in Dekane, she needed to feel the way you make folks feel, needed
you so bad.  And it's hard, Papa, hard not to love a body who loves you
so powerful, who hangs onto you like clouds hanging onto the moon,
knowing you're going to go on, knowing you'll never stay, but hungering,
Papa.  I looked for that woman, looked for her heartfire, far and wide I
searched for her, and I found her.  I know where she is.

She ain't young now like you remember.  But she's still pretty, pretty
as you recall her, Papa.  And she's a good woman, and you done her no
harm.  She remembers you fondly, Papa.  She knows God forgave her and
you both.  It's you who won't forgive, Papa.

Such a sad thing, Peggy thought, coming home in that wagon.

Papa's doing something that would make him a hero in any other
daughter's eyes.  A great man.  But because I'm a torch, I know the
truth.  He doesn't come out here like Hector afore the gates of Troy,
risking death to save other folks.  He comes slinking like a whipped
dog, cause he is a whipped dog inside.  He runs out here to hide from a
sin that the good Lord would have forgave long ago if he just allowed
forgiveness to be possible.

Soon enough, though, Peggy stopped thinking it was sad about her Papa.
It was sad about most everybody, wasn't it?  But most sad people just
kept right on being sad, hanging onto misery like the last keg of water
in a drouth.  Like the way Peggy kept waiting here for Alvin even though
she knew he'd bring no joy to her.

It was that girl in the back of the wagon who was different.  She had a
terrible misery coming on her, going to lose her boy-baby, but she
didn't just set and wait for it to happen so she could grieve.  She said
no.  Plain no, just like that, I won't let you sell this boy south on
me, even to a good rich family.  A rich man's slave is still a slave,
ain't he?

And down south means he'll be even farther away from where he can run
off and make it north.  Peggy could feel those feelings in that girl,
even as she tossed and moaned in the back of the wagon.

Something more, though.  That girl was more a hero than Papa or Po
Doggly either one.  Because the only way she could think to get away was
to use a witchery so strong that Peggy never even heard of it before.
Never dreamed that Black folks had such lore.  But it was no lie, it was
no dream neither.  That girl flew.  Made a wax poppet and feathered it
and burnt it up.  Burnt it right up.  It let her fly all this way, this
long hard way till the sun came up, far enough that Peggy saw her and
they took her across the Ohio.  But what a price that runaway had paid
for it.

When they got back to the roadhouse, Mama was just as angry as Peggy
ever saw her.  "It's a crime you should have a whipping for, taking your
sixteen-year-old daughter out to commit a crime in the darkness," But
Papa didn't answer.  He didn't have to, once he carried that girl inside
and laid her on the floor before the fire.

"She can't have ate a thing for days.  For weeks!" cried Mama.

"And her brow is like to burn my hand off just to touch her. Fetch me a
pan of water, Horace, to mop her brow, while I bet up the broth for her
to sip-" No, Mama," said Peggy.  "Best you find some milk for the baby."

"The baby won't die, and this girl's likely to, don't you tell me my
business, I know physicking for this, anyway-"

"No, Mama," said Peggy.  "She did a witchery with a wax poppet.

It's a Black sort of witchery, but she had the know-how and she had the
power, being the daughter of a king in Africa.  She knew the price and
now she can't help but pay."

"Are you saying this girl's bound to die?" asked Mama.

"She made a poppet of herself, Mama, and put it on the fire.  It gave
her the wings to fly one whole night.  But the cost of it is the rest of
her life."

Papa looked sick at heart.  "Peggy, that's plain crazy.  What good would
it do her to escape from slavery if she was just going to die?

Why not kill herself there and save the trouble?"

Peggy didn't have to answer.  The baby she was a-holding started to cry
right then, and that was all the answer there was.

"I'll get milk," said Papa.  "Christian Larsson's bound to have a gill
or so to spare even this time of the night."

Mama stopped him, though.  "Think again, Horace," she said.  "It's near
midnight now.  What'll you tell him you need the milk for?"

Horace sighed, laughed at his own foolishness.  "For a runaway
slavegirl's little pickaninny baby." But then he turned red, getting hot
with anger.  "What a crazy thing this Black girl done," he said.

"She came all this way, knowing that she'd die, and now what does she
reckon we'll do with a little pickaninny like that?  We sure can't take
it north and lay it across the Canadian border and let it bawl till some
Frenchman comes to take it."

"I reckon she just figures it's better to die free than live slave,"
said Peggy.  "I reckon she just knew that whatever life that baby found
here had to be better than what it was there."

The girl lay there before the fire, breathing soft, her eyes closed.

"She's asleep, isn't she?" asked Mama.

"Not dead yet," said Peggy, "but nothearing us."

"Then I'll tell you plain, this is a bad piece of trouble," said Mama.

"We can't have people knowing you bring runaway slaves through here.
Word of that would spread so fast we'd have two dozen finders camped
here every week of the year, and one of them'd be bound to take a shot
at you sometime from ambush."

"Nobody has to know," said Papa.

"What are you going to do, tell folks you happened to trip over her dead
body in the woods?"

Peggy wanted to shout at them, She ain't dead yet, so mind how you talk!
But the truth was they had to get some things planned, and quick.  What
if one of the guests woke up in the night and came downstairs?  There'd
be no keeping this secret then.

"How soon will she die?" Papa asked.  "By morning?"

"She'll be dead before sunrise, Papa."

Papa nodded.  "Then I better get busy.  The girl I can take care of.

You women can think of something to do with that pickaninny, I hope."

"Oh, we can, can we?" said Mama.

"Well I know I can't, so you'd better."

"Well then maybe I'll just tell folks it's my own babe."

Papa didn't get mad.  Just grinned, he did, and said, "Folks ain't going
to believe that even if you dip that boy in cream three times a day."

He went outside and got Po Doggly to help him dig a grave.

"Passing this baby off as born around here ain't such a bad idea," said
Mama.  "That Black family that lives down in that boggy landyou remember
two years back when some slaveowner tried to prove he used to own them?
What's their name, Peggy?"

Peggy knew them far better than any other White folks in Hatrack River
did; she watched over them the same as everyone else, knew all their
children, knew all their names.  "They call their name Berry," she said.
"Like a noble house, they just keep that family name no matter what job
each one of them does."

"Why couldn't we pass this baby off as theirs?"

"They're poor, Mama," said Peggy.  "They can't feed another mouth."

"We could help with that," said Mama.  "We have extra."

"Just think a minute, Mama, how that'd look.  Suddenly the Berrys get
them a light-colored baby like this, you know he's half-White just to
look at him.  And then Horace Guester starts bringing gifts down to the
Berry house."

Mama's face went red.  "What do you know about such things?"

she demanded.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mama, I'm a torch.  And you know people would
start to talk, you know they would."

Mama looked at the Black girl lying there.  "You got us into a whole lot
of trouble, little girl."

The baby started fussing.

Mama stood up and walked to the window, as if she could see out into the
night and find some answer writ on the sky.  Then, abruptly, she headed
for the door, opened it.

"Mama," said Peggy.

"There's more than one way to pluck a goose," said Mama.

Peggy saw what Mama had thought of.  If they couldn't take the baby down
to the Berry place, they could maybe keep the baby here at the roadhouse
and say they were taking care of it for the Berrys cause they were so
poor.  As long as the Berry family went along with the tale, it would
account for a half-Black baby showing up one day.

And nobody'd think the baby was Horace's bastard-not if his wife brought
it right into the house.

"You realize what you're asking them, don't you?" said Peggy.

"Everybody's going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr.
Berry's heifer."

Mama looked so surprised Peggy almost laughed out loud.  "I didn't think
Blacks cared about such things," she said.

Peggy shook her head.  "Mama, the Berrys are just about the best
Christians in Hatrack River.  They have to be, to keep forgiving the way
White folks treat them and their children."

Mama closed the door again and stood inside, leaning on it.  "How do
folks treat their children?"

It was a pertinent question, Peggy knew, and Mama had thought of it only
just in time.  It was one thing to look at that scrawny fussing little
Black baby and say, I'm going to take care of this child and save his
life.  It was something else again to think of him being five and seven
and ten and seventeen years old, a young buck living right there in the
house.

"I don't think you have to fret about that," said Little Peggy, "not
half so much as how you plan to treat this boy.  Do you plan to raise
him up to be your servant, a lowborn child in your big fine house?

If that's so, then this girl died for nothing, she might as well have
let them sell him south."

"I never hankered for no slave," said Mama.  "Don't you go saying that I
did."

"Well, what then?  Are you going to treat him as your own son, and stand
with him against all corners, the way you would if you'd ever borne a
son of your own?"

Peggy watched as Mama thought of that, and suddenly she saw all kinds of
new paths open up in Mama's heartfire.  A son-that's what this
half-White boy could be.  And if folks around here looked crosseyed at
him on account of him not being all White, they'd have to reckon with
Margaret Guester, they would, and it'd be a fearsome day for them,
they'd have no terror at the thought of herr, not after what she'd put
them through.

Mama hadn't felt such a powerful grim determination in all the years
Peggy'd been looking into her heart.  It was one of those times when
somebody's whole future changed right before her eyes.  All the old
paths had been pretty much the same; Mama had no choices that would
change her life.  But now, this dying girl had brought a transformation.
Now there were hundreds of new paths open, and all of them had a little
boy-child in them, needing her the way her daughter'd never needed her.
Set upon by strangers, cruelly treated by the boys of the town, he'd
come to her again and again for protection, for teaching, for
toughening, the kind of thing that Peggy'd never done.

That's why I disappointed you, wasn't it, Mama?  Cause I knew too much,
too young.  You wanted me to come to you in my confusion, with my
questions.  But I never had no questions, Mama, cause I knew from
childhood up.  I knew what it meant to be a woman from the memories in
your own head.  I knew about married love without you telling me.  I
never had a tearful night pressed up against your shoulder, crying cause
some boy I longed for wouldn't look at me; I never longed for any boy
around here.  I never did a thing you dreamed your little girl would do,
cause I had a torch's knack, and I knew everything and needed nothing
that you wanted to give me.

But this half-Black boy, he'll need you no matter what his knack might
be.  I see down all those paths, that if you take him in, if you raise
him up, he'll be more son to you than I ever was your daughter, though
your blood is half of mine.

"Daughter," said Mama, "if I go through this door, will it turn out well
for the boy?  And for us, too?"

"Are you asking me to See for you, Mama?"

"I am, Little Peggy, and I never asked for that before, never on my own
behalf."

"Then I'll tell you." Peggy hardly needed to look far down the paths of
Mama's life to find how much pleasure she'd have in the boy.

"If you take him in, and treat him like your own son, you'll never
regret doing it."

"What about your papa?  Will he treat him right?"

"Don't you know your own husband?" asked Peggy.

Mama walked a step toward her, her hand all clenched up even though she
never laid a hand on Peggy.  "Don't get fresh with me," she said.

"I'm talking the way I talk when I See," said Peggy.  "You come to me as
a torch, I talk as a torch to you."

"Then say what you have to say."

"It's easy enough.  If you don't know how your husband will treat this
boy, you don't know that man at all."

"So maybe I don't," said Mama.  "Maybe I don't know him at all.

Or maybe I do, and I want you to tell me if I'm right."

"You're right," said Peggy.  "He'll treat him fair, and make him feel
loved all the days of his life."

"But will he really love him?"

There wasn't no chance that Peggy'd answer that question.  Love wasn't
even in the picture for Papa.  He'd take care of the boy because he
ought to, because he felt a bounden duty, but the boy'd never know the
difference, it'd feel like love to him, and it'd be a lot more
dependable than love ever was.  But to explain that to Mama would mean
telling her how Papa did so many things because he felt so bad about his
ancient sins, and there'd never be a time in Mama's life when she was
ready to hear that tale.

So Peggy just looked at Mama and answered her the way she answered other
folks who pried too deep into things they didn't really want to know.
"That's for him to answer," Peggy said.  "All you need to know is that
the choice you already made in your heart is a good one.

Already just deciding that has changed your life."

"But I haven't even decided yet," said Mama.

In Mama's heart there wasn't a single path left, not a single one, in
which she didn't get the Berrys to say it was their boy, and leave him
with her to raise.

"Yes you have," said Peggy.  "And you're glad of it."

Mama turned and left, closing the door gentle behind her, so as not to
wake the traveling preacher who was sleeping in the room upstairs of the
door.

Peggy had just one moment's unease, and she wasn't even sure why.

If she'd thought about it a minute, she'd have known it was on account
of how she cheated her Mama without even knowing it.

When Peggy did a Seeing for anybody else, she always took care to look
far down the paths of their life, looking for darkness from causes not
even guessed at.  But Peggy was so sure she knew her Mama and Papa, she
didn't even bother looking except at what was coming up right away.

That's how it goes within a family.  You think you know each other so
well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.

It wouldn't be years yet till Peggy would think back on this day, and
try to figure why she didn't See what was coming.

Sometimes she'd even imagine that her knack failed her.  But it didn't.

She failed her own knack.  She wasn't the first to do so, nor the last,
nor even the worst, but there's few ever lived to regret it more.

The moment of unease passed, and Peggy forgot it as her thoughts turned
to the Black girl on the common-room floor.  She was awake, her eyes
open.  The baby was still mewling.  Without the girl saying a thing,
Peggy knew she was willing for the babe to suckle, if she had anything
in her breasts to suck on out.  The girl hadn't even strength to open up
her faded cotton shirt.  Peggy had to sit beside her, cradling the child
against her own thighs while she fumbled the girl's buttons open with
her free hand.  The girl's chest was so skinny, her ribs so stark and
bare, that her breasts looked to be saddlebags tossed onto a rail fence.
But the nipple still stood up for the baby to suck, and a white froth
soon appeared around the baby's lips, so there was something there, even
now, even at the very end of his mama's life.

The girl was far too weak to talk, but she didn't need to; Peggy heard
what she wanted to say, and answered her.  "My own mama's going to keep
your boy," said Peggy.  "And no wise is she going to let any man make a
slave of him."

That was what the girl wanted most to hear-that and the sound of her
greedy boy-baby slurping and humming and squealing at her breast.

But Peggy wanted her to know more than that before she died.

"Your boy-baby's going to know about you," she told the girl.

"He's going to hear how you gave your life so you could fly away and
take him here to freedom.  Don't you think he'll ever forget you, cause
he won't.

Then Peggy looked into the child's heartfire, searched there for what
he'd be.  Oh, that was a painful thing, because the life of a halfWhite
boy in a White town was hard no matter which of the paths of his life he
chose.  Still, she saw enough to know the nature of the babe whose
fingers scratched and clutched at his mama's naked chest.

"And he'll be a man worth dying for, too, I promise you that."

The girl was glad to hear it.  It brought her peace enough that she
could sleep again.  After a time the babe, satisfied, also fell asleep.

Peggy picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and laid him in the crook
of his mama's arm.  Every last moment of your mama's life you'll be with
her, she told the boychild silently.  We'll tell you that, too, that she
held you in her arms when she died.

When she died.  Papa was out with Po Doggly, digging her grave; Mama was
off at the Berrys, to persuade them to help her save the baby's life and
freedom; and here was Peggy, thinking as if the girl was already dead.

But she wasn't dead, not yet.  And all of a sudden it came to Peggy,
with a flash of anger that she was too stupid to think of it before,
that there was one soul she knew of who had the knack in him to heal the
sick.  Hadn't he knelt by Ta-Kumsaw at the battle of Detroit, that great
Red man's body riddled with bullet holes, hadn't Alvin knelt there and
healed him up?  Alvin could save this girl, if he was here.

She cast off in the darkness, searching for the heartfire that burned so
bright, the heartfire she knew better than any in the world, better even
than her own.  And there he was, running in the darkness, traveling the
way Red men did, like he was asleep, and the land around him was his
soul.  He was coming faster than any White could ever come, even with
the fastest horse on the best road between the Wobbish and the Hatrack,
but he wouldn't be here till noon tomorrow, and by then this runaway
slavegirl would be dead and in the ground up in the family graveyard. By
twelve hours at most she'd miss the one man in this country who could
have saved her life.

Wasn't that the way of it?  Alvin could save her, but he'd never know
she needed saving.  While Peggy, who couldn't do a thing, she knew all
that was happening, knew all the things that might happen, knew the one
thing that should happen if the world was good.  It wasn't good.

It wouldn't happen.

What a terrible gift it was, to be a torch, to know all these things
a-coming, and have so little power to change them.  The only power she'd
ever had was just the words of her mouth, telling folks, and even then
she couldn't be sure what they'd choose to do.  Always there'd be some
choice they could make that would set them down a path even worse than
the one she wanted to save them from-and so many times in their
wickedness or cantankerousness or just plain bad luck, they'd make that
terrible choice and then things'd be worse for them than if Peggy'd just
kept still and never said a thing.  I wish I didn't know.

I wish I had some hope that Alvin would come in time.

I wish I had some hope this girl would live.  I wish that I could save
her life myself.

And then she thought of the many times she had saved a life.

Alvin's life, using Alvin's caul.  At that moment hope did spark up in
her heart, for surely, just this once, she could use a bit of the last
scrap of Alvin's caul to save this girl, to restore her.

Peggy leapt up and ran clumsily to the stairs, her legs so numb from
sitting on the floor that she couldn't hardly feel her own footsteps on
the bare wood.  She tripped on the stairs and made some noise, but none
of the guests woke up, as far as she noticed right off like that.  Up
the stairs, then up the attic ladderway that Oldpappy made into a proper
stairway not three months afore he died.  She threaded her way among the
trunks and old furniture until she reached her room up against the west
end of the house.  Moonlight came in through her south-facing window,
making a squared-off pattern on the floor.  She pried up the floorboard
and took the box from the place where she hid it whenever she left the
room.

She walked too heavy or this one guest slept too light, but as she came
down the ladderway, there he stood, skinny white legs sticking out from
under his longshirt, a-gazing down the stairs, then back toward his
room, like as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to go in or out,
up or down.  Peggy looked into his heartfire, just to find out whether
he'd been downstairs and seen the girl and her baby-if he had, then all
their thought and caution had been in vain.

But he hadn't-it was still possible.

"Why are you still dressed for going out?" he asked.  "At this time of
the morning, too?"

She gently laid her finger against his lips.  To silence him, or at
least that's how the gesture began.  But she knew right away that she
was the first woman ever to touch this man upon the face since his mama
all those many years ago.  She saw that in that moment his heart filled,
not with lust, but with the vague longings of a lonely man.  He was the
minister who'd come day before yesterday morning, a traveling
preacher-from Scotland, he said.  She'd hardly paid him no mind, her
being so preoccupied with knowing Alvin was on his way back.

But now all that mattered was to send him back into his room, quick as
could be, and she knew one sure way to do it.  She put her hands on his
shoulders, getting a strong grip behind his neck, and pulled him down to
where she could kiss him fair on the lips.  A good long buss, like he
never had from a woman in all his days.

Just like she expected, he was back into his room almost before she let
go of him.  She might've laughed at that, except she knew from his
heartfire it wasn't her kiss sent him back, like she planned.  It was
the box she still held in one hand, which she had pressed up against the
back of his neck when she held him.  The box with Alvin's caul inside.

The moment it touched him, he felt what was inside.  It wasn't no knack
of his, it was something else-just being so near something of Alvin's
done it to him.  She saw the vision of Alvin's face loom up inside his
mind, with such fear and hatred like she never seen before.

Only then did she realize that he wasn't just any minister.  He was
Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, who once had been a preacher back in
Vigor Church.  Reverend Thrower, who once had tried to kill the boy,
except Alvin's pa prevented him.

The fear of a woman's kiss was nothing to him compared to his fear of
Alvin Junior.  The trouble was that now he was so afraid he was already
thinking of leaving right this minute and getting out of this roadhouse.
If he did that, he'd have to come downstairs and then he'd see all, just
what she meant to fend off.  This was how it went so often he tried to
stave off a bad thing and it turned out worse, something so unlikely she
didn't see it.  How could she not have reckonized who he was?  Hadn't
she seen him through Alvin's eyes all those many times in years past?
But he'd changed this last year, he looked thin and haunted and older.
Besides, she wasn't looking for him here, and anyhow it was too late to
undo what she already done.  All that mattered now was to keep him in
his room.

So she opened his door and followed him inside and looked him square in
the face and said, "He was born here."

"Who?" he said.  His face was white as if he'd just seen the devil
himself.  He knew who she meant.

"And he's coming back.  Right now he's on his way.  You're only safe if
you stay in your room tonight, and leave in the morning at first light."

"I don't know-know what you're talking about."

Did he really think he could fool a torch?  Maybe he didn't know she
was-no, he knew, he knew, he just didn't believe in torching and hexing
and knacks and suchlike.  He was a man of science and higher religion. A
blamed fool.  So she'd have to prove to him that what he feared most was
so.  She knew him, and she knew his secrets.  "You tried to kill Alvin
Junior with a butchery knife," she said.

That did it, right enough.  He fell to his knees.  "I'm not afraid to
die," he said.  Then he began to murmur the Lord's prayer.

"Pray all night, if you like," she said, "but stay in your room to do
it."

Then she stepped through the door and closed it.  She was halfway down
the stairs when she heard the bar fall into place across the door.

Peggy didn't even have time to care whether she caused him undue
misery-he wasn't really a murderer in his heart.  All she cared for now
was to get the caul down to where she could use it to help the runaway,
if by any chance Alvin's power was really hers to use.  So much time
that minister had cost her.  So many of the slavegirl's precious
breaths.

She was still breathing, wasn't she?  Yes.  No.  The babe lay sleeping
beside her, but her chest didn't move even as much as him, her bps
didn't make even so much as a baby's breath on Peggy's hand.  But her
heartfire still burned!  Peggy could see that plain enough, still burned
bright because she was so strong-hearted, that slavegirl was.

So Peggy opened up the box, took out the scrap of caul, and rubbed a dry
corner of it to dust between her fingers, whispering to her, "Live, get
strong." She tried to do what Alvin did when he healed, the way he could
feel the small broken places in a person's body, set them right.  Hadn't
she watched him as he did it so many times before?  But it was
different, doing it herself.  It was strange to her, she didn't have the
vision for it, and she could feel the life ebbing away from the girl's
body, the heart stilled, the lungs slack, the eyes open but unlighted,
and at last the heartfire flashed like a shooting star, all sudden and
bright, and it was gone.

Too late.  If I hadn't stopped in the hall upstairs, hadn't had to deal
with the ministerBut no, no, she couldn't blame herself, it wasn't her
power anyway, it was too late before she began.  The girl had been dying
all through her body.  Even Alvin himself, if he was here, even he
couldn't have done it.  It was never more than a slim hope.  Never even
hope enough that she could see a single pathway where it worked.

So she wouldn't do like so many did, she wouldn't endlessly blame
herself when after all she'd done her best at a task that had little
hope in it from the start.

Now that the girl was dead, she couldn't leave the baby there to feel
his mama's arm grow cold.  She picked him up.  He stirred, but slept on
in the way that babies do.  Your mama's dead, 4ittle halfWhite boy, but
you'll have my mama, and my papa too.  They got love enough for a little
one; you won't starve for it like some children I seen.

So you make the best of it, boy-baby.  Your mama died to bring you
here-you make the best of it, and you'll be something, right enough.

You'll be something, she heard herself whispering.  You' be something,
and so will I.

She made her decision even before she realized there was even a decision
to be made.  She could feel her own future changing even though she
couldn't see rightly what it was going to be.

That slavegirl guessed at the likeliest future-you don't have to be a
torch to see some things plain.  It was an ugly life ahead, losing her
baby, living as a slave till the day she dropped.  Yet she saw just the
faintest glimmer of hope for her baby, and once she saw it, she didn't
hold back, no sir, that glimmer was worth paying her life for.

And now look at me, thought Peggy.  Here I look down the paths of
Alvin's LIFE and see misery for myself-nowhere near as bad as that
slavegirl's, but bad enough.  Now and then I catch the shine of a bright
chance for happiness, a strange and backward way to have Alvin and have
him love me, too.  Once I seen it, am I going to sit on my hands and
watch that bright hope die, just because I'm not sure how to get to it
from here?

If that beat-down child can make her own hope out of wax and ash and
feathers and a bit of herself, then I can make my own life, too.

Somewhere there's a thread that if I just lay hold on it, it'll lead me
to happiness.  And even if I never find that particular thread, it'll be
better than the despair waiting for me if I stay.  Even if I never
become a part of Alvin's life when he comes to manhood, well, that's
still not as steep a price as that slavegirl paid for freedom.

When Alvin comes tomorrow, I won't be here.

That was her decision, just like that.  Why, she could hardly believe
she never thought of it before.  Of all people in the whole of Hatrack
River, she ought to have knowed that there's always another choice.

Folks talked on about how they were'forced into misery and woe, they
didn't have no choice at all-but that runaway girl showed that there's
always a way out, long as you remember even death can be a straight
smooth road sometimes.

I don't even have to get no blackbird feathers to fly, neither.

A Peggy sat there holding the baby, making bold and fearsome plans for
how she'd leave in the morning afore Alvin could arrive.  Whenever she
felt a-scared of what she'd set herself to do, she cast her gaze down on
that girl, and the sight of her was comfort, it truly was.  I might
someday end up like you, runaway girl, dead in some stranger's house.
But better that unknown future than one I knew all along I'd hate, and
then did nothing to avoid.

Will I do it, will I really do it in the morning, when the time's come
and no turning back?  She touched Alvin's caul with her free hand, just
snaking her fingers into the box, and what she saw in Alvin's future
made her feel like singing.  Used to be most paths showed them meeting
up and starting out her life of misery.  Now only a few of those paths
were there-in most of Alvin's futures, she saw him come to Hatrack River
and search for the torch girl and find her gone.  Just changing her mind
tonight had closed down most of the roads to misery.

Mama came back with the Berrys before Papa came in from gravedigging.
Anga Berry was a heavyset woman with laughter lines outnumbering the
lines of worry on her face, though both kinds were plain enough.  Peggy
knew her well and liked her better than most folks in Hatrack River. She
had a temper but she also had compassion, and Peggy wasn't surprised at
all to see her rush to the body of the girl and take up that cold limp
hand and press it to her bosom.

She murmured words almost like a lullaby, her voice was so low and sweet
and kind.

"She's dead," said Mock Berry.  "But that baby's strong I see."

Peggy stood up and let Mock see the baby in her arms.  She didn't like
him half so well as she liked his wife.  He was the kind of man who'd
slap a child so hard blood flowed, just cause he didn't like what was
said or done.  It was almost worse cause he didn't rage when he did it.
Like he felt nothing at all, to hurt somebody or not hurt somebody made
no powerful difference in his mind.  But he worked hard, and even though
he was poor his family got by; and nobody who knew Mock paid heed to
them crude folks what said there wasn't a buck who wouldn't steal or a
ewe you couldn't tup.

"Healthy," said Mock.  Then he turned to Mama.  "When he grow up to be a
big old buck, ma'am, you still aim to call him your boy?  Or you make
him sleep out back in the shed with the animals?"

Well, he wasn't one to pussyfoot around the issue, Peggy saw.

"Shut your mouth, Mock," said his wife.  "And you give me that baby,
Miss.  I just wish I'd knowed he was coming or I'd've kept my youngest
on the tit to keep the milk in.  Weaned that boy two months back and
he's been nothing but trouble since, but you ain't no trouble, baby, you
ain't no trouble at all." She cooed to the baby just like she cooed to
his dead mama, and he didn't wake up either.

"I told you.  I'll raise him as my son," said Mama.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but I just never heard of no White woman doing such a
thing," said Mock.

"What I say," said Mama, "that's what I do."

Mock thought on that a moment.  Then he nodded.  "I reckon so," he said.
"I reckon I never heard you break your word, not even to Black folks."
He grinned.  "Most White folk allow as how lying to a buck ain't the
same as lying.

"We'll do like you asked," said Anga Berry.  "I'll tell anybody who ask
me this is my boy, only we gave him to you cause we was too poor."

"But don't you ever go forgetting that it's a lie," said Mock.

"Don't you ever go thinking that if it really was our own baby, we'd
ever give him up.  And don't you ever go thinking that my wife here ever
would let some White man put a baby in her, and her being married to
me."

Mama studied Mock for a minute, taking his measure in the way she had.
"Mock Berry, I hope you come and visit me any day you like while this
boy is in my house, and I'll show you how one White woman keeps her
word."

Mock laughed.  "I reckon you a regular Mancipationist."

Papa came in then, covered with sweat and dirt.  He shook hands with the
Berrys, and in a minute they told him the tale they all would tell.  He
made his promises too, to raise the boy like his own son.  He even
thought of what never entered Mama's head-he said a few words to Peggy,
to promise her that they wouldn't give no preference to the boy,
neither.  Peggy nodded.  She didn't want to say much, cause anything she
said would either be a lie or give her plans away; she knew she had no
intention to be in this house for even a single day of this baby's
future here.

"We go on home now, Mrs.  Guester," said Anga.  She handed the baby to
Mama.  "If one of my children wake up with a boogly dream I best be
there or you hear them screams clear up here on the high road."

"Ain't you going have no preacher say words at her grave?" said Mock.

Papa hadn't thought of it.  "We do have a minister upstairs," he said.

But Peggy didn't let him hold that thought for even a moment.

"No," she said, sharp as she could.

Papa looked at her, and knew that she was talking as a torch.

Wasn't no arguing that point.  He just nodded.  "Not this time, Mock,"
he said.  "Wouldn't be safe."

Mama fretted Anga Berry clear to the door.  "Is there anything I ought
to know?" said Mama.  "Is there anything different about Black babies?"

"Oh, powerful different," said Anga.  "But that baby, he half White I
reckon, so you just take care of that White half, and I reckon the Black
half take care of hisself."

"Cow's milk from a pig bladder?" Mama insisted.

"You know all them things," said Anga.  "I learnt everything I know from
you, Mrs.  Guester.  All the women round here do.  How come you asking
me now?  Don't you know I need my sleeps Once the Berrys were gone, Papa
picked up the girl's body and carried her outside.  Not even a coffin,
though they would overlay the corpse with stones to keep the dogs off.
"Light as a feather," he said when first he hoisted her.

"Like the charred carcass of a burnt log."

Which was apt enough, Peggy had to admit.  That's what she was now. Just
ashes.  She'd burnt herself right up.

Mama held the pickaninny boy while Peggy went up into the attic and
fetched down the cradle.  Nobody woke up this time, except that
minister.  He was wide awake behind his door, but he wasn't coming out
for any reason.  Mama and Peggy made up that little bed in Mama's and
Papa's room, and laid the baby in it.  "Tell me if this poor orphan
baby's got him a name," said Mama.

"She never gave him one," said Peggy.  "In her tribe, a woman never got
her a name till she married, and a man had no name till he killed him
his first animal."

"That's just awful," said Mama.  "That ain't even Christian.  Why, she
died unbaptized."

"No," said Peggy.  "She was baptized right enough.  Her owner's wife saw
to that-all the Blacks on their plantation were baptized."

Mama's face went sour.  "I reckon she thought that made her a Christian.
Well, I'll have a name for you, little boy." She grinned wickedly. "What
do you think your papa would do if I named this baby Horace Guester
Junior?"

"Die," said Peggy.

"I reckon so," said Mama.  "I ain't ready to be a widow yet.  So for now
we'll name himh, I can't think, Peggy.  What's a Black man's name?  Or
should I just name him like any White child?"

"Only Black man's name I know is Othello," said Peggy.

"That's a queer name if I ever heard one," said Mama.  "You must've got
that out of one of Whitley Physicker's books."

Peggy said nothing.

"I know," said Mama.  "I know his name.  Cromwell.  The Lord Protector's
name."

"You might better name him Arthur, after the King," said Peggy.

Mama just cackled and laughed at that.  "That's your name, little boy.
Arthur Stuart!  And if the King don't like such a namesake, let him send
an army and I still won't change it.  His Majesty will have to change
his own name first."

Even though she got to bed so late, Peggy woke early next morning.

It was hoofbeats woke herhe didn't have to go to the window to recognize
his heartfire as the minister rode away.  Ride on, Thrower, she said
silently.  You won't be the last to run away this morning, fleeing from
that eleven-year-old boy.

It was the north-facing window she looked out of.  She could see between
the trees to the graveyard up the hill.  She tried to see where the
grave was dug last night, but there wasn't no sign her natural eyes
could see, and in a graveyard there wasn't no heartfires neither,
nothing to help her.  Alvin will see it though, she knew that sure.

He'd head for that graveyard first thing he did, cause his oldest
brother's body lay there, the boy Vigor, who got swept away in the
Hatrack River saving Alvin's mother's LIFE in the last hour before she
gave birth to her seventh son.  But Vigor hung on to life just long
enough, in spite of the river's strongest pubg at him, hung on just long
enough that when Alvin was born he was the seventh of seven living sons.
Peggy herself had watched his heartfire flicker and die right after the
babe was born.  He would've heard that story a thousand times.

So he'd come to that graveyard, and he could feel his way through the
earth and find what lay hidden there.  He'd find that unmarked grave,
that wasted body so fresh buried there.

Peggy took the box with the caul in it, put it deep in a cloth bag along
with her second dress, a petticoat, and the most recent books Whitley
Physicker had brought.  Just because she didn't want to meet him face to
face didn't mean she could forget that boy.  She'd touch the caul again
tonight, or maybe not till morning, and then she'd stand with him in
memory and use his senses to find that nameless Black girl's grave.

Her bag packed, she went downstairs.

Mama had drug the cradle into the kitchen and she was singing to the
baby while she kneaded bread, rocking the cradle with one foot, even
though Arthur Stuart was fast asleep.  Peggy set her bag outside the
kitchen door, walked in and touched her Mama's shoulder.  She hoped a
little that she'd see her Mama grieving something awful when she found
out Peggy'd gone off.  But it wasn't so.  Oh, she'd carry on and rage at
first, but in the times to come she'd miss Peggy less than she might've
guessed.  It was the baby'd take her mind off worrying about her
daughter.  Besides, Mama knew Peggy could take care of herself.

Mama knew Peggy wasn't a one to need to hold a body's hand.  While
Arthur Stuart needed her.

If this was the first time Peggy noticed how her Mama felt about her,
she'd have been hurt deep.  But it was the hundredth time, and she was
used to it, and looked behind it to the reason, and loved her Mama for
being a better soul than most, and forgave her for not loving Peggy
more.

"I love you, Mama," said Peggy.

"I love you too, baby," said Mama.  She didn't even look up nor guess
what Peggy had in mind.

Papa was still asleep.  After all, he dug a grave last night and filled
it too.

Peggy wrote a note.  Sometimes she took care to put in a lot of extra
letters in the fancy way they did in books, but this time she wanted to
make sure Papa could read it for hisself.  That meant putting in no more
letters than it took to make the sounds for reading out loud.

Ilov uPapaandMamabutIgottoleavInoitsrongto YO lev Hatrak with out no
torch but I bin torch sixtn yr.  I seen my fewchr and ile be saf donte
you fret on my acown.

She walked out the front door, carried her bag to the road, and waited
only ten minutes before Doctor Whitley Physicker came along in his
carriage, bound on the first leg of a trip to Philadelphia.

"You didn't wait on the road like this just to hand me back that Milton
I lent you," said Whitley Physicker.

She smiled and shook her head.  "No sir, I'd like you take me with you
to Dekane.  I plan to visit with a friend of my father's, but if you
don't mind the company I'd rather not spend the money for a coach."

Peggy watched him consider for a minute, but she knew he'd let her come,
and without asking her folks, neither.  He was the kind of man thought a
girl had as much worth as any boy, and more than that, he plain liked
Peggy, thought of her as something like a niece.

And he knew that Peggy never lied, so he had no need to check with her
folks.

And she hadn't lied to him, no more than she ever lied when she left off
without telling all she knew.  Papa's old lover, the woman he dreamed of
and suffered for, she lived there in Dekane-widowed for the last few
years, but her mourning time over so she wouldn't have to turn away
company.  Peggy knew that lady well, from watch r off for all these
years.  If I knock on her door, thought Peggy, I don't even have to tell
her I'm Horace Guester's girl, she'd take me in as a stranger, she
would, and care for me, and help me on my way.  But maybe I will tell
her whose daughter I am, and how I knew to come to her, and how Papa
still lives with the aching memory of his love for her.

The carriage rattled over the covered bridge that Alvin's father and
older brothers had built eleven years before, after the river drowned
the oldest son.  Birds nested in the rafters.  It was a mad, musical,
happy sound they made, at least to her ears, chirping so loud inside the
bridge that it sounded like she imagined grand opera ought to be.

They had opera in Camelot, down south.  Maybe someday she'd go and hear
it, and see the King himself in his box.

Or maybe not.  Because someday she might just find the path that led to
that brief but lovely dream, and then she'd have more important things
to do than look at kings or hear the music of the Austrian court played
by lacy Virginia musicians in the fancy opera hall in Camelot.

Alvin was more important than any of these, if he could only find his
way to all his power and what he ought to do with it.

And she was born to be part of it.  That's how easily she slipped into
her dreams of him.  Yet why not?  Her dreams of him, however brief and
hard to find, were true visions of the future, and the greatest joy and
the greatest grief she could find for herself both touched this boy who
wasn't even a man yet, who had never seen her face to face.

But sitting there in the carriage beside Doctor Whitley Physicker, she
forced those thoughts, those visions from her mind.  What comes will
come, she thought.  If I find that path I find it, and if not, then not.
For now, at least, I'm free.  Free of my watch aloft for the town of
Hatrack, and free of building all my plans around that little boy.  And
what if I end up free of him forever?  What if I find another future
that doesn't even have him in it?  That's the likeliest end of things.
Give me time enough, I'll even forget that scrap of a dream I had, and
find my own good road to a peaceful end, instead of bending myself to
fit his troubled path.

The dancing horses pulled the carriage along so brisk that the wind
caught and tossed her hair.  She closed her eyes and pretended she was
flying, a runaway just learning to be free.

Let him find his path to greatness now without me.  Let me have a happy
life far from him.  Let some other woman stand beside him in his glory.
Let another woman kneel a-weeping at his grave.

LieS

Eleven-year-old Alvin lost half his name when he came to Hatrack River.
Back home in the town of Vigor Church, not far from where the
Tippy-Canoe poured its waters into the Wobbish, everybody knowed his
father was Alvin, miller for the town and the country round about.

Alvin Miller.  Which made his namesake, his seventh son, Alvin Junior.

Now, though, he was going to live in a place where there wasn't six
folks who so much as ever met his pa.  No need for names like Miller and
Junior.  He was just Alvin, plain Alvin, but hearing that lone name made
him feel like only half hisself.

He came to Hatrack River on foot, hundreds of miles across Wobbish and
Ohio territories.  When he set out from home it was with a pair of
sturdy broke-in boots on and a pack of supplies on his back.

He did five miles that way, before he stopped up at a poor cabin and
gave his food to the folk there.  After another mile or so he met a poor
traveling family, heading on west to the new lands in the Noisy River
country.  He gave them the tent and blanket in his pack, and because
they had a thirteen-year-old boy about Alvin's size, he pulled off them
new boots and gave them straight out, just like that, socks too.  He
kept only his clothes and the empty pack on his back.

Why, them folks were wide-eyed and silly-faced over it, worrying that
Alvin's pa might be mad, him giving stuff away like that, but he allowed
as how it was his to give.

"You sure I won't be meeting up with your pa with a musket and a
possy-come-and-take-us?" asked the poor man.

"I'm sure you won't, sir," said young Alvin, "on account of I'm from the
town of Vigor Church, and the folks there won't see you at all unless
you force them."

It took them near ten seconds to realize where they'd heard the name of
Vigor Church before.  "Them's the folk of the Tippy-Canoe massacre,"
they said.  "Them's the folk what got blood on their hands."

Alvin just nodded.  "So you see they'll leave you be."

"Is it true they make every traveler listen to them tell that terrible
gory tale of how they killed all them Reds in cold blood?"

"Their blood wasn't cold," said Alvin, "and they only tell travelers who
come right on into town.  So just stay on the road, leave them be, ride
on through.  Once you cross the Wobbish, you'll be in open land again,
where you'll be glad to meet up with settled folk.

Not ten mile on."

Well, they didn't argue no more, nor even ask him how he came not to
have to tell the tale hisself.  The name of the Massacre of TippyCanoe
was enough to put a silence on folks like setting in a church, a kind of
holy, shameful, reverent attitude.  Cause even though most Whites
shunned the bloody-handed folk who shed Red men's blood at Tippy-Canoe,
they still knew that if they'd stood in the same place, they'd've done
the same thing, and it'd be their hands dripping red till they told a
stranger about the wretched deed they done.  That guilty knowledge
didn't make many travelers too keen on stopping in Vigor Church, or any
homes in the upper Wobbish country.  Them poor folks just took Alvin's
boots and gear and moved on down the road, glad of a stretch of canvas
over their heads and a slice of leather on their big boy's feet.

Alvin betook him off the road soon after, and plunged into woodland,
into the deepest places.  If he'd been wearing boots, he would've
stumbled and crunched and made more noise than a rutting buffalo in the
woods-which is about what most White folks did in the natural forest.
But because he was barefoot, his skin touching the forest floor, he was
like a different person.  He had run behind Ta-Kumsaw through the
forests of this whole land, north and south, and in that running young
Alvin learned him how the Red man ran, hearing the greensong of the
living woodland, moving in perfect harmony to that sweet silent music.
When he ran that way, not thinking about where to step, the ground
became soft under young Alvin's feet, and he was guided along, no sticks
breaking when he stepped, no bushes swishing or twigs snapping off with
his onward push.  Behind him he left nary a footprint or a broken
branch.

Just like a Red man, that was how he moved.  And pretty soon his White
man's clothing chafed on him, and he stopped and took it off, stuffed it
into the pack on his back, and then ran naked as a jaybird, feeling the
leaves of the bushes against his body.  Soon he was caught up in the
rhythm of his own running, forgetting anything about his own body, just
part of the living forest, moving onward, faster and stronger, not
eating, not drinking.  Like a Red man, who could run forever through the
deep forest, never needing rest, covering hundreds of miles in a single
day.

This was the natural way to travel, Alvin knew it.  Not in creaking
wooden wagons, rattling over dry ground, sucking along on muddy roads.
And not on horseback, a beast sweating and heaving under you, slave to
your hurry, not on any errand of its own.  Just a man in the woods, bare
feet on the ground, bare face in the wind, dreaming as he ran.

All that day and all that night he ran, and well into the morning.

How did he find his way?  He could feel the slash of the well-traveled
road off on his left, like a prickle or an itch, and even though that
road led through many a village and many a town, he knew that after a
while it'd fetch him up at the town of Hatrack.  After all, that was the
road his own folks followed, bridging every stream and creek and river
on the way, carrying him as a newborn babe in the wagon.  Even though he
never traveled it before, and wasn't looking at it now, he knew where it
led.

So on the second morning he fetched up at the edge of the wood, on the
verge of a field of new green maize billowing over rolling ground.

There was so many farms in this settled country that the forest was too
weak to hold him in his dream much longer anyhow.

It took a while, just standing there, to remember who he was and where
he was bound.  The music of the greenwood was strong behind him, weak
afore.  All he could know for sure was a town ahead, and a river maybe
five mile on, that's all he could feel for sure.  But he knew it was the
Hatrack River yonder, and so the town could be no other than the one he
was bound for.

He had figured to run the forest right up to the edge of town.

Now, though, he had no choice but to walk those last miles on White
man's feet or not go at all.  That was a thought he had never thought
ofthat there might be places in the world so settled that one farm
butted right against the next, with only a row of trees or a rail fence
to mark the boundary, farm after farm.  Was this what the Prophet saw in
his visions of the land?  All the forest killed back and these fields
put in their place, so a Red man couldn't run no more, nor a deer find
cover, nor a bear find him where to sleep come wintertime?

If that was so, no wonder he took all the Reds who'd follow him out
west, across the Mizzipy.  There was no living for a Red man here.

That made Alvin a little sad and a little scared, to leave behind the
living lands he'd come to know as well as a man knows his own body.

But he wasn't no philosopher.  He was a boy of eleven, and he also
hankered to see an eastern town, all settled up and civilized.

Besides, he had business here, business he'd waited a year to take up,
ever since he first learned there was such a body as the torch girl, and
how she looked for him to be a Maker.

He pulled his clothes out of his pack and put them on.  He walked the
edge of the farmland till he came to a road.  First time the road
crossed a stream, there was proof it was the right road: a covered
bridge stood over that little one-jump brooklet.  His own pa and older
brothers built that bridge, and others like it all the way along that
road from Hatrack to Vigor Church.  Eleven years ago they built it, when
Alvin was a baby sucking on his mama while the wagon rattled west.

He followed the road, and it wasn't awful far.  He'd just run hundreds
of miles through virgin forest without harm to his feet, but the White
man's road had no part of the greensong and it didn't yield to Alvin's
feet.  Within a couple of miles he was footsore and dusty and thirsty
and hungry.  Alvin hoped it wasn't too many miles on White man's road,
or he'd sure be wishing he'd kept his boots.

The sign beside the road said, Town of Hatrack, Mo.

It was a good-sized town, compared to frontier villages.  Of course it
didn't compare to the French city of Detroit, but that was a foreign
place, and this town was, well, American.  The houses and buildings were
like the few rough structures in Vigor Church and other new settlements,
only smoothed out and growed up to full size.  There was four streets
that crossed the main road, with a bank and a couple of shops and
churches and even a county courthouse and some places with shingles
saying Lawyer and Doctor and Alchemist.  Why, if there was professional
folk here, it was a town proper, not just a hopeful place like Vigor
Church before the massacre.

Less than a year ago he'd seen a vision of the town of Hatrack.

It was when the Prophet, Lolla-Wossiky, caught him up in the tornado
that he called down onto Lake Mizogan.  The walls of the whirlwind
turned to crystal that time, and in the crystal Alvin had seen many
things.  One of them was the town of Hatrack the way it was when Alvin
was born.  It was plain that things hadn't stayed the same in these
eleven years.  He didn't recognize a thing, walking through the town.

Why, this place was so big now that not a soul even seemed to notice he
was a stranger to give him howdy-do.

He was most of the way through the built-up part of town before he
realized that it wasn't the town's bigness that made folks pay him no
mind.  It was the dust on his face, his bare feet, the empty pack on his
back.  They looked, they took him in at a glance, and then they looked
away, like as if they were halfway scared he'd come up and ask them for
bread or a place to stay.  It was something Alvin never met up with
before, but he knowed it right away for what it was.  In the last eleven
years, the town of Hatrack, Ohio, had learned the difference between
rich and poor.

The built-up part was over.  He was through the town, and he hadn't seen
a single blacksmith's shop, which was what he was supposed to be looking
for, nor had he seen the roadhouse where he was born, which was what he
was really looking for.  All he saw right now was a couple of pig farms,
stinking the way pig farms do, and then the road bent a bit south and he
couldn't see more.

The smithy had to still be there, didn't it?  It was only a year and a
half ago that Taleswapper had carried the prentice contract Pa wrote up
for Makepeace, the blacksmith of Hatrack River.  And less than a year
ago that Taleswapper hisself told Alvin that he delivered that letter,
and Makepeace Smith was amenable-that was the word he used, amenable.
Since Taleswapper talked in his halfway English manner, with the rs
dropped off the ends of words, it sounded to Alvin like old Taleswapper
said Makepeace Smith, was "a meaner bull," till Taleswapper wrote it
down for him.  Anyway, the smith was here a year ago.  And the torch
girl in the roadhouse, the one he visioned in Lolla-Wossiky's crystal
tower, she must be here.  Hadn't she written in Taleswapper's book, "A
Maker is born"?  When he, looked at those words the letters burned with
light like as if they been conjured, like the message writ by the hand
of God on the wall in that Bible story: "Mean, mean, take all apart,
son," and sure enough, it came to pass, Babylon was took all apart.
Words of prophecy was what turned letters bright like that.  So if that
Maker was Alvin himself, and he knowed it was, then she must see more in
her torchy way.

She must know what a Maker really is and how to be one.

Maker.  A name folks said with a hush.  Or spoke of wistful, saying that
the world had done with Makers, there'd be no more.  Oh, some said Old
Ben Franklin was a Maker, but he denied being so much as a wizard till
the day he died.  Taleswapper, who knew Old Ben like a father, he said
Ben only made one thing in his life, and that was the American Compact,
that piece of paper that bound the Dutch and Swedish colonies with the
English and German settlements of Pennsylvania and Suskwahenny and, most
important of all, the Red nation of Irrakwa, altogether forming the
United States of America, where Red and White, Dutchman, Swede and
Englishman, rich and poor, merchant and laborer, all could vote and all
could speak and no one could say, I'm a better man than you.  Some folks
allowed as how that made Ben as true a Maker as ever lived, but no, said
Taleswapper, that made Ben a binder, a knotter, but not a Maker.

I am the Maker that torch girl wrote about.  She touched me as I was
a-horning, and when she did she saw that I had Maker-stuff in me.

I've got to find that girl, growed up to be sixteen years old by now,
and she's got to tell me what she saw.  Cause the powers I've found
inside me, the things that I can do, I know they've got a purpose bigger
than just cutting stone without hands and healing the sick and running
through the woods like any Red man can but no White man ever could. I've
got a work to do in my life and I don't have the first spark of an idea
how to get ready for it.

Standing there in the road, with a pig farm on either hand, Alvin heard
the sharp ching ching of iron striking iron.  The smith might as well
have called out to him by name.  Here I am, said the hammer, find me up
ahead along the road.

Before he ever got to the smithy, though, he rounded the bend and saw
the very roadhouse where he was born, just as plain as ever in the
vision in the crystal tower.  Whitewashed shiny and new with only the
dust of this summer on it, so it didn't look quite the same, but it was
as welcome a sight as any weary traveler could hope for.

Twice welcome, cause inside it, with any decent luck, the torch girl
could tell him what his life was supposed to be.

Alvin knocked at the door cause that's what you do, he thought.

He'd never stayed in a roadhouse before, and had no notion of a public
room.  So he knocked once, and then twice, and then hallooed till
finally the door opened.  It was a woman with flour on her hands and her
checked apron, a big woman who looked annoyed beyond belief-but he knew
her face.  This was the woman in his crystal tower vision, the one what
pulled him out of the womb with her own fingers around his neck.

"What in the world are you thinking of, boy, to knock my door like that
and start hullaballooing like there was a fire!  Why can't you just come
on in and set like any other folk, or are you so powerful important that
you got to have a servant come and open doors for you?"

"Sorry, ma'am," said Alvin, about as respectful as could be.

"Now what business could you have with us?  If you're a beggar then I
got to tell you we'll have no scraps till after dinner, but you're
welcome to wait till then, and if you got a conscience, why, you can
chop some wood for us.  Except for look at you, I can't believe you're
ore than fourteen years old-"

"Eleven, ma'am."

"Well, then, you're right big for your age, but I still can't figure
what business you got here.  I won't serve you no liquor even if you got
money, which I doubt.  This is a Christian house, in fact more than mere
Christian because we're true-blue Methodist and that means we don't
touch a drop nor serve it neither, and even if we did we wouldn't serve
children.  And I'd stake ten pound of porkfat on a wager that you don't
have the price of a night's lodging."

"No ma'am," said Alvin, "but-"

"Well then here you are, dragging me out of my kitchen with the bread
half-kneaded and a baby who's bound to cry for milk any minute, and I
reckon you don't plan to stand at the head of the table and explain to
all my boarders why their dinner is late, on account of a boy who can't
open a door his own self, no, you'll leave me to make apologies myself
as best I can, which is right uncivil of you if you don't mind my
saying, or even if you do."

"Ma'am, said Alvin, "I don't want food and I don't want a room."

He knew enough courtesy not to add that travelers had always been
welcome to stay in his father's house whether they had money or not, and
a hungry man didn't get afternoon scraps, he set down at Pa's own table
and ate with the family.  He was catching on to the idea that things
were different here in civilized country.

"Well, all we deal in here is food and rooms," said the roadhouse lady.

"I come here, ma'am, cause I was born in this house almost twelve years
ago."

Her whole demeanor changed at once.  She wasn't a roadhouse mistress
now, she was a midwife.  "Born in this house?"

"Born on the day my oldest brother Vigor died in the Hatrack River.  I
thought as how you might even remember that day, and maybe you could
show me the place where my brother lies buried."

Her face changed again.  "You," she said.  "You're the boy who was born
to that family-the seventh son of-"

"Of a seventh son," said Alvin.

"Well what's become of you, tell me!  Oh, it was a portentous thing.

My daughter stood there and looked afar off and saw that your big
brother was still alive as you came out of the womb-"

"Your daughter," said Alvin, forgetting himself so much that he
interrupted her clean in the middle of a sentence.  "She's a torch."

The lady turned cold as ice.  "Was, " she said.  "She don't torch no
more."

But Alvin hardly noticed how the lady changed.  "You mean she lost her
knack for it?  I never heard of a body losing their knack.  But if she's
here, I'd like to talk to her.

"She ain't here no more," said the lady.  Now Alvin finally caught on
that she didn't much care to talk about it.  "There ain't no torch now
in Hatrack River.  Babies will be born here without a body touching them
to see how they lie in the womb.  That's the end of it.  I won't say
another word about such a girl as that who'd run off, just run right
off-" Something caught in the lady's voice and she turned her back to
him.

"I got to finish my bread," said the lady.  "The graveyard is up the
hill there." She turned around again to face him, with nary a sign of
the anger or grief or what-all that she felt a second before.  "If my
Horace was here I'd have him show you the way, but you'll see it anyhow,
there's a kind of path.  It's just a family graveyard, with a picket
fence around it." Her stern manner softened.  "When you're done up there
you come on back and I'll serve you better than scraps." She hurried on
into the kitchen.  Alvin followed her.

There was a cradle by the kitchen table, with a babe asleep in it but
wiggling somewhat.  Something funny about the baby but Alvin couldn't
say right off what it was.

"Thank you for your kindness, ma'am, but I don't ask for no handouts.
I'll work to pay for anything I eat."

"That's rightly said, and like a true man-your father was the same, and
the bridge he built over the Hatrack is still there, strong as ever. But
you just go now, see the graveyard, and then come back by and by."

She bent over the huge wad of dough on the kneading table.  Alvin got
the notion for just a moment that she was crying, and maybe he did and
maybe he didn't see tears drop from her eyes straight down into the
dough.  It was plain she wanted to be alone.

He looked again at the baby and realized what was different.

"That's a pickaninny baby, isn't it?" he said.

She stopped kneading, but left her hands buried to the wrist in dough.
"It's a baby," she said, "and it's my baby.  I adopted him and he's
mine, and if you call him a pickaninny I'll knead your face like dough."

"Sorry, ma'am, I meant no harm.  He just had a sort of cast to his face
that gave me that idea, I reckon-"

"Oh, he's half-Black all right.

But it's the White half of him I'm raising up, just as if he was my own
son.  We named him Arthur Stuart."

Alvin got the joke of that right off.  "Ain't nobody can call the King a
pickaninny, I reckon-" She smiled.  "I reckon not.  Now get, boy.  You
owe a debt to your dead brother, and you best pay it now."

The graveyard was easy to find, and Alvin was gratified to see that his
brother Vigor had a stone, and his grave was as well-tended as any
other.  Only a few graves here.  Two stones with the same name"Baby
Missy"-and dates that told of children dying young.  Another stone that
said "Oldpappy" and then his real name, and dates that told of a long
life.  And Vigor.

He knelt by his brother's grave and tried to picture what he might have
been like.  The best he could do was imagine his brother Measure, who
was his favorite brother, the one who was captured by Reds along with
Alvin.  Vigor must have been like Measure.  Or maybe Measure was like
Vigor.  Both willing to die if need be, for their family's sake.

Vigor's death saved my life before I was born, thought Alvin, and yet he
hung on to the last breath so that when I was born I was still the
seventh son of a seventh son, with all my brothers ahead of me alive.

The same kind of sacrifice and courage and strength that it took when
Measure, who hadn't killed a single Red man, who near died just trying
to stop the Tippy-Canoe massacre from happening, took on himself the
same curse as his father and his brothers, to have blood on his hands if
he failed to tell any stranger the true story of the killing of all them
innocent Reds.  So when he knelt there at Vigor's grave, it was like he
was kneeling at Measure's grave, even though he knew Measure wasn't
dead.

Wasn't wholly dead, anyway.  But like the rest of the folk of Vigor
Church, he'd never leave that place again.  He'd live out all his days
where he wouldn't have to meet too many strangers, so that for days on
end he could forget the slaughter on that day last summer.  The whole
family, staying together there, with all the folks in the country
roundabout, living out their days of life until them as had the curse
all died, sharing each other's shame and each other's loneliness like
they was all kin, every one of them.

All them together, except for me.  I didn't take no curse on me.

I left them all behind.

Kneeling there, Alvin felt like an orphan.  He might as well be.

Sent off to be a prentice here, knowing that whatever he did, whatever
he made, his kin could never come on out to see.  He could go home to
that bleak sad town from time to time, but that was more like a
graveyard than this grassy living place, because even with dead folks
buried here, there was hope and life in the town nearby, people looking
forward instead of back.

Alvin had to look forward, too.  Had to find his way to what he was born
to be.  You died for me, Vigor, my brother that I never met. I just
haven't figured out yet why it was so important for me to be alive.

When I find out, I hope to make you proud of me.  I hope you'll think
that I was worth dying for.

When his thoughts was all spent and gone, when his heart had filled up
and then emptied out again, Alvin did something he never thought to do.
He looked under the ground.

Not by digging, mind you.  Alvin's knack was such that he could get the
feel of underground without using his eyes.  Like the way he looked into
stone.  Now it might seem to some folk like a kind of grave-robbing, for
Al to peek inside the earth where his brother's body lay.  But to Al it
was the only way he'd ever see the man who died to save him.

So he closed his eyes and gazed under the soil and found the bones
inside the rotted wooden box.  The size of him-Vigor was a big boy,
which is about what it would take to roll and yaw a full-sized tree in a
river's current.  But the soul of him, that wasn't there, and even
though he knowed it wouldn't be Al was somewhat disappointed.

His hidden gaze wandered to the small bodies barely clinging to their
own dust, and then to the gnarled old corpse of Oldpappy, whoever that
was, fresh in the earth, only a year or so buried.

But not so fresh as the other body.  The unmarked body.  One day dead at
most, she was, all her flesh still on her and the worms hardly working
at her yet.

He cried out in the surprise of it, and the grief at the next thought
that came to mind.  Could it be the torch girl buried there?

Her mother said that she run off, but when folks run off it ain't
unusual for them to come back dead.  Why else was the mother grieving
so?

The innkeeper's own daughter, buried without a markerh, that spoke of
terrible bad things.  Did she run off and get herself shamed so bad her
own folks wouldn't mark her burying place?  Why else leave her there
without a stone?

"What's wrong with you, boy?"

Alvin stood, turned, faced the man.  A stout fellow who was right
comfortable to look upon; but his face wasn't too easy right now.

"What are you doing here in this graveyard, boy?"

"Sir," said Alvin, "my brother's buried here."

The man thought a moment, his face easing.  "You're one of that family.
But I recall all their boys was as old as you even back then-"

"I'm the one what was born here that night."

At that news the man just opened up his arms and folded Alvin up inside.
"They named you Alvin, didn't they," said the man, "just like your
father.  We call him Alvin Bridger around here, he's something of
legend.  Let me see you, see what you've become.  Seventh son of a
seventh son, come home to see your birthplace and your brother's grave.

Of course you'll stay in my roadhouse.  I'm Horace Guester, as you might
guess, I'm pleased to meet you, but ain't you somewhat big for-what,
ten, eleven years old?"

:'Almost twelve.  Folks say I'm tall."

"I hope you're proud of the marker we made for your brother.  He was
admired here, even though we all met him in death and never in life."

"I'm suited," said Alvin.  "It's a good stone." And then, because he
cularly wise thing to do, couldn't help himself, though it wasn't a
parti he up and asked the question most burning in him.  "But I wonder,
sir, why one girl got herself buried here yesterday, and no stone nor
marker tells her name."

Horace Guester's face turned ashen.  "Of course you'd see," he
whispered.  "Doodlebug or something.  Seventh son.  God help us all."

"Did she do something shameful, sir, not to have no marker?"

asked Alvin.

"Not shame," said Horace.  "As God is my witness, boy, this girl was
noble in life and died a virtuous death.  She stays unmarked so this
house can be a shelter to others like her.  But oh, lad, say you'll
never tell what you found buried here.  You'd cause pain to dozens and
hundreds of lost souls along the road from slavery to freedom.

Can you believe me that much, trust me and be my friend in this?

It'd be too much grief, to lose my daughter and have this secret out,
all in the same day.  Since I can't keep the secret from you, you have
to keep it with me, Alvin, lad.  Say you will."

"I'll keep a secret if it's honorable, sir," said Alvin, "but what
honorable secret leads a man to bury his own daughter without a stone?"

Horace's eyes went wide, and then he laughed like he was calling loony
birds.  When he got control of hisself, he clapped Alvin on the
shoulder.  "That ain't my daughter in the ground there, boy, what made
you think it was?  It's a Black girl, a runaway slave, who died last
night on her way north."

Now Alvin realized for the first time that the body was way too small to
be no sixteen-year-old, anyhow.  It was a child-size body.

"That baby in your kitchen, it's her brother?"

"Her son," said Horace.

"But she's so small," said Alvin.

"That didn't stop her White owner from getting her with child, boy.  I
don't know how you stand on the question of slavery, or if you even
thought about it, but I beg you do some thinking now.  Think about how
slavery lets a White man steal a girl's virtue and still go to church on
Sunday while she groans in shame and bears his bastard child."

"You're a Mancipationist, ain't you?" said Alvin.

"Reckon I am," said the innkeeper, "but I reckon all good Christian folk
are Mancipationists in their hearts."

"I reckon so," said Alvin.

"I hope you are, cause if word gets out that I was helping a slavegirl
run off to Canada, there'll be finders and cotchers from Appalachee and
the Crown Colonies a-spying on me so I can't help no others get away."

Alvin looked back at the grave and thought about the babe in the
kitchen.  "You going to tell that baby where his mama's grave is?"

"When he's old enough to know, and not to tell it," said the man.

"Then I'll keep your secret, if you keep mine."

The man raised his eyebrows and studied Alvin.  "What secret you got,
Alvin, a boy as young as you?"

"I don't have no partickler wish to have it known I'm a seventh son. I'm
here to prentice with Makepeace Smith, which I reckon is the man I hear
a-hammering at the forge down yonder."

"And you don't want folks knowing you can see a body lying in an
unmarked grave."

"You caught my drift right enough," said Alvin.  "I won't tell your
secret, and you won't tell mine."

"You have my word on it," said the man.  Then he held out his hand.

Took that hand and shook it, gladly.  Most grownup folk wouldn't think
of making a bargain like that with a mere child like him.  But this man
even offered his hand, like they were equals.  "You'll see I know how to
keep my word, sir," said Alvin.

"And anyone around here can tell you Horace Guester keeps a promise,
too." Then Horace told him the story that they were letting out about
the baby, how it was the Berrys' youngest, and they gave it up for Old
Peg Guester to raise, cause they didn't need another child and she'd
always hankered to have her a son.  "And that part is true enough," said
Horace Guester.  "All the more, with Peggy running off."

"Your daughter," said Alvin.

Suddenly Horace Guester's eyes filled up with tears and he shuddered
with a sob like Alvin never heard from a growed man in his life.

"Just ran off this morning," said Horace Guester.

"Maybe she's just a-calling on somebody in town or something," said
Alvin.

Horace shook his head.  "I beg your pardon, crying like that, I just beg
your pardon, I'm awful tired, truth to tell, up all night last night,
and then this morning, her gone like that.  She left us a note.

She's gone all right."

"Don't you know the man she run off with?" asked Alvin.  "Maybe they'll
get married, that happened once to a Swede girl out in the Noisy River
country-" Horace turned a bit red with anger.  "I reckon you're just a
boy so you don't know better than to say such a thing.

So I'll tell you now, she didn't run off with no man.  She's a woman of
pure virtue, and no one ever said otherwise.  No, she run off alone,
boy."

Alvin thought he'd seen all kinds of strange things in his life-a
tornado turned into a crystal tower, a bolt of cloth with all the souls
of men and women woven in it, murders and tortures, tales and miracles,
Alvin knew more of life than most boys at eleven years of age.

But this was the strangest thing of all, to think of a girl of sixteen
just up and leaving her father's house, without no husband or nothing.
In all his life he never saw a woman go nowhere by herself beyond her
own dooryard.

"Is she-is she safe?"

Horace laughed bitterly.  "Safe?  Of course she's safe.  She's a torch,
Alvin, the best torch I ever heard of.  She can see folks miles off, she
knows their hearts, ain't a man born can come near her with evil on his
mind without she knows exactly what he's planning and just how to get
away.  No, I ain't worried about her.  She can take care of herself
better than any man.  I just-"

"Miss her," said Alvin.

"I guess it don't take no torch to guess that, am I right, lad?  I miss
her.  And it hurt my feelings somewhat that she up and left with no
warning.  I could've given her God bless to send her on her way.

Her mama could've worked up some good hex, not that Little Peggy'd need
it, or anyhow just pack her a cold dinner for on the road.  But none of
that, no fare-thee-well nor God-be-with-you.  It was like as if she was
running from some awful boogly monster and had no time to take but one
spare dress in a cloth bag and rush on out the door."

Running from some monster-those words stung right to Alvin's soul.

She was such a torch that it might well be she saw Alvin coming. Up and
ran away the morning he arrived.  If she wasn't no torch then maybe it
was just chance that took her off the same day he come.

But she was a torch.  She saw him coming.  She knew he came all this way
a-hoping to meet her and beg her to help him find his way into becoming
whatever it was that he was born to be.  She saw all that, and ran away.

"I'm right sorry that she's gone," said Alvin.

"I thank you for your pity, friend, it's good of you.  I just hope it
won't be for long.  I just hope she'll do whatever she left to do and
come on back in a few days or maybe a couple of weeks." He laughed
again, or maybe sobbed, it was about the same sound.  "I can't even go
ask the Hatrack torch to tell a fortune about her, cause the Hatrack
River torch is gone."

Horace cried outright again, for just a minute.  Then he took Alvin by
the shoulders and looked him in the eye, not even hiding the tears on
his cheeks.  "Alvin, you just remember how you seen me crying all
unmanlike, and you remember that's how fathers feel about their children
when they're gone.  That's how your own pa feels right now, having you
so far away."

"I know he does," said Alvin.

"Now if you don't mind," said Horace Guester, "I need to be alone here."

Alvin touched his arm just a moment and then he went away.  Not down to
the house to have his noon meal like Old Peg Guester ofo upset to sit
and eat with them.  How could he fered.  He was to explain that he was
nigh on to being as heartbroke as them, to have that torch girl gone?
No, he'd have to keep silence.  The answers he was looking for in
Hatrack, they were gone off with a sixteen-year-old girl who didn't want
to meet him when he came.

Maybe she seen my future and she hates me.  Maybe I'm as bad a boogly
monster as anybody ever dreamed of on an evil night.

He followed the sound of the blacksmith's hammer.  It led him along a
faint path to a springhouse straddling a brook that came straight out of
a hillside.  And down the stream, along a clear meadow slope, he walked
until he came to the smithy.  Hot smoke rose from the forge.  Around
front he walked, and saw the blacksmith inside the big sliding door,
hammering a hot iron bar into a curving shape across the throat of his
anvil.

Alvin stood and watched him work.  He could feel the heat from the forge
clear outside; inside must be like the fires of hell.  His muscles were
like fifty different ropes holding his arm on under the skin.

They shifted and rolled across each other as the hammer rose into the
air, then bunched all at once as the hammer came down.  Close as he was
now, Alvin could hardly bear the bell-like crash of iron on iron, with
the anvil like a sounding fork to make the sound ring on and on.

Sweat dripped off the blacksmith's body, and he was naked to the waist,
his white skin ruddy from the heat, streaked with soot from the forge
and sweat from his pores.  I've been sent here to be prentice to the
devil, thought Alvin.

But he knew that was a silly idea even as he thought it.  This was a
hardworking man, that's all, earning his living with a skill that every
town needed if it hoped to thrive.  Judging from the size of the corrals
for horses waiting to be shod, and the heaps of iron bars waiting to be
made into plows and sickles, axes and cleavers, he did a good business,
too.  If I learn this trade, I'll never be hungry, thought Alvin, and
folks will always be glad to have me.

And something more.  Something about the hot fire and the ruddy iron.
What happened in this place was akin somehow to making.

Alvin knew from the way he'd worked with stone in the granite quarry,
when he carved the millstone for his father's mill, he knew that with
his knack he could probably reach inside the iron and make it go the way
he wanted it to go.  But he had something to learn from the forge and
the hammer, the bellows and the fire and the water in the cooling tubs,
something that would help him become what he was born to become.

So now he looked at the blacksmith, not as a powerful stranger, but as
Alvin's future self.  He saw how the muscles grew on the smith's
shoulders and back.  Alvin's body was strong from chopping wood and
splitting rails and all the hoisting and lifting that he did earning
pennies and nickels on neighbors' farms.  But in that kind of work, your
whole body went into every movement.  You rared back with the axe and
when it swung it was like your whole body was part of the axhandle, so
that legs and hips and back all moved into the chop.  But the smith, he
held the hot iron in the tongs, held it so smooth and exact against the
anvil that while his right arm swung the hammer, the rest of his body
couldn't move a twitch, that left arm stayed as smooth and steady as a
rock.  It shaped the smith's body differently, forced the arms to be
much stronger by themselves, muscles rooted to the neck and breastbone
standing out in a way they never did on a farmboy's body.

Alvin felt inside himself, the way his own muscles grew, and knew
already where the changes would have to come.  it was part of his knack,
to find his way within living flesh most as easily as he could chart the
inner shapes of living stone.  So even now he was hunkering down inside,
teaching his body to change itself to make way for the new work.

"Boy," said the smith.

"Sir," said Alvin.

"Have you got business for me?  I don't know you, do I?"

Alvin stepped forward, held out the note his father writ.

"Read it to me, boy, my eyes are none too good."

Alvin unfolded the paper.  "From Alvin Miller of Vigor Church.  To
Makepeace, Blacksmith of Hatrack River.  Here is my boy Alvin what you
said could be your prentice till he be seventeen.  He'll work hard

and do what all you say, and you teach him what all a man needs to be a
good smith, like in the articles I signed.  He is a good boy."

The smith reached for the paper, held it close to his eyes.  His lips
moved as he repeated a few phrases.  Then he slapped the paper down on
the anvil.  "This is a fine turn," said the smith.  "Don't you know
you're a year late, boy?  You was supposed to come last spring.  I
turned away three offers for prentice cause I had your pa's word you was
coming, and here I've been without help this whole year cause he didn't
keep his word.  Now I'm supposed to take you in with a year less on your
contract, and not even a by-your-leave or beg-your-pardon."

"I'm sorry, sir," said Alvin.  "But we had the war last year.  I was on
my way here but I got captured by ChocTaw."

"Captured byh, come now, boy, don't tell me tales like that.  If the
ChocTaw caught you, you wouldn't have such a dandy head of hair now,
would you!  And like as not you'd be missing a few fingers."

"Ta-Kumsaw rescued me," said Alvin.

"Oh, and no doubt you met the Prophet hisself and walked on water with
him."

As a matter of fact, Alvin done just that.  But from the smith's tone of
voice, he reckoned that it wouldn't be wise to say so.  So Alvin said
nothing.

"Where's your horse?" asked the smith.

"Don't have one," said Alvin.

"Your father wrote the date on this letter boy, two days ago!  You
must've rode a horse."

"I ran." As soon as Alvin said it, he knew it was a mistake.

"Ran?" said the smith.  "With bare feet?  It must be nigh four hundred
mile or more to the Wobbish from here!  Your feet ought to be ripped to
rags clear up to your knees!  Don't tell me tales, boy!  I won't have no
liars around me!"

Alvin had a choice, and he knew it.  He could explain about how he could
run like a Red man.  Makepeace Smith wouldn't believe him, and so Alvin
would have to show him some of what he could do.  It would be easy
enough.  Bend a bar of iron just by stroking it.  Make two stones mash
together to form one.  But Alvin already made up his mind he didn't want
to show his knacks here.  How could he be a proper prentice, if folks
kept coming around for him to cut them hearthstones or fix a broken
wheel or all the other fixing things he had a knack for?  Besides, he
never done such a thing, showing off just for the sake of proving what
he could do.  Back home he only used his knack when there was need.

So he stuck with his decision to keep his knack to himself, pretty much.
Not tell what he could do.  Just learn like any normal boy, working the
iron the way the smith himself did, letting the muscles grow slowly on
his arms and shoulders, chest and back.

"I was joking," Alvin said.  "A man gave me a ride on his spare mount."

"I don't like that kind of joke," said the smith.  "I don't like it that
you lied to me so easy like that."

What could Alvin say?  He couldn't even claim that he hadn't lied -he
had, when he told about a man letting him ride.  So he was as much a
liar as the smith thought.  The only confusion was about which statement
was a lie.

"I'm sorry," said Alvin.

"I'm not taking you, boy.  I don't have to take you anyway, a year late.
And here you come lying to me the first thing.  I won't have it.

"Sir, I'm sorry," said Alvin.  "It won't happen again.  I'm not known
for a liar back home, and you'll see I'll be known for square dealing
here, if you give me a chance.  Catch me lying or not giving fair work
all the time, and you can chuck me, no questions asked.

Just give me a chance to prove it, sir."

"You don't look like you're eleven, neither, boy."

"But I am, sir.  You know I am.  You yourself with your own arms pulled
my brother Vigor's body from the river on the night that I was born, or
so my pa told me."

The smith's face went distant, as if he was remembering.  "Yes, he told
you true, I was the one who pulled him out.  Clinging to the roots of
that tree even in death, so I thought I'd have to cut him free.

Come here, boy.

Alvin walked closer.  The smith poked and pushed the muscles of his
arms.

"Well, I can see you're not a lazy boy.  Lazy boys get soft, but you're
strong like a hardworking farmer.  Can't lie about that, I reckon.
Still, you haven't seen what real work is."

"I'm ready to learn."

"Oh, I'm sure of that.  Many a boy would be glad to learn from me.

Other work might come and go, but there's always a need for a
blacksmith.  That'll never change.  Well, you're strong enough in body,
I reckon.  Let's see about your brain.  Look at this anvil.  This here's
the hick, on the point, you see.  Say that."

"Bick."

"And then the throat here.  And this is the table-it ain't faced with
blister steel, so when you ram a cold chisel into it the chisel don't
blunt.  Then up a notch onto the steel face, where you work the hot
metal.  And this is the hardie hole, where I rest the butt of the fuller
and the flatter and the swage.  And this here's the pricking hole, for
when I punch holes in strap iron-the hot punch shoots right through into
this space.  You got all that?"

"I think so, sir."

"Then name me the parts of the anvil."

Alvin named them as best he could.  Couldn't remember the job each one
did, not all of them, anyways, but what he did was good ugh, cause the
blacksmith nodded and grinned.  "Reckon you ain't eno a half-wit,
anyhow, you'll learn quick enough.  And big for your age is good.  I
won't have to keep you on a broom and the bellows for the first four
years, the way I do with smaller boys.  But your age, that's a sticking
point.  A term of prentice work is seven year, but my writtenup articles
with your pa, they only say till you're seventeen."

"I'm almost twelve now, sir."

:,So what I'm saying is, I want to be able to hold you the full seven
years, if need be.  I don't want you whining off just when I finally get
you trained enough to be useful."

"Seven years, sir.  The spring when I'm nigh on nineteen, then my time
is up."

"Seven years is a long time, boy, and I mean to hold you to it.

Most boys start when they're nine or ten, or even seven years old, so
they can make a living, start looking for a wife at sixteen or seventeen
years old.  I won't have none of that.  I expect you to live like a
fooling with any of the girls in town, you underChristian, and no stand
me?"

"Yes sir."

"All right then.  My prentices sleep in the loft over the kitchen, and
you eat at table with my wife and children and me, though I'll thank you
not to speak until spoken to inside the house-I won't have my prentices
thinking they have the same rights as my own children, cause you don't."

"Yes sir."

"And as for now, I need to bet up this strap again.  So you start to
work the bellows there."

Alvin walked to the bellows handle.  It was T-shaped, for twohanded
working.  But Alvin twisted the end piece so it was at the same angle as
the hammer handle when the smith lifted it into the air.

Then he started to work the bellows with one arm.

"What are you doing, boy!" shouted Alvin's new master.  "You won't last
ten minutes working the bellows with one arm."

"Then in ten minutes I'll switch to my left arm," said Alvin.

"But I won't get myself ready for the hammer if I bend over every time I
work the bellows."

The smith looked at him angrily.  Then he laughed.  "You got a fresh
mouth, boy, but you also got sense.  Do it your way as long as you can,
but see to it you don't slack on wind-I need a hot fire, and that's more
important than you working up strength in your arms right now."

Alvin set to pumping.  Soon he could feel the pain of this unaccustomed
movement gnawing at his neck and chest and back.  But he kept going,
never breaking the rhythm of the bellows, forcing his body to endure. He
could have made the muscles grow right now, teaching them the pattern
with his hidden power.  But that wasn't what Alvin was here for, he was
pretty sure of that.  So he let the pain come as it would, and his body
change as it would, each new muscle earned by his own effort.

Alvin lasted fifteen minutes with his right hand, ten minutes with his
left.  He felt the muscles aching and liked the way it felt.

Makepeace Smith seemed pleased enough with what he did.  Alvin knew that
he'd be changed here, that his work would make a strong and skillful man
of him.

A man, but not a Maker.  Not yet fully on the road to what he was born
to be.  But since there hadn't been a Maker in the world in a thousand
years or more, or so folks said, who was he going to prentice himself to
in order to learn that trade?

Modesty

Whitley Physicker helped Peggy down from the carriage in front of a
fine-looking house in one of the best neighborhoods of Dekane.  "I'd
like to see you to the door, Peggy Guester, just to make sure they're
home to greet you," said he, but she knew he didn't expect her to allow
him to do that.  If anybody knew how little she liked to have folks
fussing over her, it was Doctor Whitley Physicker.  So she thanked him
kindly and bid him farewell.

She heard his carriage rolling off, the horse cropping on the
cobblestones, as she rapped the knocker on the door.  A maid opened the
door, a German girl so fresh off the boat she couldn't even speak enough
English to ask Peggy's name.  She invited her in with a gesture, seated
her on a bench in the hall, and then held out a silver plate.

What was the plate for?  Peggy couldn't hardly make sense at all of what
she saw inside this foreign girl's mind.  She was expecting
something-what?  A little slip of paper, but Peggy didn't have a notion
why.  The girl thrust the salver closer to her, insisting.  Peggy
couldn't do a thing but shrug.

Finally the German girl gave up and went away.  Peggy sat on the bench
and waited.  She searched for heartfires in the house, and found the one
she looked for.  Only then did she realize what the plate was for-her
calling card.  Folks in the city, rich folks anyway, they had little
cards they put their name on, to announce theirself when they arne to
visit.  Peggy even remembered reading about it in a book, but it was a
book from the Crown Colonies and she never thought folks in free lands
kept such formality.

Soon the lady of the house came, the German girl shadowing her, peering
from behind her fine day gown.  Peggy knew from the lady's heartfire
that she didn't think herself dressed in any partickler finery today,
but to Peggy she was like the Queen herself.

Peggy looked into her heartfire and found what she had hoped for.

The lady wasn't annoyed a bit at seeing Peggy there, merely curious.

Oh, the lady was judging her, of course-Peggy never met a soul, least of
all herself, what didn't make some judgment of every stranger -but the
judgment was kind.  When the lady looked at Peggy's plain clothes, she
saw a country girl, not a pauper; when the lady looked at Peggy's stern,
expressionless face, she saw a child who had known pain, not an ugly
girl.  And when the lady imagined Peggy's pain, her first thought was to
try to heal her.  All in all, the lady was good.

Peggy made no mistake in coming here.

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure to meet you," said the lady.

Her voice was sweet and soft and beautiful.

"I reckon not, Mistress Modesty," said Peggy.  "My name is Peggy.

I think you had some acquaintance with my papa, years ago."

"Perhaps if you told me his name?"

"Horace," said Peggy.  "Horace Guester, of Hatrack, Ohio."

Peggy saw the turmoil in her heartfire at the very sound of his
name-glad memory, and yet a glimmer of fear of what this strange girl
might intend.  Yet the fear quickly subsided-her husband had died
several years ago, and so was beyond hurt.  And none of these emotions
showed in the lady's face, which held its sweet and friendly expression
with perfect grace.  Modesty turned to the maid and spoke a few words of
fluent German.  The maid curtsied and was gone.

"Did your father send you?" asked the lady.  Her unspoken question was:
Did your father tell you what I meant to him, and he to me?

"No," said Peggy.  "I come here on my own.  He'd die if he found out I
knew your name.  You see I'm a torch, Mistress Modesty.  He has no
secrets, not from me.  Nobody does."

It didn't surprise Peggy one bit how Modesty took that news.  Most folks
would've thought right off about all the secrets they hoped she wouldn't
guess.  Instead, the lady thought at once how awful it must be for
Peggy, to know things that didn't bear knowing.  "How long has it been
that way?" she said softly.  "Surely not when you were just a little
girl.  The Lord is too merciful to let such knowledge fill a child's
mind."

"I reckon the Lord didn't concern himself much with me," said Peggy.

The lady reached out and touched Peggy's cheek.  Peggy knew the lady had
noticed she was somewhat dirty from the dust of the road.

But what the lady mostly thought of wasn't clothes or cleanliness.

A torch, she was thinking.  That's why a girl so young wears such a
cold, forbidding face.  Too much knowledge has made this girl so hard.

"Why have you come to me?" asked Modesty.  "Surely you don't mean harm
to me or your father, for such an ancient transgression."

"Oh, no ma'am," said Peggy.  Never in her life did her own voice sound
so harsh to her, but compared to this lady she was squawking like a
crow.  "If I'm torch enough to know your secret, I'm torch enough to
know there was some good in it as well as sin, and as far as the sin
goes, Papa's paying for it still, paying double and treble every year of
his life."

Tears came into Modesty's eyes.  "I had hoped," she murmured, "I had
hoped that time would ease the shame of it, and he'd remember it now
with joy.  Like one of the ancient faded tapestries in England, whose
colors are no longer bright, but whose image is the very shadow of
beauty itself."

Peggy might've told her that he felt more than joy, that he relived all
his feelings for her like it happened yesterday.  But that was Papa's
secret, and not hers to tell.

Modesty touched a kerchief to her eyes, to take away the tears that
trembled there.  "All these years I've never spoken to a mortal soul of
this.  I've poured out my heart only to the Lord, and he's forgiven me;
yet I find it somehow exhilarating to speak of this to someone whose
face I can see with my eyes, and not just my imagination.

Tell me, child, if you didn't come as the avenging angel, have you come
perhaps as a forgiving one?"

Mistress Modesty spoke with such elegance that Peggy found herself
reaching for the language of the books she read, instead of her natural
talking voice.  "I'm a-a supplicant," said Peggy.  "I come for help.  I
come to change my life, and I thought, being how you loved my father,
you might be willing to do a kindness for his daughter."

The lady smiled at her.  "And if you're half the torch you claim to be,
you already know my answer.  What kind of help do you need?  My husband
left me a good deal of money when he died, but I think it isn't money
that you need."

No ma'am," said Peggy.  But what was it that she wanted, now that she
was here?  How could she explain why she had come?  "I didn't like the
life I saw for myself back in Hatrack.  I wanted to-"

"Escape?"

"Somewhat like that, I reckon, but not exactly."

"You want to become something other than what you are," said the lady.

"Yes, Mistress Modesty."

"What is it that you wish to be?"

Peggy had never thought of words to describe what she dreamed of, but
now, with Mistress Modesty before her, Peggy saw how simply those dreams
might be expressed.  "You, ma'am.f The lady smiled and touched her own
face, her own hair.  "Oh, my child, you must have higher aims than that.
Much of what is best in me, your father gave me.  The way he loved me
taught me that perhaps-no, not perhaps-that I was worth loving.  I have
learned much more since then, more of what a woman is and ought to be.
What a lovely symmetry, if I can give back to his daughter some of the
wisdom he brought to me." She laughed gently.  "I never imagined myself
taking a pupil."

"More like a disciple, I think, Mistress Modesty."

"Neither pupil nor disciple.  Will you stay here as a guest in my home?
Will you let me be your friend?"

Even though Peggy couldn't rightly see the paths of her own Ille, she
still felt them open up inside her, all the futures she could hope for,
waiting for her in this place.  "Oh, ma'am," she whispered, "if you
will."

Dowser

Hank Dowser'd seen him prentice boys a-plenty over the years, but never
a one as fresh as this.  Here was Makepeace Smith bent over old
Picklewing's left forehoof, all set to drive in the nail, and up spoke
his boy.

"Not that I nail," said the blacksmith's prentice boy.  "Not there."

Well, that was as fine a moment as Hank ever saw for the master to give
his prentice boy a sharp cuff on the ear and send him bawling into the
house.  But Makepeace Smith just nodded, then looked at the boy.

"You think you can nail this shoe, Alvin?" asked the master.

"She's a big one, this mare, but I see you got you some inches since
last I looked."

"I can," said the boy.

"Now just hold your horses," said Hank Dowser.  "Picklewing's my only
animal, and I can't just up and buy me another.  I don't want your
prentice boy learning to be a farrier and making his mistakes at my poor
old nag's expense." And since he was already speaking his mind so frank
like, Hank just rattled right on like a plain fool.

"Who's the master here, anyway9" said he.

Well, that was the wrong thing to say.  Hank knew it the second the
words slipped out of his mouth.  You don't say Who's the master, not in
front of the prentice.  And sure enough, Makepeace Smith's ears turned
red and he stood up, all six feet of him, with arms like oxlegs and
hands that could crush a bear's face, and he said, "I'm the master the
he's here, and when I say my prentice is good enough for the job, n good
enough, or you can take your custom to another smith."

"Now just hold your horses," said Hank Dowser.

"I am holding your horse," said Makepeace Smith.  "Or at least your
horse's leg.  In fact, your horse is leaning over on me something heavy.
And now you start asking if I'm master of my own smithy."

Anybody whose head don't leak knows that riling the smith who's shoeing
your horse is about as smart as provoking the bees on your way in for
the honey.  Hank Dowser just hoped Makepeace would be somewhat easier to
calm down.  "Course you are," said Hank.  "I meant nothing by it, except
I was surprised when your prentice spoke up so smart and all."

"Well that's cause he's got him a knack," said Makepeace Smith.

"This boy Alvin, he can tell things about the inside of a horse's hoof
-where a nail's going to hold, where it's going into soft hurting flesh,
that kind of thing.  He's a natural farrier.  And if he says to me,
Don't drive that nail, well I know by now that's a nail I don't want to
drive, cause it'll make the horse crazy or lame."

Hank Dowser grinned and backed off.  It was a hot day, that's all,
that's why tempers were so high.  "I have respect for every man's
knack," said Hank.  "Just like I expect them to have respect for mine."

"In that case, I've held up your horse long enough," said the smith.

"Here, Alvin, nail this shoe."

If the boy had swaggered or simpered or sneered, Hank would've had a
reason to be so mad.  But Prentice Alvin just hunkered down with nails
in his mouth and hooked up the left forehoof.  Picklewing leaned on him,
but the boy was right tall, even though his face had no sign of beard
yet, and he was like a twin of his master, when it come to muscle under
his skin.  It wasn't one minute, the horse leaning that way, before the
shoe was nailed in place.  Picklewing didn't so much as shiver, let
alone dance the way he usually did when the nails went in.

And now that Hank thought about it a little, Picklewing always did seem
to favor that leg just a little, as if something was a mite sore inside
the hoof.  But he'd been that way so long Hank hardly noticed it no
more.

The prentice boy stepped back out of the way, still not showing any brag
at all.  He wasn't doing a thing that was the tiniest bit benoctious,
but Hank still felt an unreasonable anger at the boy.  "How old is he?"

asked Hank.

"Fourteen," said Makepeace Smith.  "He come to me when he was eleven."

"A mite old for a prentice, wouldn't you say?" asked Hank.

"A year late in arriving, he was, because of the war with the Reds and
the French-he's from out in the Wobbish country."

"Them was hard years," said Hank.  "Lucky me I was in Irrakwa the whole
time.  Dowsing wells for windmills the whole way along the railroad they
were building.  Fourteen, eh?  Tall as he is, I reckon he lied about his
age even so."

If the boy disliked being named a liar, he didn't show no sign of it.

Which made Hank Dowser all the more annoyed.  That boy was like a burr
under his saddle, just made him mad whatever the boy did.

"No," said the smith.  "We know his age well enough.  He was born right
here in Hatrack River, fourteen years ago, when his folks were passing
through on their way west.  We buried his oldest brother up on the hill.
Big for his age though, ain't he?"

They might've been discussing a horse instead of a boy.  But Prentice
Alvin didn't seem to mind.  He just stood there, staring right through
them as if they were made of glass.

"You got four years left of his contract, then?" asked Hank.

"Bit more.  Till he's near nineteen."

"Well, if he's already this good, I reckon he'll be buying out early and
going journeyman." Hank looked, but the boy didn't brighten up at this
idea, neither.

"I reckon not," said Makepeace Smith.  "He's good with the horses, but
he gets careless with the forge.  Any smith can do shoes, but it takes a
real smith to do a plow blade or a wheel tire, and a knack with horses
don't help a bit with that.  Why, for my masterpiece I done me an
anchor!  I was in Netticut at the time, mind you.  There ain't much call
for anchors here, I reckon."

Picklewing snorted and stamped-but he didn't dance lively, the way
horses do when their new shoes are troublesome.  It was a good set of
shoes, well shod.  Even that made Hank mad at the prentice boy.  His own
anger made no sense to him.  The boy had put on Picklewing's last shoe,
on a leg that might have been lamed in another farrier's hands.

The boy had done him good.  So why this wrath burning just under the
surface, getting worse whatever the boy did or said?

Hank shrugged off his feelings.  "Well, that's work well done," he said.
"And so it's time for me to do my part."

"Now, we both know a dowsing's worth more than a shoeing," said the
smith.  "So if you need any more work done, you know I owe it to you,
free and clear."

"I will come back, Makepeace Smith, next time my nag needs shoes."

And because Hank Dowser was a Christian man and felt ashamed of how he
disliked the boy, he added praise for the lad.  "I reckon I'll be sure
to come back while this boy's still under prentice bond to you, him
having the knack he's got."

The boy might as well not've heard the good words, and the master smith
just chuckled.  "You ain't the only one who feels like that," he said.

At that moment Hank Dowser understood something that he might've missed
otherwise.  This boy's knack with hooves was good for trade, and
Makepeace Smith was just the kind of man who'd hold that boy to every
day of his contract, to profit from the boy's name for clean shoeing
with no horses lost by laming.  All a greedy master had to do was claim
the boy wasn't good at forgework or something like, then use that as a
pretext to hold him fast.  In the meantime the boy'd make a name for
this place as the best farriery in eastern Ohio.

Money in Makepeace Smith's pocket, and nothing for the boy at all, not
money nor freedom.

The law was the law, and the smith wasn't breaking it-he had the right
to every day of that boy's service.  But the custom was to let a
prentice go as soon as he had the skill and had sense enough to make his
way in the world.  Otherwise, if a boy couldn't hope for early freedom,
why should he work hard to learn as quick as he could, work as hard as
he could?  They said even the slaveowners in the Crown Colonies let
their best slaves earn a little pocket money on the side, so's they
could buy their freedom sometime before they died.

No, Makepeace Smith wasn't breaking no law, but he was breaking the
custom of masters with their prentice boys, and Hank thought ill of him
for it; it was a mean sort of master who'd keep a boy who'd already
learned everything the master had to teach.

And yet, even knowing that it was the boy who was in the right, and his
master in the wrong-even knowing that, he looked at that boy and felt a
cold wet hatred in his heart.  Hank shuddered, tried to shake it off.

"You say you need a well," said Hank Dowser.  "You want it for drinking
or for washing or for the smithy?"

"Does it make a difference?" asked the smith.

"Well, I think so," said Hank.  "For drinking you need pure water, and
for washing you want water that got no disease in it.  But for your work
in the smithy, I reckon the iron don't give no never mind whether it
cools in clear or murky water, am I right?"

"The spring up the hill is giving out, slacking off year by year," said
the smith.  "I need me a well I can count on.  Deep and clean and pure.
"You know why the stream's going slack," said Hank.  "Everybody else is
digging wells, and sucking out the water before it can seep out the
spring.  Your well is going to be about the last straw."

"I wouldn't be surprised," said the smith.  "But I can't undig their
wells, and I got to have my water, too.  Reason I settled here was
because of the stream, and now they've dried it up on me.  I reckon I
could move on, but I got me a wife and three brats up at the house, and
I like it here, like it well enough.  So I figure I'd rather draw
waterthan move."

Hank went on down to the stand of willows by the stream, near where it
came out from under an old springhouse, which had fallen into disrepair.
"Yours?" asked Hank.

"No, it belongs to old Horace Guester, him who owns the roadhouse up
yonder."

Hank found him a thin willow wand that forked just right, and started
cutting it out with his knife.  "Springhouse doesn't get much use now, I
see."

"Stream's dying, like I said.  Half the time in summer there ain't
enough water in it to keep the cream jars cool.  Springhouse ain't no
good if you can't count on it all summer."

Hank made the last slice and the willow rod pulled free.  He shaved the
thick end to a point and whittled off all the leaf nubs, making it as
smooth as ever he could.  There was some dowsers who didn't care how
smooth the rod was, just broke off the leaves and left the ends all
raggedy, but Hank knew that the water didn't always want to be found,
and then you needed a good smooth willow wand to find it.

There was others used a clean wand, but always the same one, year after
year, place after place, but that wasn't no good neither, Hank knew,
cause the wand had to be from willow or, sometimes, hickory that grew up
sucking the water you were hoping to find.  Them other dowsers were
mountebanks, though it didn't do no good to say so.

They found water most times because in most places if you dig down far
enough there's bound to be water.  But Hank did it right, Hank had the
true knack.  He could feel the willow wand trembling in his hands, could
feel the water singing to him under the ground.  He didn't just pick the
first sign of water, either.  He was looking for clear water, high
water, close to the surface and easy to pull.  He took pride in his
work.

But it wasn't like that prentice boy-what was his name?-Alvin.

Wasn't like him.  Either a man could nail horseshoes without ever laming
the horse, or he couldn't.  If he ever lamed a horse, folks thought
twice before they went to that farrier again.  But with a dowser, it
didn't seem to make no difference if you found water every time or not.
If you called yourself a dowser and had you a forked stick, folks would
pay you for dowsing wells, without bothering to find out if you had any
knack for it at all.

Thinking that, Hank wondered if maybe that was why he hated this boy so
much-because the boy already had a name for his good work, while Hank
got no fame at all even though he was the only true dowser likely to
pass through these parts in a month of Sundays.

Hank set down on the grassy bank of the stream and pulled off his boots.
When he leaned to set the second boot on a dry rock where it wouldn't be
so like to fill up with bugs, he saw two eyes blinking in the shadows
inside a thick stand of bushes.  It gave him such a start, cause he
thought to see a bear, and then he thought to see a Red man hankering
after dowser's scalp, even though both such was gone from these parts
for years.  No, it was just a little light-skinned pickaninny hiding in
the bushes.  The boy was a mixup, half-White, half-Black, that was plain
to see once Hank got over the surprise.

"What're you looking at?" demanded Hank.

The eyes closed and the face was gone.  The bushes wiggled and whispered
from something crawling fast.

"Never you mind him," said Makepeace Smith.  "That's just Arthur
Stuart."

Arthur Stuart!  Not a soul in New England or the United States but knew
that name as sure as if they lived in the Crown Colonies.  "Then You'll
be glad to hear that I'm the Lord Protector," said Hank Dowser.

"Cause if the King be that partickler shade of skin, I got some news
that'll get me three free dinners a day in any town in Ohio and
Suskwahenny till the day I die."

Makepeace laughed brisk at that idea.  "No, that's Horace Guester's
joke, naming him thate way.  Horace and Old Peg Guester, they're raising
that boy, seeing how his natural ma's too poor to raise him.  Course I
don't think that's the whole reason.  Him being so lightskinned, her
husband, Mock Berry, you can't blame him if he don't like seeing that
child eat at table with his coal-black children.

Hank Dowser started pulling off his stockings.  "You don't suppose old
Horace Guester took him in on account of he's the party responsible for
causing the boy's skin to be so light."

"Hush your mouth with a pumpkin, Hank, before you say such a thing,"
said Makepeace.  "Horace ain't that kind of a man."

"You'd be surprised who I've known turn out to be that kind of a man,"
said Hank.  "Though I don't think it of Horace Guester, mind."

"Do you think Old Peg Guester'd let a half-Black bastard son of her
husband into the house?"

"What if she didn't know?"

"She'd know.  Her daughter Peggy used to be torch here in Hatrack River.
And everybody knowed that Little Peggy Guester never told a lie.

"I used to hear tell about the Hatrack River torch, afore I ever come
here.  How come I never seen her?"

"She's gone, that's why," said Makepeace.  "Left three years ago.

Just run off.  You'd be wise never to ask about her up to Guester's
roadhouse.  They're a mite ticklish on the subject."

Barefoot now, Hank Dowser stood up on the bank of the stream.

He happened to glance up, and there off in the trees, just a-watching
him, stood that Arthur Stuart boy again.  Well, what harm could a little
pickaninny do?  Not a bit.

Hank stepped into the stream and let the ice-cold water pour over his
feet.  He spoke silently to the water: I don't mean to block your flow,
or slack you down even further.  The well I dig ain't meant to do you no
harm.  It's like giving you another place to flow through, like giving
you another face, more hands, another eye.  So don't you hide from me,
Water.  Show me where you're rising up, pushing to reach the sky, and
I'll tell them to dig there, and set you free to wash over the earth,
you just see if I don't.

"This water pure enough?" Hank asked the smith.

"Pure as it can be," said Makepeace.  "Never heard of nobody taking sick
from it."

Hank dipped the sharp end of the wand into the water, upstream of his
feet.  Taste it, he told the wand.  Catch the flavor of it, and
remember, and find me more just this sweet.

The wand started to buck in his hands.  It was ready.  He lifted it from
the stream; it settled down, calmer, but still shaking just the least
bit, to let him know it was alive, alive and searching.

Now there was no more talking, no more thinking.  Hank just walked, eyes
near closed because he didn't want his vision to distract from the
tingling in his hands.  The wand never led him astray; to look where he
was going would be as much as to admit the wand had no power to find.

It took near half an hour.  Oh, he found a few places right off, but not
good enough, not for Hank Dowser.  He could tell by how sharp the wand
bucked and dropped whether the water was close enough to the surface to
do much good.  He was so good at it now that most folks couldn't make no
difference between him and a doodlebug, which was about as fine a knack
as a dowser could ever have.  And since doodlebugs were right scarce,
mostly being found among seventh sons or thirteenth children, Hank never
wished anymore that he was a doodlebug instead of just a dowser, or not
often, anyway.

The wand dropped so hard it buried itself three inches deep in the
earth.  Couldn't do much better than that.  Hank sled and opened his
eyes.  He wasn't thirty feet back of the smithy.  Couldn't have found a
better spot with his eyes open.  No doodlebug could've done a nicer job.

The smith thought so, too.  "Why, if you'd asked me where I wished the
well would be, this is the spot I'd pick."

Hank nodded, accepting the praise without a smile, his eyes halfclosed,
his whole body still a-tingle with the strength of the water's call to
him.  "I don't want to lift this wand," said Hank, "till you've dug a
trench all round this spot to mark it off."

"Fetch a spade!" cried the smith.

Prentice Alvin jogged off in search of the tool.  Hank noticed Arthur
Stuart toddling after, running full tilt on them short legs so awkward
he was bound to fall.  And fall he did, flat down on his face in the
grass, moving so fast he slid a yard at least, and came up soaking wet
with dew.  Didn't pause him none.  Just waddled on around the smithy
building where Prentice Alvin went.

Hank turned back to Makepeace Smith and kicked at the soil just
underfoot.  "I can't be sure, not being a doodlebug," said Hank, as
modest as he could manage, "but I'd say you won't have to dig ten feet
till you strike water here.  It's fresh and lively as I ever seen."

"No skin off my nose either way," said Makepeace.  "I don't aim to dig
it."

"That prentice of yours looks strong enough to dig it hisself, if he
doesn't lazy off and sleep when your back is turned."

"He ain't the lazying kind," said Makepeace.  "You'll be staying the
night at the roadhouse, I reckon."

"I reckon not," said Hank.  "I got some folks about six mile west who
want me to find them some dry ground to dig a good deep cellar."

"Ain't that kind of anti-dowsing?"

"It is, Makepeace, and it's a whole lot harder, too, in wettish country
like this."

"Well, come back this way, then," said Makepeace, "and I'll save you a
sip of the first water pulled up from your well."

"I'll do that," said Hank, "and gladly." That was an honor he wasn't
often offered, that first sip from a well.  There was power in that, but
only if it was freely given, and Hank couldn't keep from smiling now.
"I'll be back in a couple of days, sure as shooting."

The prentice boy come back with the spade and set right to digging. Just
a shallow trench, but Hank noticed that the boy squared it off without
measuring, each side of the hole equal, and as near as Hank could guess,
it was true to the compass points as well.  Standing there with the wand
still rooted into the ground, Hank felt a sudden sickness in his
stomach, having the boy so close.  Only it wasn't the kind of sickness
where you hanker to chuck up what you ate for breakfast.  It was the
kind of sickness that turns to pain, the sickness that turns to
violence; Hank felt himself yearning to snatch the spade out of the
boy's hands and smack him across the head with the sharp side of the
blade.

Till finally it dawned on him, standing there with the wand a-trembling
in his hand.  It wasn't Hank who hated this boy, no sir.

It was the water that Hank served so well, the water that wanted this
boy dead.

The moment that thought entered Hank's head, he fought it down,
swallowed back the sickness inside him.  It was the plain craziest idea
that ever entered his head.  Water was water.  All it wanted was to come
up out of the ground or down out of the clouds and race over the face of
the earth.  It didn't have no malice in it.  No desire to kill.

And anyway, Hank Dowser was a Christian, and a Baptist to boot-a natural
dowser's religion if there ever was one.  When he put folks under the
water, it was to baptize them and bring them to Jesus, not to drownd
them.  Hank didn't have murder in his heart, he had his Savior there,
teaching him to love his enemies, teaching him that even to hate a man
was like murder.

Hank said a silent prayer to Jesus to take this rage out of his heart
and make him stop wishing for this innocent boy's death.

As if in answer, the wand leapt right out of the ground, flew clear out
of his hands and landed in the bushes most of two rods off.

That never happened to Hank in all his days of dowsing.  A wand taking
off like that!  Why, it was as if the water had spurned him as sharp as
a fine lady spurns a cussing man.

"Trench is all dug," said the boy.

Hank looked sharp at him, to see if he noticed anything funny about the
way the wand took off like that.  But the boy wasn't even looking at
him.  Just looking at the ground inside the square he'd just ditched
off.

"Good work," said Hank.  He tried not to let his voice show the loathing
that he felt.

"Won't do no good to dig here," said the boy.

Hank couldn't hardly believe his ears.  Bad enough the boy sassing his
own master, in the trade he knew, but what in tarnation did this boy
know about dowsing?

"What did you say, boy?" asked Hank.

The boy must have seen the menace in Hank's face, or caught the tone of
fury in his voice, because he backed right down.  "Nothing, sir," he
said.  "None of my business anyhow."

Such was Hank's built-up anger, though, that he wasn't letting the boy
off so easy.  "You think you can do my job too, is that it?  Maybe your
master lets you think you're as good as he is cause you got your knack
with hooves, but let me tell you, boy, I am a true dowser and my wand
tells me there's water here!"

"That's right," said the boy.  He spoke mildly, so that Hank didn't
really notice that the boy had four inches on him in height and probably
more than that in reach.  Prentice Alvin wasn't so big you'd call him a
giant, but you wouldn't call him no dwarf, neither.

"That's right?  It ain't for you to say right or wrong to what my wand
tells me!"

"I know it, sir, I was out of turn."

The smith came back with a wheelbarrow, a pick, and two stout iron
levers.  "What's all this?" he asked.

"Your boy here got smart with me," said Hank.  He knew as he said it
that it wasn't quite fair-the boy had already apologized, hadn't he?

Now at last Makepeace's hand lashed out and caught the boy a blow like a
bear's paw alongside his head.  Alvin staggered under the cuffing, but
he didn't fall.  "I'm sorry, sir," said Alvin.

"He said there wasn't no water here, where I said the well should be."
Hank just couldn't stop himself.  "I had respect for his knack.

You'd think he'd have respect for mine."

"Knack or no knack," said the smith, "he'll have respect for my
customers or he'll learn how long it takes to be a smith, oh sir!

he'll learn."

Now the smith had one of the heavy iron levers in his hand, as if he
meant to cane the boy across the back with it.  That would be sheer
murder, and Hank hadn't the heart for it.  He held out his hand and
caught the end of the lever.  "No, Makepeace, wait, it's all right.  He
did tell me he was sorry."

"And is that enough for you?"

"That and knowing you'll listen to me and not to him," said Hank.

"I'm not so old I'm ready to hear boys with hoof-knacks tell me I can't
dowse no more."

"Oh, the well's going to be dug right here, you can bet your life.

And this boy's going to dig it all himself, and not have a bite to eat
until he strikes water."

Hank smiled.  "Well, then, he'll be glad to discover that I know what
I'm doing-he won't have to dig far, that's for sure."

Makepeace rounded on the boy, who now stood a few yards off, his hands
slack at his side, showing no anger on his face, nothing at all, really.
"I'm going to escort Mr.  Dowser back to his new-shod mare, Alvin.  And
this is the last I want to see of you until you can bring me a bucket of
clean water from this well.  You won't eat a bite or have a sip of water
until you drink it from here!"

"Oh, now," said Hank, "have a heart.  You know it takes a couple of days
sometimes for the dirt to settle out of a new well."

"Bring me a bucket of water from the new well, anyway," said Makepeace.
"Even if you work all night."

They headed back for the smithy then, to the corral where Picklewing
waited.  There was some chat, some work at saddling up, and then Hank
Dowser was on his way, his nag riding smoother and easier under him,
just as happy as a clam.  He could see the boy working as he rode off.
There wasn't no flurry of dirt, just methodical lifting and dumping,
lifting and dumping.  The boy didn't seem to stop to rest, either. There
wasn't a single break in the sound of his labor as Hank rode off.  The
shuck sound of the spade dipping into the soil, then the swish-thump as
the dirt slid off onto the pile.

Hank didn't calm down his anger till he couldn't hear a sound of the
boy, or even remember what the sound was like.  Whatever power Hank had
as a dowser, this boy was the enemy of his knack, that much Hank knew.
He had thought his rage was unreasonable before, but now that the boy
had spoke up, Hank knew he had been right all along.  The boy thought he
was a master of water, maybe even a doodlebug, and that made him Hank's
enemy.

Jesus said to give your enemy your own cloak, to turn the other
cheek-but what about when your enemy aims to take away your livelihood,
what then?  Do you let him ruin you?  Not this Christian, thought Hank.

I learned that boy something this time, and if it doesn't take, I'll
learn him more later.

Masquffade

Peggy wasn't the belle of the Governor's Ball, but that was fine with
her.  Mistress Modesty had long since taught her that it was a mistake
for women to compete with each other.  "There is no single prize to be
won, which, if one woman attains it, must remain out of reach for an the
others."

No one else seemed to understand this, however.  The other women eyed
each other with jealous eyes, measuring the probable expense of gowns,
guessing at the cost of whatever amulet of beauty the other woman wore;
keeping track of who danced with whom, how many men arranged to be
presented Few of them turned a jealous eye toward Peggy-at least not
when she first entered the room in midafternoon.

Peggy knew the impresSion she was making.  Instead of an elegant
coiffure, her hair was brushed and shining, pulled up in a style that
looked well-tended, but rone to straying locks here and there.  Her gown
was simple, almost p ain-but this was by calculation.  "You have a sweet
young body, so Pi your gown must not distract from the natural litheness
of youth."

Moreover, the gown was unusually modest, showing less bare flesh than
any other woman's dress; yet, more than most, it revealed the free
movement of the body underneath it.

She could almost hear Mistress Modesty's voice, saying, "So many girls
misunderstand.  The corset is not an end in itself It is meant to allow
old and sagging bodies to imitate the body that a healthy young woman
naturally has.  A corset on you must be lightly laced, the stays only
for comfort, not containment.  Then your body can move freely, athe.
Other girls will marvel that you have the courand you can bre age to
appear in public with a natural waistline.  But men don't measure the
cut of a woman's clothes.  Instead they pleasure in the naturalness of a
lady who is comfortable, sure of herself, enjoying life on this day, in
this place, in his company."

Most important, though, was the fact that she wore no jewelry.

The other ladies all depended on beseemings whenever they went out in
public.  Unless a girl had a knack for beseemings herself, she had to
buyr her parents or husband had to buy-a hex engraven on a.

ring or amulet.  Amulets were preferred, since they were worn nearer the
face, and so one could get by with a much weaker-and therefore
cheaper-hex.  Such beseemings had no effect from far off, but the closer
you came to a woman with a beseeming of beauty, the more you began to
feel that her face was particularly beautiful.  None of her features was
transformed; you still saw what was actually there.  It was your
judgment that changed.  Mistress Modesty laughed at such hexes.  "What
good does it do to fool someone, when he knows that he's being fooled?"
So Peggy wore no such hex.

All the other women at the ball were in disguise.  Though no one's face
was hidden, this ball was a masquerade.  Only Peggy and Mistress
Modesty, of all the women here, were not in costume, were not pretending
to some unnatural ideal.

She could guess at the other girls' thoughts as they watched her enter
the room: Poor thing.  How plain.  No competition there.  And their
estimation was true enough-at least at first.  No one took particular
notice of Peggy.

But Mistress Modesty carefully selected a few of the men who approached
her.  "I'd like you to meet my young friend Margaret," she would say,
and then Peggy would smile the fresh and open smile that was not
artificial at all-her natural smile, the one that spoke of her honest
gladness at meeting a friend of Mistress Modesty's.  They would touch
her hand and bow, and her gentle echoing courtesy was graceful and
unmeasured, an honest gesture; her hand squeezed his as a friendly
reflex, the way one greets a hoped-for friend.  "The art of beauty is
the art of truth," said Mistress Modesty.  "Other women pretend to be
someone else; you will be your loveliest self, with the same natural
exuberant grace as a bounding deer or a circling hawk."

The man would lead her onto the floor, and she would dance with him, not
worrying about correct steps or keeping time or showing off her dress,
but rather enjoying the dance, their symmetrical movement, the way the
music flowed through their bodies together.

The man who met her, who danced with her, remembered.  Afterward the
other girls seemed stilted, awkward, unfree, artificial.  Many men,
themselves as artificial as most of the ladies, did not know themselves
well enough to know they enjoyed Peggy's company more than any other
young lady's.  But then, Mistress Modesty did not introduce Peggy to
such men.  Rather she only allowed Peggy to dance with the kind of man
who could respond to her; and Mistress Modesty knew which men they were
because they were genuinely fond of Mistress Modesty.

So as the hours passed by at the ball, hazy afternoon giving way to
bright evening, more and more men were circling Peggy, filling up her
dance card, eagerly conversing with her during the lulls, bringing her
refreshment-which she ate if she was hungry or thirsty, and kindly
refused if she was not-until the other girls began to take note of her.

There were plenty of men who took no notice of Peggy, of course; no
other girl lacked because of Peggy's plenty.  But they didn't see it
that way.  What they saw was that Peggy was always surrounded, and Peggy
could guess at their whispered conversations.

"What kind of spell does she have?"

"She wears an amulet under her bodice-I'm sure I saw its shape pressing
against that cheap fabric."

"Why don't they see how thick-waisted she is?"

"Look how her hair is awry, as if she had just come in from the
barnyard."

"She must flatter them dreadfully."

"Only a certain kind of man is attracted to her, I hope you notice."

Poor things, poor things.  Peggy had no power that was not already born
within any of these girls.  She used no artifice that they would have to
buy.

Most important to her was the fact that she did not even use her own
knack here.  All of Mistress Modesty's other teachings had come easily
to her over the years, for they were nothing more than the extension of
her natural honesty.  The one difficult barrier was Peggy's knack.  By
habit, the moment she met someone she had always looked into his
heartfire to see who he was; and, knowing more about him than she knew
about herself, she then had to conceal her knowledge of his darkest
secrets.  It was this that had made her so reserved, even
haughty-seeming.

Mistress Modesty and Peggy both agreed-she could not tell others how
much she knew about them.  Yet Mistress Modesty assured her that as long
as she was concealing something so important, she could not become her
most beautiful self-could not become the woman that Alvin would love for
herself, and not out of pity.

The answer was simple enough.  Since Peggy could not tell what she knew,
and could not hide what she knew, the only solution was not to know it
in the first place.  That was the real struggle of these past three
years-to train herself not to look into the heartfires around her.  Yet
by hard work, after many tears of frustration and a thousand different
tricks to try to fool herself, she had achieved it.

She could enter a crowded ballroom and remain oblivious to the
heartfires around her.  Oh, she saw the heartfires-she could not blind
herself-but she paid no attention to them.  She did not find herself
drawing close to see deeply.  And now she was getting skilled enough
that she didn't even have to try not to see into the heartfire.  She
could stand this close to someone, conversing, paying attention to their
words, and yet see no more of his inner thoughts than any other person
would.

Of course, years of torchery had taught her more about human nature-the
kinds of thoughts that go behind certain words or tones of voice or
expressions or gestures-that she was very good at guessing others'
present thoughts.  But good people never minded when she seemed to know
what was on their mind right at the moment.  She did not have to hide
that knowledge.  It was only their deepest secrets that she could not
know-and those secrets were now invisible to her unless she chose to
see.

She did not choose to see.  For in her new detachment she found a kind
of freedom she had never known before in all her life.  She could take
other people at face value now.  She could rejoice in their company, not
knowing and therefore not feeling responsible for their bidden hungers
or, most terribly, their dangerous futures.  It gave a kind of
exhilarating madness to her dancing, her laughter, her conversation; no
one else at the ball felt so free as Modesty's young friend Margaret,
because no one else had ever known such desperate confinement as she had
known all her life till now.

So it was that Peggy's evening at the Governor's Ball was glorious.

Not a triumph, actually, since she vanquished no one-whatever man won
her friendship was not conquered, but liberated, even victorious.

What she felt was pure joy, and so those who were with her also rejoiced
in her company.  Such good feelings could not be contained.

Even those who gossiped nastily about her behind their fans nevertheless
caught the joy of the evening; many told the governor's wife that this
was the best ball ever held in Dekane, or for that matter in the whole
state of Suskwahenny.

Some even realized who it was who brought such gladness to the

evening.  Among them were the governor's wife and Mistress Modesty.

Peggy saw them talking once, as she turned gracefully on the floor,
returning to her partner with a smile that made him laugh with joy to be
dancing with her.  The governor's wife was smiling and nodding, and she
pointed with her fan toward the dance floor, and for a moment Peggy's
eyes met hers.  Peggy smiled in warm greeting; the governor's wife
smiled and nodded back.  The gesture did not go unremarked.  Peggy would
be welcome at any party she wanted to attend in Dekane-two or three a
night, if she desired, every night of the year.

Yet Peggy did not glory in this achievement, for she recognized how
small it really was.  She had won her way into the finest events in
Dekane-but Dekane was merely the capital of a state on the edge of the
American frontier.  If she longed for social victories, she would have
to make her way to Camelot, to win the accolades or royaltyand from
there to Europe, to be received in Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, or Madrid.

Even then, though, even if she had danced with every crowned head, it
would mean nothing.  She would die, they would die, and how would the
world be any better because she had danced?

She had seen true greatness in the heartfire of a newborn baby fourteen
years ago.  She had protected the child because she loved his future;
she had also come to love the boy because of who he was, the kind of
soul he had.  Most of all, though, more important than her feelings for
Prentice Alvin, most of all she loved the work that lay ahead of him.
Kings and queens built kingdoms, or lost them; merchants made fortunes,
or squandered them; artists made works that time faded or forgot.  Only
Prentice Alvin had in him the seeds of Making that would stand against
time, against the endless wasting of the Unmaker.

So as she danced tonight, she danced for him, knowing that if she could
win the love of these strangers, she might also win Alvin's love, and
earn a place beside him on his pathway to the Crystal City, that place
in which all the citizens can see like torches, build like makers, and
love with the purity of Christ.

With the thought of Alvin, she cast her attention to his distant
heartfire.  Though she had schooled herself not to see into nearby
heartfires, she never gave up looking into his.  Perhaps this made it
harder for her to control her knack, but what purpose was it to learn
anything, if by learning she lost her connection to that boy?  So she
did not have to search for him; she knew always, in the back of her
mind, where his heartfire burned.  In these years she had learned not to
see him constantly before her, but still she could see him in an
instant.  She did so now.

He was digging in the ground behind his smithy.  But she hardly noticed
the work, for neither did he.  What burned strongest in his heartfire
was anger.  Someone had treated him unfairly-but that could hardly be
new, could it?  Makepeace, once the most fairminded of masters, had
become steadily more envious of Alvin's skill at ironwork, and in his
jealousy he had become unjust, denying Alvin's ability more fervently
the further his prentice boy surpassed him.

Alvin lived with injustice every day, yet never had Peggy seen such rage
in him.

"Is something wrong, Mistress Margaret?" The man who danced with her
spoke in concern.  Peggy had stopped, there in the middle of the floor.
The music still played, and couples still moved through the dance, but
near her the dancers had stopped, were watching her.

"I can'tontinue," she said.  It surprised her to find that she was out
of breath with fear.  What was she afraid of?

"Would you like to leave the ballroom?" he asked.  What was his name?
There was only one name in her mind: Alvin.

"Please," she said.  She leaned on him as they walked toward the open
doors leading onto the porch.  The crowd parted; she didn't see them.

It was as if all the anger Alvin had stored up in his years of working
under Makepeace Smith now was coming out, and every dig of his shovel
was a deep cut of revenge.  A dowser, an itinerant water-seeker, that's
who had angered him, that's the one he meant to harm.  But the dowser
was none of Peggy's concern; nor was his provocation, however mean or
terrible.  It was Alvin.  Couldn't he see that when he dug so deep in
hatred it was an act of destruction?  And didn't he know that when you
work to destroy, you invite the Destroyer?  When your labor is unmaking,
the Unmaker can claim you.

The air outside was cooler in the gathering dusk, the last shred of the
sun throwing a ruddy light across the lawns of the Governor's mansion.
"Mistress Margaret, I hope I did nothing to cause you to faint."

"No, I'm not even fainting.  Will you forgive me?  I had a thought,
that's all.  One that I must think about."

He looked at her strangely.  Any time a woman needed to part with a man,
she always claimed to be near fainting.  But not Mistress Margaret-Peggy
knew that he was puzzled, uncertain.  The etiquette of fainting was
clear.  But what was a gentleman's proper manner toward a woman who "had
a thought"?

She laid her hand on his arm.  "I assure you, my friend-I'm quite well,
and I delighted in dancing with you.  I hope we'll dance again.

But for now, for the moment, I need to be alone."

She could see how her words eased his concern.  Calling him "my friend"
was a promise to remember him; her hope to dance with him again was so
sincere that he could not help but believe her.  He took her words at
face value, and bowed with a smile.  After that she didn't even see him
leave.

Her attention was far away, in Hatrack River, where Prentice Alvin was
calling to the Unmaker, not guessing what he was doing.

Peggy searched and searched in his heartfire, trying to find something
she might do to keep him safe.  But there was nothing.  Now that Alvin
was being driven by anger, all paths led to one place, and that lace
terrified her, for she couldn't see what was there, couldn't see what
would happen.  And there were no paths out.

What was I doing at this foolish ball, when Alvin needed me?  If I had
been paying proper attention, I would have seen this coming, would have
found some way to help him.  Instead I was dancing with these men who
mean less than nothing to the future of this world.

Yes, they delight in me.  But what is that worth, if Alvin falls, if
Prentice Alvin is destroyed, if the Crystal City is unmade before its
Maker begins to build it?

wells

Alvin didn't need to look up when the dowser left.  He could feel where
the man was as he moved along, his anger like a black noise in the midst
of the sweet green music of the wood.  That was the curse of being the
only White, man or boy, who could feel the life of the greenwood-it
meant that he was also the only White who knew how the land was dying.

Not that the soil wasn't rich-years of forest growth had made the earth
so fertile that they said the shadow of a seed could take root and grow.
There was life in the fields, life in the towns even.  But it wasn't
part of the land's own song.  It was just noise, whispering noise, and
the green of the wood, the life of the Red man, the animal, the plant,
the soil all living together in harmony, that song was quiet now,
intermittent, sad.  Alvin heard it dying and he mourned.

Vain little dowser.  Why was he so mad?  Alvin couldn't figure.

But he didn't press it, didn't argue, because almost as soon as the
dowser came along, Al could see the Unmaker shadowing the edges of his
vision, as if Hank Dowser'd brought him along.

Alvin first saw the Unmaker in his nightmares as a child, a vast
nothingness that rolled invisibly toward him, trying to crush him, to
get inside him, to grind him into pieces.  It was old Taleswapper who
first helped Alvin give his empty enemy a name.  The Unmaker, which
longs to undo the universe, break it all down until everything is flat
and cold and smooth and dead.

As soon as he had a name for it and some notion what it was, he started
seeing the Unmaker in daylight, wide awake.  Not right out in the open,
of course.  Look at the Unmaker and most times you can't see him.  He
goes all invisible behind all the life and growth and upbuilding in the
world.  But at the edges of your sight, as if he was sneaking up behind,
that's where the sly old snake awaited, that's where Alvin saw him.

When Alvin was a boy he learned a way to make that Unmaker step back a
ways and leave him be.  All he had to do was use his hands to build
something.  It could be as simple as weaving grass into a basket, and
he'd have some peace.  So when the Unmaker showed up around the
blacksmith's shop not long after Alvin got there, he wasn't too worried.
There was plenty of chance for making things in the smithy.

Besides, the smithy was full of fire-fire and iron, the hardest earth.

Alvin knew from childhood on that the Unmaker hankered after water.

Water was its servant, did most of its work, tearing things down. So it
was no wonder that when a water man like Hank Dowser came along, the
Unmaker freshened up and got lively.

Now, though, Hank Dowser was on his way, taking his anger and his
unfairness with him, but the Unmaker was still there, hiding out in the
meadow and the bushes, lurking in the long shadows of the evening.

Dig with the shovel, lever up the earth, hoist it to the lip of the
well, dump it aside.  A steady rhythm, a careful building of the pile,
shaping the sides of the hole.  Square the first three feet of the hole,
to set the shape of the well house.  Then round and gently tapered
inward for the stonework of the finished well.  Even though you know
this well will never draw water, do it careful, dig as if you thought
that it would last.  Build smooth, as near to perfect as you can, and
it'll be enough to hold that sly old spy at bay.

So why didn't Alvin feel a speck more brave about it?

Alvin knew it was getting on toward evening, sure as if he had him a
watch in his pocket, cause here came Arthur Stuart, his face just
scrubbed after supper, sucking on a horehound and saying not a word.

Alvin was used to him by now.  Almost ever since the boy could walk,
he'd been like Alvin's little shadow, coming every day it didn't rain.

Never had much to say, and when he did it wasn't too easy to understand
his baby talk-he had trouble with his Rs and Ss.  Didn't matter.

Arthur never wanted nothing and never did no harm, and Alvin usually
half-forgot the boy was around.

Digging there with the evening flies out, buzzing in his face, Alvin had
nothing to do with his brain but think.  Three years he been in Hatrack,
and all that time he hadn't got him one inch closer to knowing what his
knack was for.  He hardly used it, except for the bit he done with the
horses, and that was cause he couldn't bear to know how bad they
suffered when it was so easy a thing for him to make the shoeing go
right.  That was a good thing to do, but it didn't amount to much
up-building, compared to the ruination of the land all around him.

The White man was the Unmaker's tool in this forest land, Alvin knew
that, better even than water at tearing things down.  Every tree that
fell, every badger, coon, deer, and beaver that got used up without
consent, each death was part of the killing of the land.  Used to be the
Reds kept the balance of things, but now they were gone, either dead or
moved west of the Mizzipy-or, like the Irrakwa and the Cherriky, turned
White at heart, sleeves rolled up and working hard to unmake the land
even faster than the White.  No one left to try to keep things whole.

Sometimes Alvin thought he was the only one left who hated the Unmaker
and wanted to build against him.  And he didn't know how to do it,
didn't have any idea what the next step ought to be.  The torch who
touched him at his birthing, she was the only one who might've taught
him how to be a true Maker, but she was gone, run off the very morning
that he came.  Couldn't be no accident.  She just didn't want to teach
him aught.  He had a destiny, he knew it, and not a soul to help him
find the way.

I'm willing, thought Alvin.  I got the power in me, when I can figure
how to use it straight, and I got the desire to be whatever it is I'm
meant to be, but somebody's got to teach me.

Not the blacksmith, that was sure.  Profiteering old coot.  Alvin knew
that Makepeace Smith tried to teach him as little as he could.

Even now Alvin reckoned Makepeace didn't know half how much Alvin had
learned himself just by watching when his master didn't guess that he
was alert.  Old Makepeace never meant to let him go if he could help it.
Here I got a destiny, a real honest-to-goodness Work to do in my life,
just like the old boys in the Bible or Ulysses or Hector, and the only
teacher I got is a smith so greedy I have to steal learning from him,
even though it's mine by right.

Sometimes it burned Alvin up inside, and he got a hankering to do
something spetackler to show Makepeace Smith that his prentice wasn't
just a boy who didn't know he was being cheated.  What would Makepeace
Smith do if he saw Alvin split iron with his fingers?  What if he saw
that Al could straighten a bent nail as strong as before, or heal up
brittle iron that shattered under the hammer?  What if he saw that Al
could beat iron so thin you could see sunlight through it, and yet so
strong you couldn't break it?

But that was plain dumb when Alvin thought that way, and he knowed it.
Makepeace Smith might gasp the first time, he might even faint dead
away, but inside ten minutes he'd be figuring an angle how to make money
from it, and Alvin'd be less likely than ever to get free ahead of time.
And his fame would spread, yes sir, so that by the time he turned
nineteen and Makepeace Smith had to let him go, Alvin would already have
too much notice.  Folks'd keep him busy healing and doodlebugging and
fixing and stone shaping, work that wasn't even halfway toward what he
was born for.  If they brought him the sick and lame to heal, how would
he ever have time to be aught but a physicker?

Time enough for healing when he learned the whole way to be a Maker.

The Prophet Lolla-Wossiky showed him a vision of the Crystal City only a
week before the massacre at Tippy-Canoe.  Alvin knew that someday in the
future it was up to him to build them towers of ice and light.  That was
his destiny, not to be a country fixit man.  As long as he was bound to
Makepeace Smith's service, he had to keep his real knack secret.

That's why he never ran off, even though he was big enough now that
nobody'd take him for a runaway prentice.  What good would freedom do?
He had to learn first how to be a Maker, or it wouldn't make no
difference if he went or stayed.

So he never spoke of what he could do, and scarce used his gifts more
than to shoe horses and feel the death of the land around him.

But all the time in the back of his brain he recollected what he really
was.  A Maker.  Whatever that is, I'm it, which is why the Unmaker tried
to kill me before I was born and in a hundred accidents and
almost-murders in my childhood back in Vigor Church.  That's why he
lurks around now, watching me, waiting for a chance to get me, waiting
maybe for a time like tonight, all alone out here in the darkness, just
me and the spade and my anger of having to do work that won't amount to
nothing.

Hank Dowser.  What kind of man won't listen to a good idea from somebody
else?  Sure the wand went down hard-the water was like to bust up
through the earth at that place.  But the reason it hadn't busted
through was on account of a shelf of rock along there, not four feet
under the soil.  Why else did they think this was a natural meadow here?
The big trees couldn't root, because the water that fell here flowed
right off the stone, while the roots couldn't punch through the shelf of
rock to get to the water underneath it.  Hank Dowser could find water,
but he sure couldn't find what lay between the water and the surface. It
wasn't Hank's fault he couldn't see it, but it sure was his fault he
wouldn't entertain no notion it might be there.

So here was Alvin, digging as neat a well as you please, and sure
enough, no sooner did he have the round side wall of the well defined
than clink, clank, clunk, the spade rang against stone.

At the new sound, Arthur Stuart ran right up to the edge of the hole and
looked in.  "Donk donk," he said.  Then he clapped his hands.

"Donk donk is right," said Alvin.  "I'll be donking on solid rock the
whole width of this hole.  And I ain't going in to tell Makepeace Smith
about it, neither, you can bet on that, Arthur Stuart.  He told me I
couldn't eat nor drink till I got water, and I ain't about to go in
afore dark and start pleading for supper just cause I hit rock, no sir.

"Donk," said the little boy.

"I'm digging every scrap of dirt out of this hole till the rock is bare.
" He carefully dug out all the dirt he could, scraping the spade along
the bumpy face of the rock.  Even so, it was still brown and earthy, and
Alvin wasn't satisfied.  He wanted that stone to shine white.  Nobody
was watching but Arthur Stuart, and he was just a baby anyhow.  So Alvin
used his knack in a way he hadn't done since leaving Vigor Church.  He
made all the soil flow away from the bare rock, slide right across the
stone and fetch up tight against the smooth-edge earthen walls of the
hole.

It took almost no time till the stone was so shiny and white you could
think it was a pool reflecting the last sunlight of the day.  The
evening birds sang in the trees.  Sweat dripped off Alvin so fast it
left little black spots when it fell on the rock.

Arthur stood at the edge of the hole.  "Water," he said.

"Now you stand back, Arthur Stuart.  Even if this ain't all that deep,
you just stand back from holes like this.  You can get killed falling
in, you know."

A bird flew by, its wings rattling loud as could be.  Somewhere another
bird gave a frantic cry.

"Snow," said Arthur Stuart.

"It ain't snow, it's rock," said Alvin.  Then he clambered up out of the
hole and stood there, laughing to himself.  "There's your well, Hank
Dowser," Alvin said.  "You ride on back here and see where your stick
drove into the dirt."

He'd be sorry he got Al a blow from his master's hand.  It wasn't no
joke when a blacksmith hit you, specially one like his master, who
didn't go easy even on a little boy, and sure not on a man-size prentice
like Alvin.

Now he could go on up to the house and tell Makepeace Smith the well was
dug.  Then he'd lead his master back down here and show him this hole,
with the stone looking up from the bottom, as solid as the heart of the
world.  Alvin heard himself saying to his master, "You show me how to
drink that and I'll drink it." It'd be pure pleasure to hear how
Makepeace'd cuss himself blue at the sight of it.

Except now that he could show them how wrong they were to treat him like
they did, Alvin knew it didn't matter in the long run whether he taught
them a lesson or not.  What mattered was Makepeace Smith really did need
this well.  Needed it bad enough to pay out a dowser's cost in free
ironwork.  Whether it was dug where Hank Dowser said or somewhere else,
Alvin knew he had to dig it.

That would suit Alvin's pride even better, now he thought of it.

He'd come in with a bucket, just like Makepeace ordered him to-but from
a well of his own choosing.

He looked around in the ruddy evening light, thinking where to start
looking for a diggable spot.  He heard Arthur Stuart pulling at the
meadow grass, and the sound of birds having a church choir practice,
they were so loud tonight.

Or maybe they were plain scared.  Cause now he was looking around, Alvin
could see that the Unmaker was lively tonight.  By rights digging the
first hole should've been enough to send it headlong, keep it off for
days.  Instead it followed him just out of sight, ever step he took as
he hunted for the place to dig the true well.  It was getting more and
more like one of his nightmares, where nothing he did could make the
Unmaker go away.  It was enough to send a thrill of fear right through
him, make him shiver in the warm spring air.

Alvin just shrugged off that scare.  He knew the Unmaker wasn't going to
touch him.  For all the years of his life till now, the Unmaker'd tried
to kill him by setting up accidents, like water icing up where he was
bound to step, or eating away at a riverbank so he slipped in.  Now and
then the Unmaker even got some man or other to take a few swipes at
Alvin, like Reverend Thrower or them ChocTaw Reds.

In all his life, outside his dreams, that Unmaker never did anything
direct.

And he won't now either, Alvin told hisself Just keep searching, so you
can dig the real well.  The false one didn't drive that old deceiver
off, but the real one's bound to, and I won't see him shimmering at the
edges of my vision for three months after that.

With that thought in mind, Alvin hunkered down and kept his mind on
searching for a break in the hidden shelf of stone.

How Alvin searched things out underground wasn't like seeing.  It was
more like he had another hand that skittered through the soil and rock
as fast as a waterdrop on a hot griddle.  Even though he'd never met him
a doodlebug, he figured doodling couldn't be much different than how he
done it, sending his bug scouting along under the earth, feeling things
out all the way.  And if he was doodlebugging, then he had to wonder if
folks was right who allowed as how it was the doodlebug's very soul that
slithered under the ground, and there was tales about doodlebugs whose
souls got lost and the doodler never said another word or moved a muscle
till he finally died.  But Alvin didn't let such tales scare him off
from doing what he ought to.  if there was a need for stone, he'd find
him the natural breaks to make it come away without hardly chipping at
it.  If there was a need for water, he'd find him a way to dig on down
to get it.

Finally he found him a place where the shelf of stone was thin and
crumbled.  The ground was higher here, the water deeper down, but what
counted was he could get through the stone to it.

This new spot was halfway between the house and the smithywhich would be
less convenient for Makepeace, but better for his wife Gertie, who had
to use the same water.  Alvin set to with a win, because it was getting
on to dark, and he was determined to take no rest tonight until his work
was done.  Without even thinking about it he made up his mind to use his
power like he used to back on his father's land.  He never struck stone
with his spade; it was like the earth turned to flour and fair to jumped
out of the hole instead of him having to heft it.  If any grownup
happened to see him right then they'd think they was likkered up or
having a conniption fit, he dug so fast.  But nobody was looking, except
for Arthur Stuart.  It was getting nightward, after all, and Al had no
lantern, so nobody'd ever even notice he was there.

He could use his knack tonight without fear of being found out.

From the house came the sound of shouting, loud but not clear enough for
Alvin to make out the words.

"Mad," said Arthur Stuart.  He was looking straight at the house, as
steady as a dog on point.

"Can you hear what they're saying?" said Alvin.  "Old Peg Guester always
says you got ears like a dog, perk up at everything."

Arthur Stuart closed his eyes.  "You got no right to starve that boy,"
he said.

Alvin like to laughed outright.  Arthur was doing as perfect an
imitation of Gertie Smith's voice as he ever heard.

"He's too big to thrash and I got to learn him," said Arthur Stuart.

This time he sounded just like Alvin's master.  "I'll be," murmured
Alvin.

Little Arthur went right on.  "Either Alvin eats this plate of supper
Makepeace Smith or you'll wear it on your head.  I'd like to see you try
it you old hag I'll break your arms."

Alvin couldn't help himself, he just laughed outright.  "Consam it if
you ain't a perfect mockingbird, Arthur Stuart."

The little boy looked up at Alvin and a grin stole across his face.

Down from the house come the sound of breaking crockery.  Arthur Stuart
started to laugh and run around in circles.  "Break a dish, break a
dish, break a dish!" he cried.

"If you don't beat all," said Alvin.  "Now you tell me, Arthur, you
didn't really understand all them things you just said, did you?  I
mean, you were just repeating what you heard, ain't that so?"

"Break a dish on his head!" Arthur screamed with laughter and fell over
backward in the grass.  Alvin laughed right along, but he couldn't take
his eyes off the little boy.  More to him than meets the eye, thought
Alvin.  Or else he's plain crazy.

From the other direction came another woman's voice, a fullthroated call
that floated over the moist darkening air.  "Arthur!

Arthur Stuart!" Arthur sat right up.  "Mama," he said.

"That's right, that's Old Peg Guester calling," said Alvin.

"Go to bed," said Arthur.  give you it bath first, boy, you're a mite
"Just be careful she don't grimy.  Arthur got up and started trotting
ofr across the meadow, up to the path that led from the springhouse to
the roadhouse where he lived.

Alvin watched him out of sight, the little boy flapping his arms as he
ran, like as if he was flying.  Some bird, probably an owl, flew right
alongside the boy halfway across the meadow, skimming along the ground
like as if to keep him company.  Not till Arthur was out of sight behind
the springhouse did Alvin turn back to his labor.

In a few more minutes it was full dark, and the deep silence of night
came quick after that.  Even the dogs were quiet all through town.  It'd
be hours before the moon came up.  Alvin worked on.  He didn't have to
see; he could feel how the well was going, the earth under his feet. Nor
was it the Red man's seeing now, their gift for hearing the greenwood
song.  It was his own knack he was using, helping him feel his way
deeper into the earth.

He knew he'd strike rock twice as deep this time.  But when the spade
caught up on big chunks of rocks, it wasn't a smooth plate like it was
at the spot Hank Dowser chose.  The stones were crumbly and broke up,
and with his knack Al hardly had to press his lever afore the stones
flipped up easy as you please, and he tossed them out the well like
clods.

Once he dug through that layer, though, the ground got oozy underfoot.
If he wasn't who he was, he'd've had to set the work aside and get help
to dredge it out in the morning.  But for Alvin it was easy enough.  He
tightened up the earth around the walls of the hole, so water couldn't
seep in so fast.  It wasn't spadework now.  Alvin used a dredge to scoop
up the mucky soil, and he didn't need no partner to hoist it out on a
rope, either, he just heaved it up and his knack was such that each
scoop of ooze clung together and landed neat as you please outside the
well, just like he was flinging bunny rabbits out the hole.

Alvin was master here, that was sure, working miracles in this hole in
the ground.  You tell me I can't eat or drink till the well is dug,
thinking you'll have me begging for a cup of water and pleading for you
to let me go to bed.  Well, you won't see such a thing.  You'll have
your well, with walls so solid they'll be drawing water here after your
house and smithy have crumbled into dust.

But even as he felt the sweet taste of victory, he saw that the Unmaker
was closer than it had ever come in years.  It flickered and danced, and
not just at the edges of his vision anymore.  He could see it right in
front of him, even in the darkness, he could see it clearer than ever in
daylight, cause now he couldn't see nothing real to distract him.

It was scary, all of a sudden, just like the nightmares of his
childhood, and for a while Alvin stood in the hole, all froze with fear,
as water oozed up from below, making the ground under him turn to slime.
Thick slime a hundred feet deep, he was sinking down, and the walls of
the well were getting soft, too, they'd cave in on him and bury him,
he'd drown trying to breathe muck into his lungs, he knew it, he could
feel it cold and wet around his thighs, his crotch; he clenched his
fists and felt mud ooze between his fingers, just like the nothingness
in all his nightmaresAnd then he came to himself, got control.  Sure, he
was up to his waist in mud, and if he was any other boy in such a case
he might have wiggled himself down deeper and smothered hisself, trying
to struggle out.  But this was Alvin, not some ordinary boy, and he was
safe as long as he wasn't booglied up by fear like a child caught in
abad dream.  He just made the slime under his feet harden enough to hold
his weight, then made the hard place float upward, lifting him out of
the mud until he was standing on gravelly mud at the bottom of the well.

Easy as breaking a rat's neck.  If that was all the Unmaker could think
of doing, it might as well go on home.  Alvin was a match for him, just
like he was a match for Makepeace Smith and Hank Dowser both.

He dug on, dredged up, hoisted, flung, then bent to dredge again.

He was pretty near deep enough now, a good six feet lower than the stone
shelf.  Why, if he hadn't firmed up the earthen sides of the well, it'd
be full of water over his head already.  Alvin took hold of the knotted
rope he left dangling and walked up the wall, pulling himself hand over
hand up the rope.

The moon was rising now, but the hole was so deep it wouldn't shine into
the well until near moon-noon.  Never mind, Into the pit Alvin dumped a
barrowload of the stones he'd levered out only an hour before.  Then he
clambered down after it.

He'd been working rock with his knack since he was little, and he was
never more sure-handed with it than tonight.  With his bare hands he
shaped the stone like soft clay, making it into smooth square blocks
that he placed all around the walls of the well from the bottom up,
braced firm against each other so, that the pushing of soil and water
wouldn't cave it in.  Water would seep easily through the cracks between
stones, but the soil wouldn't, so the well would be clean almost from
the start.

There wasn't enough stone from the well itself, of course; Alvin made
three trips to the stream to load the barrow with watersmoothed rocks.
Even though he was using his knack to make the work easier, it was late
at night and weariness was coming on him.

But he refused to pay attention.  Hadn't he learned the Red man's knack
for running on long after weariness should have claimed him?

A boy who followed Ta-Kumsaw, running without a rest from Detroit to
Eight-Face Mound, such a boy had no need to give in to a single night of
well-digging, and never mind his thirst or the pain in his back and
thighs and shoulders, the ache of his elbows and his knees.

At last, at last, it was done.  The moon past zenith, his mouth tasting
like a horsehair blanket, but it was done.  He climbed on out of the
hole, bracing himself against the stone walls he'd just finished
building.  As he climbed he let go of his hold on the earth around the
well, unsealed it, and the water, now tame, began to trickle noisily
into the deep stone basin he'd built to hold it.

Still Alvin didn't go inside the house, didn't so much as walk to the
stream and drink.  His first taste of water would be from his well, just
like Makepeace Smith had said.  He'd stay here and wait until the well
had reached its natural level, and then clear the water and draw up a
bucket and carry it inside the house and drink a cup of it in front of
his master.  Afterward he'd take Makepeace Smith outside and show him
the well Hank Dowser called for, the one Makepeace Smith had cuffed him
for, and then point out the one where you could drop a bucket and it was
splash, not clatter.

He stood there at the lip of the well, imagining how Makepeace Smith
would sputter, how he'd cuss.  Then he sat down, just to ease his feet,
picturing Hank Dowser's face when he saw what Al had done.  Then he lay
right down to ease his aching back, and closed his eyes for just a
minute, so he didn't have to pay no heed to the fluttering shadows of
unmaking that kept pestering him out the corners of his eyes.

Unmaker

Mistress Modesty was stirring.  Peggy heard her breathing change rhythm.
Then she came awake and sat up abruptly on her couch.  At once Mistress
Modesty looked for Peggy in the darkness of the room.

"Here I am," Peggy murmured.

"What has happened, my dear?  Haven't you slept at all?"

"I dare not," said Peggy.

Mistress Modesty stepped onto the portico beside her.  The breeze from
the southwest billowed the damask curtains behind them.  The moon was
flirting with a cloud; the city of Dekane was a shifting pattern of
roofs down the hill below them.  "Can you see him?" asked Mistress
Modesty.

"Not him," said Peggy.  "I see his heartfire; I can see through his
eyes, as he sees; I can see his futures.  But himself, no, I can't see
him."

"My poor dear.  On such a marvelous night, to have to leave the
Governor's Ball and watch over this faraway child in grave danger."

It was Mistress Modesty's way of asking what the danger was without
actually asking.  This way Peggy could answer or not, and neither way
would any offense be given or taken.

"I wish I could explain," said Peggy.  "It's his enemy, the one with no
face-" Mistress Modesty shuddered.  "No face!  How ghastly."

"Oh, he has a face for other men.  There was a minister once, a man who
fancied himself a scientist.  He saw the Unmaker, but could not see him
truly, not as Alvin does.  Instead he made up a manshape for him in his
mind, and a nam ailed him 'the Visitor,' and thought he was an angel."

"An angel!"

"I believe that when most of us see the Unmaker, we can't comprehend
him, we haven't the strength of intellect for that.  So our minds come
as close as they can.  Whatever shape represents naked destructive
power, terrible and irresistible force, that is what we see.  Those who
love such evil power, they make themselves see the Unmaker as beautiful.
Others, who hate and fear it, they see the worst thing in the world."

"What does your Alvin see?"

"I could never see it myself, it's so subtle; even looking through his
eyes I wouldn't have noticed it, if he hadn't noticed it.  I saw that he
was seeing something, and only then did I understand what it was he saw.
Think of it as-the feeling when you think you saw some movement out of
the corner of your eye, only when you turn there's nothing there."

"Like someone always sneaking up behind you," said Mistress Modesty.

"Yes, exactly."

"And it's sneaking up on Alvin?"

"Poor boy, he doesn't realize that he's calling to it.  He has dug a
deep black pit in his heart, just the sort of place where the Umnaker
flows."

Mistress Modesty sighed.  "Ah, my child, these things are all beyond me.
I never had a knack; I can barely comprehend the things you do."

"You?  No knack?" Peggy was amazed.

"I know-hardly anyone ever admits to not having one, but surely I'm not
the only one."

"You misunderstand me, Mistress Modesty," said Peggy.  "I was startled,
not that you had no knack, but that you thought you had no knack.  Of
course you have one."

"Oh, but I don't mind not having one, my dear-"

"You have the knack of seeing potential beauty as if it were already
there, and by seeing, you let it come to be."

"What a lovely idea," said Mistress ty.

"Do you doubt me?"

"I don't doubt that you believe what you say."

There was no point in arguing.  Mistress Modesty believed her, but was
afraid to believe.  It didn't matter, though.  What mattered was Alvin,
finishing his second well.  He had saved himself once; he thought the
danger was over.  Now he sat at the edge of the well, just to rest a
moment; now he lay down.  Didn't he see the Unmaker moving close to him?
Didn't he realize that his very sleepiness opened himself wide for the
Unmaker to enter him?

"No!" whispered Peggy.  "Don't sleep!"

"Ah," said Mistress Modesty.  "You speak to him.  Can he hear you?"

"Never," said Peggy.  "Never a word."

"Then what can you do?"

"Nothing.  Nothing I can think of."

"You told me you used his caul-"

"It's a part of his power, that's what I use.  But even his knack can' -
t send away what came at his own call.  I never had the knowledge to
fend off the Unmaker itself, anyway, even if I had a yard of his
caulflesh, and not just a scrap of it."

Peggy watched in desperate silence as Alvin's eyes closed.  "He sleeps."

"If the Unmaker wins, will he die?"

"I don't know.  Perhaps.  Perhaps he'll disappear, eaten away to
nothing.  Or perhaps the Unmaker will own him-"

"Can't you see the future, torch girl?"

"All paths lead into darkness, and I see no path emerging."

"Then it's over," whispered Mistress Modesty.

Peggy could feel something cold on her cheeks.  Ah, of course: her own
tears drying in the cool breeze.

"But if Alvin were awake, he could fend off this invisible enemy.9"
Mistress Modesty asked.  "Sorry to bother you with questions, but if I
know how it works, perhaps I can help you think of something."

"No, no, it's beyond us, we can only watch-" Yet even as Peggy rejected
Mistress Modesty's suggestion, her mind leapt ahead to ways of using it.
I must waken him.  I don't have to fight the Unmaker, but if I waken
him, then he can do his fighting for himself.  Weak and weary though he
is, he might still find a way to victory.  At once Peggy turned and
rushed back into her room, scrabbled through her top drawer until she
found the carven box that held the caul.

"Should I leave?" Mistress Modesty had followed her.

"Stay with me," said Peggy.  "Please, for company.  For comfort, if I
fall."

"You won't fail," said Mistress Modesty.  "He won't fail, if he's the
man you say he is."

Peggy barely heard her.  She sat on the edge of her bed, searching in
Alvin's heartfire for some way to waken him.  Normally she could use his
senses even when he slept, hearing what he heard, seeing his memory of
the place around him.  But now, with the Unmaker seeping in, his senses
were fading.  She could not trust them.  Desperately she cast about for
some other plan.  A loud noise?  Using what little was left of Alvin's
sense of the life around him, she found a tree, then rubbed a tiny bit
of the caul and tried-as she had seen Alvin do itto picture in her mind
how the wood in the branch would come apart.

It was painfully slow-Alvin did it so quickly!-but at last she made it
fall.  Too late.  He barely heard it.  The Urumaker had undone so much
of the air around him that the trembling of sound could not pass through
it.  Perhaps Alvin noticed; perhaps he came a bit close to wakefulness.
Perhaps not.

How can I waken him, when he is so insensible that nothing can disturb
him?  Once I held this caul as a ridgebeam tumbled toward him; I burned
a childsize gap in it, so that the hair of his head wasn't even touched.
Once a millstone fell toward his leg; I split it in half.

Once his own father stood in a loft, pitchfork in hand, driven by the
Unmaker's madness until he had decided to murder his own mostbeloved
son; I brought Taleswapper down the hill to him, distracting the father
from his dark purpose and driving off the Urunaker.

How?  How did Taleswapper's coming drive off the Destroyer?

Because he would have seen the hateful beast and given the cry against
it, that's why the Unmaker left when Taleswapper arrived. Taleswapper
isn't anywhere near Alvin now, but surely there's someone I can waken
and draw down the hill; someone filled with love and goodness, so that
the Unmaker must flee before him.

With agonizing fear she withdrew from Alvin's heartfire even as the
blackness of the Unmaker threatened to drown it, and searched in the
night for another heartfire, someone she could waken and send to him in
time.  Yet even as she searched, she could sense in Alvin's heartfire a
certain lightening, a hint of shadows within shadows, not the utter
emptiness she had seen before where his future ought to be.

If Alvin had any chance, it was from her searching.  Even if she found
someone, she had no notion how to waken them.  But she would find a way,
or the Crystal City would be swallowed up in the flood that came because
of Alvin's foolish, childish rage.

Redbird

Alvin woke up hours later, the moon low in the west, the first scant
light appearing in the east.  He hadn't meant to sleep.  But he was
tired, after all, and his work was done, so of course he couldn't close
his eyes and hope to stay awake.  There was still time to take a
bucketful of water and carry it inside.

Were his eyes open even now?  The sky he could see, light grey to the
left, light grey to the right.  But where were the trees?

Shouldn't they have been moving gently in the morning breeze, just at
the fringes of his vision?  For that matter, there was no breeze; and
beyond the sight of his eyes, and touch on his skin, there were other
things he could not feel.  The green music of the living forest. It was
gone; no murmur of life from the sleeping insects in the grass, no
rhythm of the heartbeats of the dawn-browsing deer.  No birds roosting
in the trees, waiting for the sun's heat to bring out the insects.

Dead.  Unmade.  The forest was gone.

Alvin opened his eyes.

Hadn't they already been open?

Alvin opened his eyes again, and still he couldn't see; without closing
them, he opened them still again, and each time the sky seemed ply
farther away, rushing up and away darker.  No, not darker, sim from him,
like as if he was falling into a pit so deep that the sky itself got
lost.

Alvin cried out in fear, and opened his already-open eyes, and saw: The
quivering air of the Unmaker,'pressing down on him, poking itself into
his nostrils, between his fingers, into his ears.

He couldn't feel it, no sir, except that he knew what wasn't there now;
the outermost layers of his skin, wherever the Unmaker touched, his own
body was breaking apart, the tiniest bits of him dying, drying, flaking
away.

"No!" he shouted.  The shout didn't make a sound.  Instead, the Unmaker
whipped inside his mouth, down into his lungs, and he couldn't close his
teeth hard enough, his lips tight enough to keep that slimy uncreator
from slithering on inside him, eating him away from the inside out.

He tried to heal himself the way he done with his leg that time the
millstone broke it clean in half.  But it was like the old story
Taleswapper told him.  He couldn't build things up half so fast as the
Unmaker could tear them down.  For every place he healed, there was a
thousand places wrecked and lost.  He was a-going to die, he was
half-gone already, and it wouldn't be just death, just losing his flesh
and living on in the spirit, the Unmaker meant to eat him body and
spirit both alike, his mind and his flesh together.

A splash.  He heard a splashing sound.  It was the most welcome thing he
ever heard in his life, to hear a sound at all.  It meant that there was
something beyond the Unmaker that surrounded and filled him.

Alvin heard the sound echo and ring inside his own memory, and with that
to cling to, with that touch of the real world there to hang on to,
Alvin opened his eyes.

This time for real, he knew, cause he saw the sky again with its proper
fringe of trees.  And there was Gertie Smith, Makepeace's missus,
standing over him with a bucket in her hands.

"I reckon this is the first water from this well," she said.

Alvin opened his mouth, and felt cool moist air come inside.

"Reckon so," he whispered.

"I never would've thought you could dig it all out and line it proper
with stones, all in one night," she said.  "That mixup boy, Arthur
Stuart, he come to the kitchen where I was making breakfast biscuits,
and he told me your well was done.  I had to come and see."

"He gets up powerful early," said Alvin.

"And you stay up powerful late," said Gertie.  "If I was a man your size
I'd give my husband a proper licking, Al, prentice or no."

"I just did what he asked."

"I'm certain you did, just like I'm certain he wanted you to excavate
that there circle of stone off by the smithy, am I right?"

She cackled with delight.  "That'll show the old coot.  Sets such a
store by that dowser, but his own prentice has a better dowsing knack
than that old fraud-" For the first time Alvin realized that the hole he
dug in anger was like a signboard telling folks he had more than a
hoof-knack in him.

"Please, ma'am," he said.

"Please what?"

"My knack ain't dowsing, ma'am, and if you start saying so, I'll never
get no peace."

She eyed him cool and steady.  "If you ain't got the dowser's knack,
boy, tell me how come there's clear water in this well you dug."

Alvin calculated his he.  "The dowser's stick dipped here, too, I saw
it, and so when the first well struck stone, I tried here."

Gertie had a suspicious nature.  "Do you reckon you'd say the same if
Jesus was standing here judging your eternal soul depending on the truth
of what you say?"

"Ma'am, I reckon if Jesus was here, I'd be asking forgiveness for my
sins, and I wouldn't care two hoots about any old well."

She laughed again, cuffed him lightly on the shoulder.  "I like your
dowsing story.  You just happened to be watching old Hank Dowser.

Oh, that's a good one.  I'll tell that tale to everybody, see if I
don't."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Here.  Drink.  You deserve first swallow from the first bucket of clear
water from this well."

Alvin knew that the custom was for the owner to get first drinks.

But she was offering, and he was so dry he couldn't have spit two bits'
worth even if you paid him five bucks an ounce.  So he set the bucket to
his lips and drank, letting it splash out onto his shirt.

"I'd wager you're hungry, too," she said.

"More tired than hungry, I think," said Alvin.

"Then come inside to sleep."

He knew he should, but he could see the Unmaker not far off, and he was
afeared to sleep again, that was the truth.  "Thank you kindly, Ma'am,
but anyhow, I'd like to be off by myself a few minutes."

"Suit yourself," she said, and went on inside.

The morning breeze chilled him as it dried off the water he spilled on
his shirt.  Was his ravishment by the Unmaker only a dream?

He didn't think so.  He was awake right enough, and it was real, and if
Gertie Smith hadn't come along and dunked that bucket in the well, he
would've been unmade.  The Unmaker wasn't hiding out no more.

He wasn't sneaking in backways nor roundabout.  No matter where he
looked, there it was, shimmering in the greyish morning light.

For some reason the Unmaker picked this morning for a face-to-face.

Only Alvin didn't know how he was supposed to fight.  If digging a well
and building it up so fine wasn't making enough to drive off his enemy,
he didn't know what else to do.  The Unmaker wasn't like the men he
wrestled with in town.  The Unmaker had nothing he could take ahold of.

One thing was sure.  Alvin'd never have a night of sleep again if he
didn't take this Unmaker down somehow and wrestle him into the dirt.

I'm supposed to be your master, Alvin said to the Unmaker.  So tell me,
Unmaker, how do I undo you, when all you are is Undoing?

Who's going to teach me how to win this battle, when you can sneak up on
me in my sleep, and I don't have the faintest idea how to get to you?

As he spoke these words inside his head, Alvin walked to the edge o the
woods.  The Unmaker backed away him, always out of reach.  Al knew
without looking that it also closed up behind him, so it had him on all
sides.

This is the middle of the uncut wood where I ought to feel most at home,
but the greensong, it's gone silent here, and all around me is my enemy
from birth, and me here with no plan at all.

T e Unmaker, though, he had a plan.  He didn't need to waste no time
a-dithering about what to do, Alvin found that out real quick.

Cause while Alvin was a-standing there in the cool heavy breeze of a
summer morning, the air suddenly went chill, and blamed if snowflakes
didn't start to fall.  Right down on the green-leaf trees they came,
settling on the tall thick grass between them.  Thick and cold it piled
up, not the wet heavy flakes of a warm snow, but the tiny icy crystals
of a deep winter blizzard blow.  Alvin shivered.

"You can't do this," he said.

But his eyes weren't closed now, he knew that.  This wasn't no
halfasleep dream.  This was real snow, and it was so thick and cold that
the branches of summer-green trees were snapping, the leaves were
tearing off and falling to the ground in a tinkle of broken ice.  And
Alvin himself was like to freeze himself clear to death if he didn't get
out of there somehow.

He started to walk back the way e came, but t snow was coming down so
thick he couldn't see more than five or six feet ahead of him, and he
couldn't feel his way because the Unmaker had deadened the greensong of
the living woods.  Pretty soon he wasn't walking, he was running.

Only he didn't run surefooted like Ta-Kumsaw taught him; he ran as noisy
and stupid as any oaf of a White man, and like most Whites would've, he
slipped on a patch of ice-covered stone and sprawled out face down
across a reach of snow.

Snow that caught up in his mouth and nose and into his ears, snow that
clung between his fingers, just like the slime last night, just like the
Unmaker in his dream, and he choked and sputtered and cried 0 ut"I know
it's a lie!"

His voice was swallowed up in the wall of snow.

"It's summer!" he shouted.

His jaw ached from the cold and he knew it'd hurt too much to speak
again, but still he screamed through numb lips, "I'll make you stop!"

And then he realized that he could never make anything out of the
Unmaker, could never make the Unmaker do or be anything because it was
only Undoing and Unbeing.  It wasn't the Unmaker he needed to call to,
it was all the living things around him, the trees, the grass, the
earth, the air itself.  It was the greensong that he needed to restore.

He grabbed ahold of that idea and used it, spoke again, his voice scarce
more than a whisper now, but he called to them, and not in anger.

"Summer," he whispered.

"Warm air!" he said.

"Leaves green!" he shouted.  "Hot wind out of the southwest.

Thunderheads in the afternoon, mist in the morning, sunlight hotting it
up, burning off the fog!"

Did it change, just a little?  Did the snowfall slacken?  Did the drifts
on the ground melt lower, the heaps on the treelimbs tumble off, baring
more of the branch?

"It's a hot morning, dry!" he cried.  "Rain may drift in later like the
gift of the Wise Men, coming from a long way off, but for now sunlight
beating on the leaves, waking you up, you're growing, putting out
leaves, that's right!  That's right!"

There was gladness in his voice because the snowfall was just a spatter
of rain now, the snow on the ground was melted back to patches here and
there, the broke-off leaves were sprouting on the branch again as quick
as militia in a doubletime march.

And in the silence after his last shout, he heard birdsong.

Song like he'd never heard before.  He didn't know this bird, this sweet
melody that changed with every whistle and never played the same tune
again.  It was a weaving song, but one whose pattern you couldn't find,
so you couldn't ever sing it again, but you also couldn't ravel it, spin
it out and break it down.  It was all of one piece, all of one single
Making, and Alvin knew that if he could just find the bird with that
song in his throat he'd be safe.  His victory would be complete.

He ran, and now the greensong of the forest was with him, and his feet
found the right places to step without him looking.  He followed that
song until he came to the clearing where the singing was.

Perched on an old log with a patch of snow still in the northwest
shadow-a redbird.  And sitting in front of that log, almost nose to nose
as he listened to it sing-Arthur Stuart.

Alvin walked around the two of them real slow, walking a clean circle
before he come much closer.  Arthur Stuart like to never noticed he was
there, he never took his eyes off that bird.  The sunlight dazzled on
the two of them, but neither bird nor boy so much as blinked.  Alvin
didn't say nothing, either.  Just like Arthur Stuart, he was all caught
up in the redbird song.

It wasn't no different from all the other redbirds, the thousand scarlet
songbirds Alvin had seen since he was little.  Except that from its
throat came music that no other bird had ever sung before.  This wasn't
a redbird.  Nor was it the redbird.  There was no single bird had some
gift the other redbirds lacked.  It was just Redbird, the one picked for
this moment to speak in the voice of all the birds, to sing the song of
all the singers, so that this boy could hear.

Alvin knelt down on the new-grown grass not three feet from Redbird, and
listened to its song.  He knew from what Lolla-Wossiky once told him
that Redbird's song was all the stories of the Red man, everything they
ever done that was worth doing.  Alvin halfway hoped to understand that
ancient tale, or at least to hear how Redbird told of things that he
took part in.  The Prophet Lolla-Wossiky walking on water; Tippy-Canoe
River all scarlet with Red folks' blood; Ta-Kumsaw standing with a dozen
musketballs in him, still crying out for his men to stand, to fight, to
drive the White thieves back.

But the sense of the song eluded him no matter how he listened.

He might run the forest with a Red man's legs and hear the greensong
with a Red man's ears, but Redbird's song wasn't meant for him.  The
saying told the truth: No one girl gets all the suitors, and no boy gets
all the knacks.  There was much that Alvin could do already, and much
ahead of him to learn, but there'd be far more that was always out of
his ken, and Redbird's song was part of that.

Yet Alvin was sure as shucks that Redbird wasn't here by accident.

Come like this at the end of his face-to-face with the Unmaker, Redbird
had to have some purpose.  He had to get some answers out of Redbird's
song.

Alvin was just about to speak, just about to ask the question burning in
him ever since he first learned what his destiny might be.

But it wasn't his voice that broke into Redbird's song.  It was Arthur
Stuart's.

"I don't know days coming up," said the mixup boy.  His voice was like
music and the words were clearer than any Alvin ever heard that
three-year-old say before.  "I only know days gone."

It took a second for Alvin to hitch himself to what was going on here.
What Arthur said was the answer to Alvin's question.  Will I ever be a
Maker like the torch girl said?  That was what Alvin would've asked, and
Arthur's words were the answer.

But not Arthur Stuart's own answer, that was plain.  The little boy no
more understood what he was saying than he did when he was mimicking
Makepeace's and Gertie's quarrel last night.  He was giving Redbird's
answer.  Translating from birdsong into speech that Alvin's ears were
fit to understand.

Alvin knew now that he'd asked the wrong question.  He didn't need
Redbird to tell him he was supposed to be a Maker-he knowed that firm
and sure years ago, and knew it still in spite of all doubts.

The real question wasn't whether, it was how to be a Maker.

Tell me how.

Redbird changed his song to a soft and simple tune, more like normal
birdsong, quite different from the thousand-year-old Red man's tale that
he'd been singing up to now.  Alvin didn't understand the sense of it,
but he knew all the same what it was about.  It was the song of Making.
Over and over, the same tune repeating, only a few moments of it-but
they were blinding in their brightness, a song so true that Alvin saw it
with his eyes, felt it from his lips to his groin, tasted it and smelled
it.  The song of Making, and it was his own song, he knew it from how
sweet it tasted on his tongue.

And when the song was at its peak, Arthur Stuart spoke again in a voice
that was hardly human it piped so sharp, it sang so clear.

"The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes," said the mixup boy.

Alvin wrote the words in his heart, even though he didn't understand
them.  Because he knew that someday he would understand them, and when
he did, he would have the power of the ancient Makers who built the
Crystal City.  He would understand, and use his power, and find the
Crystal City and build it once again.

The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.

Redbird fell silent.  Stood still, head cocked; and then became, not
Redbird, but any old bird with scarlet feathers.  Off it flew.

Arthur Stuart watched the bird out of sight.  Then he called out after
it in his own true childish voice, "Bird!  Fly bird!" Alvin knelt beside
the boy, weak from the night's work, the grey dawn's fear, this bright
day's birdsong.

"I flied," said Arthur Stuart.  For the first time, it seemed, he took
notice Alvin was there, and turned to him.

"Did you now?" whispered Alvin, reluctant to destroy the child's dream
by telling him that folks don't fly.

"Big blackbird tote me," said Arthur.  "Fly and fly." Then Arthur
reached up his hands and pressed in on Alvin's cheeks.  "Maker," he
said.  Then he laughed and laughed with joy.

So Arthur wasn't just a mimic.  He really understood Redbird's song,
some of it, at least.  Enough to know the name of Alvin's destiny.

"Don't you tell nobody," Alvin said.  "I won't tell nobody you can talk
to birds, and you don't tell nobody I'm a Maker.  Promise?"

Arthur's face grew serious.  "Don't talk birds," he said.  "Birds talk
me." And then: "I flied."

"I believe you," Alvin said.

"I beeve you, " said Arthur.  Then he laughed again.

Alvin stood up and so did Arthur.  Al took him by the hand.

"Let's go on home," he said.

He took Arthur to the roadhouse, where Old Peg Guester was full of scold
at the mixup boy for running off and bothering folks all morning.

But it was a loving scold, and Arthur grinned like an idiot at the voice
of the woman he called Mama.  As the door closed with Arthur Stuart on
the other side, Alvin told himself, I'm going to tell that boy what he
done for me.  Someday I'll tell him what this meant.

Alvin came home by way of the springhouse path and headed on down toward
the smithy, where Makepeace was no doubt angry at him for not being
ready for work, even though he dug a well all night.

The well.  Alvin found himself standing by the hole that he had dug as a
monument to Hank Dowser, with the white stone bright in the sunlight,
bright and cruel as scornful laughter.

In that moment Alvin knew why the Unmaker came to him that night.

Not because of the true well that he dug.  Not because he had used his
knack to hold the water back, not because he had softened the stone and
bent it to his need.  It was because he had dug that first hole down to
the stone for one reason only-to make Hank Dowser look the fool.

To punish him?  Yes Sir, to make him a laughingstock to any man who saw
the stone-bottomed well on the spot that Hank had marked.

It would destroy him, take away his name as a dowser-and unfairly so,
because he was a good dowser who got hisself fooled by the lay of the
land.  Hank made an honest mistake, and Al had got all set to punish him
as if he was a fool, which surely he was not.

Tired as he was, weak from labor and the battle with the Unmaker, Alvin
didn't waste a minute.  He fetched the spade from where it lay by the
working well, then stripped off his shirt and set to work.  When he dug
this false well, it was a work of evil, to unmake an honest man for no
reason better than spite.  Filling it in, though, was a Maker's work.
Since it was daylight, Alvin couldn't even use his knack to help -he did
full labor on it till he thought he was so tired he might just die.

It was noon, and him without supper or breakfast either one, but the
well was filled right up, the turves set back on so they'd grow back,
and if you didn't look close you'd never know there'd been a hole at
all.  Alvin did use his knack a little, since no one was about, to weave
the grassroots back together, knit them into the ground, so there'd be
no dead patches to mark the spot.

All the time, though, what burned worse than the sun on his back or the
hunger in his belly was his own shame.  He was so busy last night being
angry and thinking how to make a fool of Hank Dowser that it never once
occurred to him to do the right thing and use his knack to break right
through the shelf of stone in the very spot Hank picked.

No one ever would've known save Alvin hisself that there'd been aught
wrong with the place.  That would've been the Christian thing, the
charitable thing to do.  When a man slaps your face, you answer by
shaking his hand, that's what Jesus said to do, and Alvin just plain
wasn't listening, Alvin was too cussed proud.

That's what called the Unmaker to me, thought Alvin.  I could've used my
knack to build up, and I used it to tear down.  Well, never again, never
again, never again.  He made that promise three times, and even though
it was a silent promise and no one'd ever know, he'd keep it better than
any oath he might take before a judge or even a minister.

Well, too late now.  If he'd thought of this before Ger-tie ever saw the
false well or drew water from the true, he might've filled up the other
well and made this one good after all.  But now she'd seen the stone,
and if he dug through it then all his secrets would be out.

And once you've drunk water from a good new well, you can't never fill
it up till it runs dry on its own.  To fill up a living well is to beg
for drouth and cholera to dog you all the days of your life.

He'd undone all he could.  You can be sorry, and you can be forgiven,
but you can't call back the futures that your bad decisions lost.

He didn't need no philosopher to tell him that.

Makepeace wasn't a-hammering in the forge, and there wasn't no smoke
from the smithy chimney, either.  Must be Makepeace was up at the house,
doing some chores there, Alvin figured.  So he put the spade away back
in the smithy and then headed on toward the house.

Halfway there, he come to the good well, and there was Makepeace Smith
setting on the low wall of footing stones Al had laid down to be
foundation for the wellhouse.

"Morning, Alvin," said the master.

"Morning, Sir," said Alvin.

"Dropped me the tin and copper bucket right down to the bottom here. You
must've dug like the devil hisself, boy, to get it so deep."

"Didn't want it to run dry."

"And lined it with stone already," said the Smith.  "It's a wonderment,
I say.

"I worked hard and fast."

"You also dug in the right place, I see."

Alvin took a deep breath.  "The way I figure, Sir, I dug right where the
dowser said to dig."

"I saw another hole just yonder," said Makepeace Smith.  "Stone as thick
and hard as the devil's hoof all along the bottom.  You telling me you
don't aim for folks to guess why you dug there?"

"I filled that old hole up," said Alvin.  "I wish I'd never dug such a
well.  I don't want nobody telling stories on Hank Dowser.

There was water there, right enough, and no dowser in the world could've
guessed about the stone."

"Except you," said Makepeace.

"I ain't no dowser, Sir," said Alvin.  And he told the lie again: "I
just saw that his wand dipped over here, too."

Makepeace Smith shook his head, a grin just creeping out across his
face.  "My wife told me that tale already, and I like to died a-laughing
at it.  I cuffed your head for saying he was wrong.  You telling me now
you want him to get the credit?"

"He's a true dowser," said Alvin.  "And I ain't no dowser, sir, so I
reckon since he is one, he ought to get the name for it."

Makepeace Smith drew up the copper bucket, put it to his lips, and drank
a few swallows.  Then he tipped back his head and poured the rest of the
water straight onto his face and laughed out loud.  "That's the sweetest
water I ever drunk in my life, I swear."

It wasn't the same as promising to go along with his story and let Hank
Dowser think it was his well, but Al knew it was the best he'd get from
his master.  "If it's all right, sir," said Al, "I'm a mite hungry.

"Yes, go eat, you've earned it."

Alvin walked by him.  The smell of new water rose up from the well as he
passed.

Makepeace Smith spoke again behind him.  "Gertie tells me you took first
swallow from the well."

Al turned around, fearing trouble now.  "I did, sir, but not till she
give it to me."

Makepeace studied on that notion awhile, as if he was deciding whether
to make it reason for punishing Al or not.  "Well," he finally said,
"well, that's just like her, but I don't mind.  There's still enough of
that first dip in the wooden bucket for me to save a few swallows for
Hank Dowser.  I promised him a drink from the first bucket, and I'll
keep my word when he comes back around."

"When he comes, sir," said Alvin, "and I hope you won't mind, but I
think I'd like it best and so would he if I just didn't happen to be at
home, if you see what I mean.  I don't think he cottoned to me much."

The smith eyed him narrowly.  "If this is just a way for you to get a
few hours off work when that dowser comes on back, why"-he broke into a
grin-"why, I reckon that you've earned it with last night's labor.  "

"Thank you sir," said Alvin.

"You heading back to the house?"

"Yes sir."

"Well, I'll take those tools and put them away-you carry this bucket to
the missus.  She's expecting it.  A lot less way to tote the water than
the stream.  I got to thank Hank Dowser special for choosing this very
exact spot." The smith was still chuckling to himself at his wit when
Alvin reached the house.

Gertie Smith took the bucket, set Alvin down, and near filled him to the
brim with hot fried bacon and good greasy biscuits.  It was so much food
that Al had to beg her to stop.  "We've already finished one pig," said
Alvin.  "No need to kill another just for my breakfast."

"Pigs are just corn on the hoof," said Gertie Smith, "and you worked two
hogs' worth last night, I'll say that."

Belly full and belching, Alvin climbed the ladder into the loft over the
kitchen, stripped off his clothes, and burrowed into the blankets on his
bed.

The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.

Over and over he whispered the words to himself as he went to sleep.  He
had no dreams or troubles, and slept clear through tin suppertime, and
then again all night till dawn.

When he woke up in the morning, just before dawn, there was a faint grey
scarce brighter than moonlight sifting into the house through the
windows.  Hardly none of it got up into the loft where Alvin lay, and
instead of springing up bright like he did most mornings, he felt logey
from sleep and a little sore from his labors. So he lay there quiet, a
faint sort of birdsong chirping in the back of his mind.

He didn't think on the phrase Arthur Stuart told him from Redbird's
song.  Instead he got to wondering how things happened yesterday.  Why
did hard winter turn to summertime again, just from him shouting?

"Summer," he whispered.  "Warm air, leaves green." What was it about
Alvin that when he said summer, summer came?  Didn't always work that
way, for sure-never when he was a-working the iron or slipping through
stone to mend or break it.  Then he had to hold the shape of it firm in
his mind, understand the way things lined up, find the natural cracks
and creases, the threads of the metal or the grain of the rock.

And when he was a-healing, that was so hard it took his whole mind to
find how the body ought to be, and mend it.  Things were so small, so
hard to see-well, not see, but whatever it was he did.  Sometimes he had
to work so hard to understand the way things were inside.

Inside, down deep, so small and fine, and always the deepest secrets of
the way things worked skittered away like roaches when you bring a lamp
into the room, always getting smaller, forming themselves up in strange
new ways.  Was there some particle that was smallest of all?

Some place at the heart of things where what he saw was real, instead of
just being made up out of lots of smaller pieces, and them out of
smaller pieces still?

Yet he hadn't understood how the Unmaker made winter.  So how did his
desperate cries make the summer come back?

How can I be a Maker if I can't even guess how I do what I do?

The light came stronger from outside, shining through the wavering glass
of the windows, and for a moment Alvin thought he saw the light like
little balls flying so fast, like they was hit with a stick or shot from
a gun, only even faster than that, bouncing around, most of them getting
stuck in the tiny cracks of the wooden walls or the floor or the
ceiling, so only a precious few got up into the loft where they got
captured by Alvin's eyes.

Then that moment passed, and the light was just fire, pure fire,
drilling into the room like the gentle waves washing against the shore
of Lake Mizogan, and wherever they passed, the waves turned things
warm-the wood of the walls, the massive kitchen table, the iron of the
stove-so that they all quivered, they all danced with life.  Only Alvin
could see it, only Alvin knew how the whole room awoke with the day.

That fire from the sun, that's what the Umnaker hates most.  The life it
makes.  Put that fire out, that's what the Unmaker says inside himself.
Put all fires out, turn all water into ice, the whole world smooth with
ice, the whole sky black and cold like night.  And to oppose the
Unmaker's desire, one lone Maker who can't do right even when he's
digging a well.

The Maker is the one who is part of-part of what?  What do I make?

How am I part of it?  When I work the iron, am I part of the iron?

When I shiver stone, am I part of the stone?  It makes no sense, but I
got to make sense of it or I'll lose my war with the Unmaker.  I could
fight him all my days, every way I know how, and when I died the world
would be farther along his downhill road than it was when I got born.

There's got to be some secret, some key to everything, so I can build it
all at once.  Got to find that key, that's all, find the secret, and
then I can speak a word and the Unmaker will shy back and cower and give
up and die, maybe even die, so that life and light go on forever and
don't fade.

Alvin heard Gertie begin to stir in the bedroom, and one of the children
uttered a soft cry, the last noise before waking.  Alvin flexed and
stretched and felt the sweet delicious pain of sore muscles waking up,
getting set for a day at the forge, a day at the fire.

Goodwife

Peggy did not sleep as long or as well as Alvin.  His battle was over;
he could sleep a victor's sleep.  For her, though, it was the end of
peace.

It was still midafternoon when Peggy tossed herself awake on the smooth
linen sheets of her bed in Mistress Modesty's house.  She felt
exhausted; her head hurt.  She wore only her shift, though she didn't
remember undressing.  She remembered hearing Redbird singing, watching
Arthur Stuart interpret the song.  She remembered looking into Alvin's
heartfire, seeing all his futures restored to him-but still did not find
herself in any of them.  Then her memory stopped.  Mistress Modesty must
have undressed her, put her to bed with the sun already nearing noon.

She rolled over; the sheet clung to her, and then her back went cold
from sweat.  Alvin's victory was won; the lesson was learned; the
Unmaker would not find another such opening again.  She saw no danger in
Alvin's future, not soon.  The Unmaker would doubtless lie in wait for
another time, or return to working through his human servants.

Perhaps the Visitor would return to Reverend Thrower, or some other soul
with a secret hunger for evil would receive the Unmaker as a welcome
teacher.  But that wasn't the danger, not the immediate danger, Peggy
knew.

For as long as Alvin had no notion how to be a Maker or what to do with
his power, then it made no difference how long they kept the Unmaker at
bay.  The Crystal City would never be built.  And it must be built, or
Alvin's life-and Peggy's life, devoted to helping himboth would be in
vain.

It seemed so clear now to Peggy, coming out of a feverish exhausted
sleep.  Alvin's labor was to prepare himself, to master his own human
frailties.  If there was some knowledge somewhere in the world about the
art of Making, or the science of it, Alvin would have no chance to learn
it.  The smithy was his school, the forge his master, teaching
him-what?-to change other men only by persuasion and long-suffering,
gentleness and meekness, unfeigned love and kindness.

Someone else, then, would have to acquire that pure knowledge which
would raise Alvin up to greatness.

I am done with all my schooling in Dekane.

So many lessons, and I have learned them all, Mistress Modesty.

All so I would be ready to bear the title you taught me was the finest
any lady could aspire to.

Goodwife.

As her mother had been called Goody Guester all these years, and other
women Goody this or Goody that, any woman could have the name.

But few deserved it.  Few there were who inspired others to call her by
the name in full: Goodwife, not just Goody; the way that Mistress
Modesty was never called Missus.  It would demean her name to be touched
by a diminished, a common tit e.

Peggy got up from the bed.  Her head swam for a moment; she waited, then
got up.  Her feet padded on the wooden floor.  She walked softly, but
she knew she would be heard; already Mistress Modesty would be coming up
the stairs.

Peggy stopped at the mirror and looked at herself.  Her hair was tousled
by sleep, stringy with sweat.  Her face was imprinted, red and white,
with the creases in the pillowcase.  Yet she saw there the face that
Mistress Modesty had taught her how to see.

"Our handiwork," said Mistress Modesty.

Peggy did not turn.  She knew her mentor would be there.

"A woman should know that she is beautiful," said Mistress Modesty.
"Surely God gave Eve a single piece of glass, or flat polished silver,
or at least a still pool to show her what it was that Adam saw."

Peggy turned and kissed Mistress Modesty on the cheek.  "I love what
you've made of me," she said.

Mistress Modesty kissed her in return, but when they drew apart, there
were tears in the older woman's eyes.  "And now I shall lose your
company."

Peggy wasn't used to others guessing what she felt, especially when she
didn't realize that she had already made the decision.

"Will you?" asked Peggy.

"I've taught you all I can," said Mistress Modesty, "but I know after
last night that you need things that I never dreamed of, because you
have work to do that I never thought that anyone could do."

"I meant only to be Goodwife to Alvin's Goodman."

"For me that was the beginning and the end," said Mistress Modesty.

Peggy chose her words to be true, and therefore beautiful, and therefore
good.  "Perhaps all that some men need from a woman is for her to be
loving and wise and careful, like a field of flowers where he can play
the butterfly, drawing sweetness from her blossoms."

Mistress Modesty smiled.  "How kindly you describe me."

"But Alvin has a sturdier work to do, and what he needs is not a
beautiful woman to be fresh and loving for him when his work is done.

What he needs is a woman who can heft the other end of his burden."

"Where will you go?"

Peggy answered before she realized that she knew the answer.

"Philadelphia, I think."

Mistress Modesty looked at her in surprise, as if to say, You've already
decided?  Tears welled in her eyes.

Peggy rushed to explain.  "The best universities are there-free ones,
that teach all there is to know, not the crabbed religious schools of
New England or the effete schools for lordlings in the South."

"This isn't sudden," said Mistress Modesty.  "You've been planning this
for long enough to find out where to go."

"It is sudden, but perhaps I was planning, without knowing it.

I've listened to others talk, and now there it is already in my mind,
all sorted out, the decision made.  There's a school for women there,
but what matters is the libraries.  I have no formal schooling, but
somehow I'll persuade them to let me in."

"It won't take much persuasion," Mistress Modesty said, "if you arrive
with a letter from the governor of Suskwahenny.  And letters from other
men who trust my judgment well enough."

Peggy was not surprised that Mistress Modesty still intended to help
her, even though Peggy had determined so suddenly, so ungracefully to
leave.  And Peggy had no foolish notion of pridefully trying to do
without such help.  "Thank you, Mistress Modesty!"

"I've never known a woman-or a I man, for that matter-with such ability
as yours.  Not your knack, remarkable as it is; I don't measure a person
by such things.  But I fear that you are wasting yourself on this boy in
Hatrack River.  How could any man deserve all that you've sacrificed for
him?"

"Deserving it-that's his labor.  Mine is to have the knowledge when he's
ready to learn it."

Mistress Modesty was crying in earnest now.  She still smiled-for she
had taught herself that love must always smile, even in grief-but the
tears flowed down her cheeks.  "Oh, Peggy, how could you have learned so
well, and yet make such a mistake?"

A mistake?  Didn't Mistress Modesty trust her judgment, even now?

"'A woman's wisdom is her gift to women,"' Peggy quoted.

"'Her beauty is her gift to men.  Her love is her gift to God."'
Mistress Modesty shook her head as she listened to her own maxim from
Peggy's lips.  "So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor
unfortunate man you say you love?"

"Because some men are great enough that they can love a whole woman, and
not just a part of her."

"Is he such a man?"

How could Peggy answer?  "He will be, or he won't have me."

Mistress Modesty paused for a moment, as if trying to find a beautiful
way to tell a painful truth.  "I always taught you that if you become
completely and perfectly yourself, then good men will be drawn to you
and love you.  Peggy, let us say this man has great needs -but if you
must become something that is not you in order to supply him, then you
will not be perfectly yourself, and he will not love you.

Isn't that why you left Hatrack River in the first place, so he would
love you for yourself, and not for what you did for him?"

"Mistress Modesty, I want him to love me, yes.  But I love the work he
must accomplish even more than that.  What I am today would be enough
for the man.  What I will go and do tomorrow is not for the man, it is
for his work."

"But-" began Mistress Modesty.

Peggy raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly.  Mistress Modesty nodded
and did not interrupt.

"If I love his work more than I love the man, then to be perfectly
myself, I must do what his work requires of me.  Won't 1, then, be even
more beautiful?"

"To me, perhaps," said Mistress Modesty.  "Few men have vi,;on clear
enough for that subtle beauty."

"He loves his work more than he loves his life.  Won't he, then, love
the woman who shares in it more than a woman who is merely beautiful?"

"You may be right," said Mistress Modesty, "for I have never loved work
more than I have loved the person doing it, and I have never known a man
who truly loved his work more than his own life.

All that I have taught you is true in the world I know.  If you pass
from my world into another one, I can no longer teach you anything."

"Maybe I can't be a perfect woman and also live my life as it must be
lived."

"Or perhaps, Mistress Margaret, even the best of the world is not fit to
recognize a perfect woman, and so will accept me as a fair counterfeit,
while you pass by unknown."

That was more than Peggy could bear.  She cast aside decorum and threw
her arms around Mistress Modesty and kissed her and cried, assuring her
that there was nothing counterfeit about her.  But when all the weeping
was done, nothing had changed.  Peggy was finished in Dekane, and by
next morning her trunk was packed.

Everything she had in the world was a gift from Mistress Modesty, except
for the box Oldpappy gave her long ago.  Yet what was in that box was a
heavier burden by far than any other thing that Peggy carried.

She sat in the northbound train, watching the mountains drift by outside
her east-facing window.  It wasn't all that long ago that Whitley
Physicker had brought her to Dekane in his carriage.  Dekane had seemed
the grandest place at first; at the time it seemed to her that she was
discovering the world by coming here.  Now she knew that the world was
far too large for one person to discover it.  She was leaving a very
small place and going to another very small place, and perhaps from
there to other small places.  The same size heartfires blazed in every
city, no brighter for having so much company.

I left Hatrack River to be free of you, Prentice Alvin.  Instead I found
a larger, far more entangling net outside.  Your work is larger than
yourself, larger than me, and because I know of it I'm bound to help. If
I didn't, I'd be a vile person in my own eyes.

So if you end up loving me or not, that doesn't matter all that much.
Oh, yes, to me it matters, but the course of the world won't change one
way or the other.  What matters is that we both prepare you to do your
work.  Then if love comes, then if you can play Goodman to my Goodwife,
we'll take that as an unlooked-for blessing and be glad of it as long as
we can.

Wand

It was a week before Hank Dowser found his way back to Hatrack River.  A
miserable week with no profit in it, because try as he would he couldn't
find decent dry ground for them folks west of town to dig their cellar.
"It's all wet ground," he said.  "I can't help it if it's all watery."

But they held him responsible just the same.  Folks are like that.

They act like they thought the dowser put the water where it sets,
instead of just pointing to it.  Same way with torches-blamed them half
the time for causing what they saw, when all they did was see it.

There was no gratitude or even simple understanding in most folks.

So it was a relief to be back with somebody half-decent like Makepeace
Smith.  Even if Hank wasn't too proud of the way Makepeace was dealing
with his prentice boy.  How could Hank criticize him?  He himself hadn't
done much better-oh, he was pure embarrassed now to think how he railed
on that boy and got him a cuffing, and for nothing, really, just a
little affront to Hank Dowser's pride.  Jesus stood and took whippings
and a crown of thorns in silence, but I lash out when a prentice mumbles
a few silly words.  Oh, thoughts like that put Hank Dowser in a dark
mood, and he was aching for a chance to apologize to the boy.

But the boy wasn't there, which was too bad, though Hank didn't have
long to brood about it.  Gertie Smith took Hank Dowser up to the house
and near jammed the food down his throat with a ramrod, just to get in
an extra half-loaf O' bread, it 1 - "I can't hardly walk," said Hank,
which was true; but it was also true that Gertie Smith cooked just as
good as her husband forged and that prentice boy shod and Hank dowsed,
which is to say, with a true knack.

Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go
about sharing gifts with each other, that's the way of the world, the
best way.

So it was with pleasure and pride that Hank drank the swallows of water
from the first clear bucket drawn from the well.  Oh, it was fine water,
sweet water, and he loved the way they thanked him from their hearts. It
wasn't till he was out getting mounted on his Picklewing again that he
realized he hadn't seen the well.  Surely he should've seen the wellHe
rounded the smithy on horseback and looked where he thought he had
dowsed the spot, but the ground didn't appear like it had been troubled
in a hundred years.  Not even the trench the prentice dug while he was
standing there.  It took him a minute to find where the well actually
was, sort of halfway between smithy and house, a fine little roof over
the windlass, the whole thing finished with smoothedworked stone.  But
surely he hadn't been so near the house when the wand dipped"Oh, Hank!"
called Makepeace Smith.  "Hank, I'm glad you ain't gone yet!"

Where was the man?  Oh, there, back in the meadow just up from the
smithy, near where Hank had first looked for the well.  Waving a stick
in his hand-a forked stick"Your wand, the one you used to dowse this
well-you want it back?"

"No, Makepeace, no thanks.  I never use the same wand twice.

Doesn't work proper when it isn't fresh."

Makepeace Smith pitched the wand back over his head, walked back down
the slope and stood exactly in the place where Hank thought he had
dowsed the well to be.  "What do you think of the well house we built?"

Hank glanced back toward the well.  "Fine stonework.  If you ever give
up the forge, I bet there's a living for you in stonecutting."

"Why, thank you, Hank!  But it was my prentice boy did it all."

"That's some boy you got," said Hank.  But it left a bad taste in his
mouth, to say those words.  There was something made him uneasy about
this whole conversation.  Makepeace Smith meant something sly, and Hank
didn't know rightly what it was.  Never mind.  Time to be on his way.
"Good-bye, Makepeace!" he said, walking his nag back toward the road.
"I'll be back for shoes, remember!"

Makepeace laughed and waved.  "I'll be glad to see your ugly old face
when you come!"

With that, Hank nudged old Pieklewing and headed off right brisk for the
road that led to the covered bridge over the river.  That was one of the
nicest things about the westbound road out of Hatrack.

From there to the Wobbish the track was as sweet as you please, with
covered bridges over every river, every stream, every rush and every
rivulet.  Folks were known to camp at night on the bridges, they were so
tight and dry.

There must've been three dozen redbird nests in the eaves of the Hatrack
Bridge.  The birds were making such a racket that Hank allowed as how it
was a miracle they didn't wake the dead.  Too bad redbirds were too
scrawny for eating.  There'd be a banquet on that bridge, if it was
worth the trouble.

"Ho there, Picklewing, my girl, ho," he said.  He sat astride his horse,
a-standing in the middle of the bridge, listening to the redbird song.
Remembering now as clear as could be how the wand had leapt clean out of
his hands and flung itself up into the meadow grass.

Flung itself northeast of the spot he dowsed.  And that's just where
Makepeace Smith picked it up when he was saying good-bye.

Their fine new well wasn't on the spot he dowsed at all.  The whole time
he was there, they all were lying to him, pretending he dowsed them a
well, but the water they drank was from another place.

Hank knew, oh yes, he knew who chose the spot they used.  Hadn't the
wand as much as told him when it flew off like that?  Flew off because
the boy spoke up, that smart-mouth prentice.  And now they made mock of
him behind his back, not saying a thing to his face, of course, but he
knew that Makepeace was laughing the whole time, figuring he wasn't even
smart enough to notice the switch.

Well, I noticed, yes sir.  You made a fool of me, Makepeace Smith, you
and that prentice boy of yours.  But I noticed.  A man can forgive seven
times, or even seven times seven.  But then there comes the fiftieth
time, and even a good Christian can't forget.

"Gee-ap," he said angrily.  Picklewing's ears twitehed and she started
forward in a gentle walk, new shoes cropping loud on the floorboards of
the bridge, echoing from the walls and ceiling.

"Alvin," whispered Hank Dowser.  "Prentice Alvin.  Got no respect for
any man's knack except his own."

School Board

When the carriage pulled up in front of the inn, Old Peg Guester was
upstairs hanging mattresses half out the windows to let them air, so she
saw.  She recognized Whitlev Phvsicker's rig, a newfangled closed car
that kept the weather and most of the dust out; Physicker could use a
carriage like that, now that he could afford to pay a man just to drive
for him.  It was things like that carriage that had most folks calling
him Dr.  Physicker now, instead of just Whitley.

The driver was Po Doggly, who used to have a farm of his own till he got
to likkering up after his wife died.  It was a good thing, Physicker
hiring him when other folks just thought of old Po as a drunk.  Things
like that made most plain folks think well of Dr.  Physicker, even if he
did show off his money more than was seemly among Christians.

Anyway, Po hopped down from his seat and swung around to open the door
of the carriage.  But it wasn't Whitley Physicker got out first -it was
Pauley Wiseman, the sheriff.  If ever a man didn't deserve his last
name, it was Pauley Wiseman.  Old Peg felt herself wrinkle up inside
just seeing him.  It was like her husband Horace always saidany man who
wants the job of sheriff is plainly unfit for the office.

Pauley Wiseman wanted his job, wanted it more than most folks wanted to
breathe.  You could see it in the way he wore his stupid silver star
right out in the open, on the outside of his coat, so nobody'd forget
they was talking to the man who had the keys to the town jail.  As if
Hatrack River needed'a jail!

Then Whitley Physicker got out of the carriage, and Old Peg knew exactly
what business they were here for.  The school board had made its
decision, and these two were come to make sure she settled for it
without making any noise about it in public.  Old Peg tossed the
mattress she was holding, tossed it so hard it near to flew clean out
the window; she caught it by a corner and pulled it back so it'd hang
proper and get a good airing.  Then she ran down the stahe wasn't so old
yet she couldn't run a flight of stairs when she wanted.

Downward, anyways.

She looked around a bit for Arthur Stuart, but of course he wasn't in
the house.  He was just old enough for chores, and he did them, right
enough, but after that he was always off by himself, over in town
sometimes, or sometimes bothering around that blacksmith boy, Prentice
Alvin.  "What you do that for, boy?" Old Peg asked him once.  "What you
always have to be with Prentice Alvin for?" Arthur just grinned and then
put his arms out like a street rassler all set to grab and said, "Got to
learn how to throw a man twice my size."

What made it funny was he said it just exactly in Alvin's own voice,
complete with the way Alvin would've said it-with a joke in his voice,
so you'd know he didn't take himself all that serious.  Arthur had that
knack, to mimic folks like as if he knew them right to the soul.
Sometimes it made her wonder if he didn't have something of the torchy
knack, like her runaway daughter Little Peggy; but no, it didn't seem
like Arthur actually understood what he was doing.  He was just a mimic.
Still, he was smart as a whip, and that's why Old Peg knew the boy
deserved to be in school, probably more than any other child in Hatrack
River.

She got to the front door just as they started in to knock.  She stood
there, panting a little from her run down the stairs, waiting to open it
even though she saw their shadows through the lace-curtain windows on
the door.  They were kind of shifting their weight back and forth, like
they was nervous-as well they should be.  Let 'em sweat.

It was just like them folks on the school board, to send Whitley
Physicker of all people.  It made Old Peg Guester mad just to see his
shadow at her door.  Wasn't he the one who took Little Peggy off six
years ago, and then wouldn't tell her where the girl went?  Dekane was
all he said, to folks she seemed to know.  And then Peg's husband Horace
reading the note over and over, saying, If a torch can't see her own
future safe, none of us can look out for her any better.  Why, if it
hadn't been for Arthur Stuart needing her so bad, Old Peg would have up
and left.  Just up and left, and see how they liked that!  Take her
daughter away and tell her it's all for the best-such a thing to tell a
mother!  Let's see what they think when I leave.  If she hadn't had
Arthur to look after, she would have gone so fast her shadow would've
been stuck in the door.

And now they send Whitley Physicker to do it again, to set her grieving
over another child, just like before.  Only worse this time, because
Little Peggy really could take care of herself, while Arthur Stuart
couldn't, he was just a six-year-old boy, a boy with no future at all
unless Old Peg fought for it tooth and nail.

They knocked again.  She opened the door.  There was Whitley Physicker,
looking all cheerful and dignified, and behind him Pauley Wiseman,
looking all important and dignified.  Like two masts on the same ship,
with sails all puffed out and bossy-looking.  All full of wind.  Coming
to tell me what's right and proper, are you?  We'll see.

"Goody Guester," said Dr.  Physicker.  He doffed his hat proper, like a
gentleman.  That's what's wrong with Hatrack River these days, thought
Old Peg.  Too many folks putting on like gentlemen and ladies.

Don't they know this is Ohio?  All the high-toned folks are down in the
Crown Colonies with His Majesty, the other Arthur Stuart.

The long-haired White king, as opposed to her own short-haired Black boy
Arthur.  Anybody in the state of Ohio who thinks he's a gentleman is
just fooling himself and nobody but the other fools.

"I suppose you want to come in," said Old Peg.

"I hoped you'd invite us," said Physicker.  "We come from the school
board."

"You can turn me down on the porch as easy as you can inside my house."

"Now see here," said Sheriff Pauley.  He wasn't used to folks leaving
him standing on porches.

"We didn't come to turn you down, Goody Guester," said the doctor.

Old Peg didn't believe it for a minute.  "You telling me that
stiffnecked bunch of high-collar hypocrites is going to let a Black
child into the new school?"

That set Sheriff Pauley off like gunpowder in a bucket.  "Well, if
you're so all-fired sure you know the answer, Old Peg, why'd you bother
asking the question?"

"Cause I wanted you all down on record as being Black-hating slavers in
your hearts!  Then someday when the Emancipationists have their way and
Black people have all their rights everywhere, you'll have to wear your
shame in public like you deserve."

Old Peg didn't even hear her husband coming up behind her, she was
talking so loud.

"Margaret," said Horace Guester.  "No man stands on my porch without a
welcome."

"You welcome them yourself, then," said Old Peg.  She turned her back on
Dr.  Physicker and Sheriff Pauley and walked on into the kitchen.  "I
wash my hands of it," she shouted over her shoulder.

But once she was in the kitchen she realized that she wasn't cooking yet
this morning, she was doing the upstairs beds.  And as she stood there,
kind of confused for a second, she got to thinking it was Pontius Pflate
who did that first famous hand-washing.  Why, she'd confessed herself
unrighteous with her own words.  God wouldn't look kindly on her if she
once started in imitating someone as killed the Lord Jesus, like Pflate
did.  So she turned around and walked back into the common room and sat
down near the hearth.  It being August there wasn't no fire in it, which
made it a cool place to sit.  Not like the kitchen hearth, which was hot
as the devil's privy on summer days like this.  No reason she should
sweat her heart out in the kitchen while these two decided the fate of
Arthur Stuart in the coolest spot in the house.

Her husband and the two visitors looked at her but didn't say a thing
about her storming out and then storming back in.  Old Peg knew what was
said behind her back-that you might as well try to set a trap for a
cyclone as to tangle with Old Peg Guester-but she didn't mind a bit if
men like Whitley Physicker and Pauley Wiseman walked a little wary
around her.  After a second or two, waiting for her to settle down, they
went right on with their talk.

"As I was saying, Horace, we looked at your proposal seriously,"
Physicker said.  "It would be a great convenience to us if the new
teacher could be housed in your roadhouse instead of being boarded here
and there the way it usually happens.  But we wouldn't consider having
you do it for free.  We have enough students enrolled and enough basis
in the property tax to pay you a small stipend for the service."

"How much does a sty pen come to in money?" asked Horace.

"The details remain to be worked out, but the sum of twenty dollars for
the year was mentioned."

"Well," said Horace, "that's a mite low, if you're thinking you're
paying the actual cost."

"On the contrary, Horace, we know that we're underpaying you by
considerable.  But since you offered to do it free, we hoped this would
be an improvement on the original offer."

Horace was all set to agree, but Peg wouldn't stand for all this
pretending.  "I know what it is, Dr.  Physicker, and it's no
improvement.  We didn't offer to put up the schoolteacher forfree.  We
offered to put up Arthur Stuart's teacher for free.  And if you figure
twenty dollars is going to make me change my mind about that, you better
go back and do your figuring again."

Dr.  Physicker got a pained look on his.  face.  "Now, Goody Guester.
Don't get ahead of yourself on this.  There was not a man on the school
board who had any personal objection to having Arthur Stuart attend the
new school."

When Physicker said that, Old Peg took a sharp look at Pauley Wiseman.
Sure enough, he squirmed in his chair like he had a bad itch in a place
where a gentleman doesn't scratch.  That's right, Pauley Wiseman.  Dr.
Physicker can say what he likes, but I know you, and there was one, at
least, who had all kinds of objections to Arthur Stuart.

Whitley Physicker went on talking, of course.  Since he was pretending
that everybody loved Arthur Stuart dearly, he couldn't very well take
notice of how uncomfortable Sheziff Pauley was.  "We know Arthur has
been raised by the two oldest settlers and finest citizens of Hatrack
River, and the whole town loves him for his own self.  We just can't
think what benefit a school education would give the boy."

"It'll give him the same benefit it gives any other boy or girl," said
Old Peg.

"Will it?  Will his knowing how to read and write get him a place in a
counting house?  Can you imagine that even if they let him take the bar,
any jury would listen to a Black lawyer plead?  Society has decreed that
a Black child will grow up to be a Black man, and a Black man, like
ancient Adam, will earn his bread by the sweat of his body, not by the
labors of his mind."

"Arthur Stuart is smarter than any child who']] be in that school and
you know it."

"All the more reason we shouldn't build up young Arthur's hopes, only to
have them dashed when he's older.  I'm talking about the way of the
world, Goody Guester, not the way of the heart."

"Well why don't you wise men of the school board just say, To hell with
the way of the world, we'll do what's right!  I can't make you do what
you don't want to do, but I'll be damned if I let you pretend it's !l

for Arthur's own good

Horace winced.  He didn't like it to hear Old Peg swear.  She'd only
taken it up lately, beginning with the time she cussed Millicent Mercher
right in public for insisting on being called "Mistress Mercher" instead
of "Goody Mercher." It didn't sit well with Horace, her using those
words, especially since she didn't seem to ken the time and place for it
like a man would, or at least so he said.  But Old Peg figured if you
can't cuss at a lying hypocrite, then what was cussing invented for?

Pauley Wiseman started turning red, barely controlling a stream of his
own favorite cusswords.  But Whitley Physicker was now a gentleman, so
he merely bowed his head for a moment, like as if he was saying a
prayer-but Old Peg figured it was more likely he was waiting till he
calmed down enough for his words to come out civil.

"Goody Guester, you're right.  We didn't think up that story about it
being for Arthur's own good till after the decision was made."

His frankness left her without a word, at least for the moment.

Even Sheriff Pauley could only give out a kind of squeak.  Whitley
Physicker wasn't sticking to what they all agreed to say; he sounded
espiciously close to telling the truth, and Sheriff Pauley didn't know
what to do when people started throwing the truth around loose and
dangerous.  Old Peg enjoyed watching Pauley Wiseman look like a fool, it
being something for which old Pauley had a particular knack.

"You see, Goody Guester, we want this school to work proper, we truly
do," said Dr.  Physicker.  "The whole idea of public schools is a little
strange.  The way they do schools in the Crown Colonies, it's all the
people with titles and money who get to attend, so that the poor have no
chance to learn or rise.  In New England all the schools are religious,
so you don't come out with bright minds, you come out with perfect
little Puritans who all stay in their place like God meant them to.  But
the public schools in the Dutch states and Pennsylvania are making
people see that in America we can do it different.  We can teach every
child in every wildwood cabin to read and write and cipher, so that we
have a whole population educated enough to be fit to vote and hold
office and govern ourselves."

"All this is well and good," said Old Peg, and I recollect hearing you
give this exact speech in our common room not three months ago before we
voted on the school tax.  What I can't figure, Whitley Physicker, is why
you figure my son should be the exception."

At this, Sheriff Pauley decided it was time to put an oar in.  And since
the truth was being used so recklessly, he lost control of himself and
spoke truthfully himself It was a new experience, and it went to his
head a little.  "Begging your pardon, Old Peg, but there isn't a drop of
your blood in that boy, so he's no-wise your son, and if Horace here has
some part of him, it isn't enough to turn him White."

Horace slowly got to his feet, as if he was preparing to invite Sheriff
Pauley outside to punch some caution into him.  Pauley Wiseman must have
known he was in trouble the second he accused Horace of maybe being the
father of a half-Black bastard.  And when Horace stood up so tall like
that, Pauley remembered he wasn't no match for Horace Guester.  Horace
wasn't exactly a small man and Pauley wasn't exactly a large one.  So
old Pauley did what he always did when things got out of hand.  He
turned kind of sideways so his badge was facing straight at Horace
Guester.  Take a lick at me, that badge said, and you'll be facing a
trial for assaulting an officer of the law.

Still, Old Peg knew that Horace wouldn't hit a man over a word; he
hadn't even knocked down that river rat who accused Horace of
unspeakable crimes with barnyard animals.  Horace just wasn't the kind
to lose control of himself in anger.  In fact, Old Peg could see that as
Horace stood there, he'd already forgotten about his anger at Pauley
Wiseman and was thinking over an idea.

Sure enough, Horace turned to Old Peg as if Wiseman didn't even exist.
"Maybe we should give it up, Peg.  It was fine when Arthur was a sweet
little baby, but .  .  ."

Horace, who was looking right at Old Peg's face, he knew better than to
finish his sentence.  Sheriff Pauley wasn't half so bright.

"He just gets blacker every day, Goody Guester."

Well, what do you say to that kind of thing, anyway?  At least now it
was plain what was going on-that it was Arthur Stuart's color and
nothing else that was keeping him out of the new Hatrack River School.

Whitley Physicker sighed into the silence.  Nothing that happened with
Sheriff Pauley there ever went according to plan.  "Don't you see?" said
Physicker.  He sounded mild and reasonable, which he was good at.
"There's some ignorant and backward folks"-and at this he took a cool
look at Sheriff Pauley-"who can't abide the thought of a Black child
getting the same education as their own boys and girls.

What's the advantage of schooling, they figure, if a Black has it the
same as a White?  Why, the next thing you know, Blacks would be wanting
to vote or hold office."

Old Peg hadn't thought of that.  It just never entered her mind.

She tried to imagine Mock Berry being governor, and trying to give
orders to the militia.  There wasn't a soldier in Ohio who'd take orders
from a Black man.  It'd be as unnatural as a fish jumping out of the
river to kill him a bear.

But Old Peg wasn't going to give up so easy, just because Whitley
Physicker made one point like that.  "Arthur Stuart's a good boy," she
said.  "He wouldn't no more try to vote than I would."

"I know that," said Physicker.  "The whole school board knows that.  But
it's the backwoods people who won't know it.  They're the ones who'll
hear there's a Black child in the school and they'll keep their children
home.  And here we'll be paying for a school that won't be doing its job
of educating the citizenry of our republic.  We're asking Arthur to
forgo an education that will do him no good anyway, in order to allow
others to receive an education that will do them and our nation a great
deal of good."

It all sounded so logical.  After all, Whitley Physicker was a doctor,
wasn't he?  He'd even been to college back in Philadelphia, so he had a
deeper understanding than Old Peg would ever have.  Why did she think
even for a moment that she could disagree with a man like Physicker and
not be wrong?

Yet even though she couldn't think of a single argument against him, she
couldn't get rid of a feeling deep in her guts that if she said yes to
Whitley Physicker, she'd be stabbing a knife right into little Arthur's
heart.  She could imagine him asking her, "Mama, why can't I go to
school like all my friends?" And then all these fine words from Dr.
Physicker would fly away like she'd never heard them, and she'd just sit
there and say, "It's because you're Black, Arthur Stuart Guester.

Whitley Physicker seemed to take her silence as surrender, which it
nearly was, "You'll see," said Physicker.  "Arthur won't mind not going
to school.  Why, the White boys'll all be jealous of him, when he can be
outside in the sun while they're cooped up in a classroom."

Old Peg Guester knew there was something wrong with all this, that it
wasn't as sensible as it sounded, but she couldn't think what it was.

"And someday things might be different," said Physicker.  "Someday maybe
society will change.  Maybe they'll stop keeping Blacks as slaves in the
Crown Colonies and Appalachee.  Maybe there'll be a time when .

.  ." His voice trailed off.  Then he shook himself.  "I get to
wondering sometimes, that's all," he said.  "Silly things.  The world is
the way the world is.  It just isn't natural for a Black man to grow up
like a White."

Old Peg felt a bitter hatred inside her when he said those words.

But it wasn't a hot rage, to make her shout at him.  It was a cold,
despairing hate, that said, Maybe I am unnatural, but Arthur Stuart is
my true son, and I won't betray him.  No I won't.

Again, though, her silence was taken to mean consent.  The men all got
up, looking relieved, Horace most of all.  It was plain they never
figured Old Peg would listen to reason so fast.  The visitors' relief
was to be expected, but why was Horace looking so happy?  Old Peg had a
nasty suspicion and she knew at once that it had to be the truthHorace
Guester and Dr.  Physicker and Sheriff Pauley had already worked things
out between them before they ever come a-calhng today.  This whole
conversation was pretend.  Just a show put on to make Old Peg Guester
happy.

Horace didn't want Arthur Stuart in school any more than Whitley
Physicker or anybody else in Hatrack River.

Old Peg's anger turned hot, but now it was too late.  Physicker and
Pauley was out the door, Horace following on out after them.  No doubt
they'd all pat each other on the back and share a smile out of Old Peg's
sight.  But Old Peg wasn't smiling.  She remembered all too clear how
Little Peggy had done a seeing for her that last night before she run
off, a Seeing about Arthur Stuart's future.  Old Peg had asked Little
Peggy if Horace would ever love little Arthur, and the girl refused to
answer.  That was an answer, sure enough.  Horace might go through the
motions of treating Arthur like his own son, but in fact he thought of
him as just a Black boy that his wife had taken a notion to care for.
Horace was no papa to Arthur Stuart.

So Arthur's an orphan all over again.  Lost his father.  Or, rightly
speaking, never had a father.  Well, so be it.  He's got two mothers:
the one who died for him when he was born, and me.  I can't get him in
the school.  I knew I couldn't, knew it from the start.  But I can get
him an education all the same.  A plan for it sprung into her head all
at once.  It all depended on the schoolmistress they hired, this teacher
lady from Philadelphia.  With luck she'd be a Quaker, with no hate for
Blacks and so the plan would work out just fine.  But even if the
schoolmistress hated Blacks as bad as a finder watching a slave stand
free on the Canadian shore, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

Old Peg would find a way.  Arthur Stuart was the only family she had
left in the world, the only person she loved who didn't lie to her or
fool her or do things behind her back.  She wasn't going to let him be
cheated out of anything that might do him good.

SpHnghouse

Alvin first knew something was up when he heard Horace and Old Peg
Guester yelling at each other up at the old springhouse.  It was so loud
for a minute there that he could hear them clear over the sound of the
forgefire and his own hammering.  Then they quietened themselves down a
mite, but by then Alvin was so curious he kind of laid off the hammer.
Laid it right down, in fact, and stepped outside to hear better.

No, no, he wasn't listening.  He was just going to the well to fetch
more water, some to drink and some for the cooling barrel.  If he
happened to hear them somewhat, he couldn't be blamed, now, could he?

"Folks'll say I'm a bad innkeeper, making the teacher live in the
springhouse instead of putting her up proper."

"It's just an empty budding, Horace, and we'll put it to use.  And it'll
leave us the rooms in the inn for paying customers."

"I won't have that schoohnistress living off alone by herself.  It ain't
decent!"

"Why, Horace?  Are you planning to make advances?"

Alvin could hardly believe his ears.  Married people just didn't say
such things to each other.  Alvin half expected to hear the sound of a
slap.  But instead Horace must've just took it.  Everybody said he was
henpecked, and this was about all the proof a body'd need, to have his
wife accuse him of hankering after adultery and him not hit her or even
say boo.

"It doesn't matter, anyway," said Old Peg.  "Maybe you'll have your way
and she'll say no.  But we'll fix it up, anyway, and offer it to her.  "
Horace mumbled something that Alvin couldn't hear.

"I don't care if Little Peggy built this springhouse.  She's gone of her
own free will, left without so much as a word to me, and I'm not about
to keep this springhouse like a monument just because she used to come
here when she was little.  Do you hear me?"

Again Alvin couldn't hear what Horace said.

On the other hand, he could hear Old Peg right fine.  Her voice just
sailed right out like a crack of thunder.  "You're telling me who loved
who?  Well let me tell you, Horace Guester, all your love for Little
Peggy didn't keep her here, did it?  But my love for Arthur Stuart is
going to get him an education, do you understand me?  And when it's all
said and done, Horace Guester, we'll just see who does better at loving
their children!"

There wasn't exactly a slap or nothing, but there was a slammed door
which like to took the door of the springhouse off its hinges.

Alvin couldn't help craning his neck a little to see who did the
slamming.  Sure enough, it was Old Peg stalking away.

A minute later, maybe even more, the door opened real slow.  Alvin could
barely make it out through the brush and leaves that had grown up
between the well and the springhouse.  Horace Guester came out even
slower, his face downcast in a way Alvin had never seen him before.  He
stood there awhile, his hand on the door.  Then he pushed it closed, as
gentle as if he was tucking a baby into bed.  Alvin always wondered why
they hadn't tore down that springhouse years ago, when Alvin dug the
well that finally killed the stream that used to go through it.  Or at
least why they never put it to some use.  But now Alvin knew it had
something to do with Peggy, that torch girl who left right before Alvin
showed up in Hatrack River.  The way Horace touched that door, the way
he closed it, it made Alvin see for the first time how much a man might
dote on a child of his, so that even when she was gone, the places that
she loved were like holy ground to her old dad.  For the first time
Alvin wondered if he'd ever love a child of his own like that.  And then
he wondered who the mother of that child might be, and if she'd ever
scream at him the way Old Peg screamed at Horace, and if he'd ever have
at her the way Makepeace Smith had at his wife Gertie, him flailing with
his belt and her throwing the crockery.

"Alvin," said Horace.

Well, Alvin like to died with embarrassment, to be caught staring at
Horace like that.  "I beg pardon, sir," said Alvin.  "I shouldn't ought
to've been listening."

Horace smiled wanly.  "I reckon as you'd have to be a deaf mute not to
hear that last bit."

"It got a mite loud," said Alvin, "but I didn't exactly go out of my way
not to hear, neither.  "Well, I know you're a good boy, and I never
heard of no one carrying tales from you."

The words "good boy" rankled a bit.  Alvin was eighteen now, less than a
year to being nineteen, long since ready to be a journeyman smith out on
his own.  Just because Makepeace Smith wouldn't release him early from
his prenticeship didn't make it right for Horace Guester to call him a
boy.  I may be Prentice Alvin, and not a man yet afore the law, but no
woman yells me to shame.

"Alvin," said Horace, "you might tell your master we'll be needing new
hinges and fittings for the springhouse doors.  I reckon we're fixing it
up for the new schoolteacher to live here, if she wants."

So that was the way of it.  Horace had lost the battle with Old Peg.

He was giving in.  Was that the way of marriage, then?  A man either had
to be willing to hit his wife, like Makepeace Smith, or he'd be bossed
around like poor Horace Guester.  Well, if that's the choices, I'll have
none of it, thought Alvin.  Oh, Alvin had an eye for girls in town. He'd
see them flouncing along the street, their breasts all pushed up high by
their corsets and stays, their waists so small he could wrap his great
strong hands right around and toss them every which way, only he never
thought of tossing or grabbing, they just made him feel shy and hot at
the same time, so he looked down when they happened to look at him, or
got busy loading or unloading or whatever business brought him into
town.

Alvin knew what they saw when they looked at him, those town girls. They
saw a man with no coat on, just in his shirt-sleeves, stained and wet
from his labor.  They saw a poor man who'd never keep them in a fine
white clapboard house like their papa, who was no doubt a lawyer or a
judge or a merchant.  They saw him low, a mere prentice still, and him
already more than eighteen years old.  If by some miracle he ever
married one such girl, he knew how it would be, her always looking down
at him, always expecting him to give way for her because she was a lady.

And if he married a girl who was as low as himself, it would be like
Gertie Smith or Old Peg Guester, a good cook or a hard worker or
whatever, but a hellion when she didn't get her way.  There was no woman
in Alvin Smith's life, that was sure.  He'd never let himself be showed
up like Horace Guester.

"Did you hear me, Alvin?"

"I did, Mr.  Horace, and I'll tell Makepeace Smith first off when I see
him.  All the fittings for the springhouse."

"And nice work, too," said Horace.  "It's for the schoolmistress to live
there." But Horace wasn't so whipped that he couldn't get a curl to his
lip and a nasty tone to his voice as he said, "So she can give private
lessons."

The way he said "private lessons" made it sound like it'd be a
whorehouse or something, but Alvin knew right off, by putting things
together, exactly who would be getting private lessons.  Didn't
everybody know how Old Peg had asked to have Arthur Stuart accepted at
the school?

"Well, so long," said Horace.

Alvin waved him good-bye, and Horace ambled away along the path to the
inn.

Makepeace Smith didn't come in that afternoon.  Alvin wasn't surprised.
Now that Alvin had his full mansize on him, he could do the whole work
of the smithy, and faster and better than Makepeace.

Nobody said aught about it, but Alvin noticed back last year that folks
took to dropping in during the times when Makepeace wasn't at the forge.
They'd ask Alvin to do their ironwork quickhke, while they was there
waiting.  "Just a little job," they'd say, only sometimes the job wasn't
all that little.  And pretty soon Alvin realized that it wasn't just
chance brought them by.  They wanted Alvin to do the work they needed.

It wasn't because Alvin did anything peculiar to the iron, either,
except a hex or two where it was called for, and every smith did that.

Alvin knew it wouldn't be right to best his master using some secret
knack-it'd be like slipping a knife into a rasshng match.  It'd just
bring him trouble anyway, if he used his knack to give his iron any
peculiar strength.  So he did his work natural, with his own strong arm
and good eye.  He'd earned every inch of muscle in his back and
shoulders and arms.  And if people liked his work better than Makepeace
Smith's, why, it was because Alvin was a better blacksmith, not because
his knack gave him the advantage.

Anyhow, Makepeace must've caught on to what was happening, and he took
to staying away from the forge more and more.  Maybe it was because he
knew it was better for business, and Makepeace was humble enough to give
way before his prentice's skill-but Alvin never quite believed that.
More likely Makepeace stayed away so folks wouldn't see how he snuck a
look over Alvin's shoulder now and then, trying to figure out what Al
did better than his master.  Or maybe Makepeace was plain jealous, and
couldn't bear to watch his prentice at work.  Could be, though, that
Makepeace was just lazy, and since his prentice boy was doing the work
just fine, why shouldn't Makepeace go out to drink himself silly with
the river rats down at Hatrack Mouth?

Or perhaps, by some strange twist of chance, Makepeace was actually
ashamed of how he kept Alvin to his prentice contract even though Alvin
was plainly ready to take to the road as a journeyman.

It was a low thing for a master to hold a prentice after he knew his
trade, just to get the benefit of his labor without having to pay him a
fair wage.  Alvin brought good money into Makepeace Smith's household,
everybody knew that, and all the while Alvin stayed dirt poor, sleeping
in a loft and never two coins in his pocket to make a jingle when he
walked to town.  Sure, Gertie fed him proper-best food in town, Al knew
well, having eaten a bite now and then with one of the town boys.  But
good food wasn't the same thing as a good wage.

Food you ate and it was gone.  Money you could use to buy things, or to
do things-to havefreedom.  That contract Makepeace Smith kept in the
cupboard up to the house, the one signed by Alvin's father, it made
Alvin a slave as sure any Black in the Crown Colonies.

Except for one difference.  Alvin could count the days till freedom.

It was August.  Not even a year left.  Next spring he'd be free.

No slave in the South ever knew such a thing; nary such a hope would
ever enter their heads.  Alvin had thought on that often enough over the
years, when he was feeling most put upon; he'd think, if they can keep
on living and working, having no hope of freedom, then I can hold out
for another five years, three years, one year, knowing that it'll come
to an end someday.

Anyway, Makepeace Smith didn't show up that afternoon, and when Alvin
finished his assigned work, instead of doing chores and cleaning up,
instead of getting ahead, he went on up to the springhouse and took the
measure of the doors and windows.  It was a place built to keep in the
cool of the stream, so the windows didn't open, but the schoolmistress
wouldn't cotton to that, never having a breath of air, so Alvin took the
measure there, too.  Not that he exactly decided to make a new window
frames himself, seeing how he wasn't no carpenter particularly, except
what woodworking skill any man learns.  He was just taking the measure
of the place, and when he got to the windows he kept going.

He took the measure of a lot of things.  Where a little pot-bellied
stove would have to go, if the place was going to be warm in the winter;
and figuring that, he also figured how to lay in the right foundation
under the heavy stove, and how to put the flaring around the chimney,
all the things it'd take to make the springhouse into a tight little
cabin, fit for a lady to live in.

Alvin didn't write down the measures.  He never did.  He just knew them,
now that he'd put his fingers and hands and arms into all the places;
and if he forgot, and took the measure wrong somehow, he knew that in a
pinch he could make it fit even so.  It was a kind of laziness, he knew,
but he got precious little advantage from his knack these days, and
there was no shame in such small ridging.

Arthur Stuart wandered along when Al was just about done at the
springhouse.  Alvin didn't say nothing, nor did Arthur; you don't greet
somebody who belongs where you are, you hardly notice them.

But when Alvin needed to get the measure of the roof, he just said so
and then tossed Arthur up onto the roof as easy as Peg Guester tossed
the feather mattresses from the inn beds.

Arthur walked like a cat on top of the roof, paying no heed to being up
so high.  He paced off the roof and kept his own count, and when he was
done he didn't even wait to make sure Alvin was ready to catch him, he
just took a leap into the air.  It was like Arthur believed he could
fly.  And with Alvin there to catch him below, why, it might as well be
true, since Alvin had such arms on him that he could catch Arthur easy
and let him down as gentle as a mallard settling onto a pond.

When Al and Arthur was done with measuring, they went back to the
smithy.  Alvin took a few bars of iron from the pile, bet up the forge,
and set to work.  Arthur set in to pumping the bellows and fetching
tools-they'd been doing this so long that it was like Arthur was Alvin's
own prentice, and it never occurred to either of them that there was
arything wrong with it.  They just did this together, so smooth that to
other folks it looked like a kind of dance.

A couple of hours later, Alvin had'all the fittings.  It should've taken
less time by half, only for some reason Alvin got it into his head that
he ought to make a lock for the door, and then he got it into his head
that it ought to be a real lock, the kind that a few rich folks in town
ordered from back east in Philadelphia-with a proper key and all, and a
catch that shut all by itself when you closed the door, so you'd never
forget to lock the door behind -you.

What's more, he put secret hexes on all the fittings, perfect sixpoint
figures that spoke of safety, and no one with harm in his heart being
about to turn the lock.  Once the lock was closed and fastened in place
on the door, nobody'd see those hexes, but they'd do the work sure,
since when Alvin made a hex the measure was so perfect it cast a network
of hexes like a wall for many yards on every side.

It occurred to Alvin to wonder why a hex should work at all.  Of course
he knew why it was such a magical shape, being twice three; and he knew
how you could lay hexes down on a table and they'd fit snug together, as
perfect as squares, only stronger, woven not with warp and weft, but
with warp and weft and hax.  It wasn't like squares, which were hardly
ever found in nature, being too simple and weak; there was hexes in
snowflakes and crystals and honeycombs.  Making a single hex was the
same as making a whole fabric of hexes, so that the perfect hexes he hid
up inside the lock would wrap all the way around the house, sealing it
from outside harm as surely as if he forged a net of iron and wove it
right in place.

But that didn't answer the question why it worked.  Why his hidden hexes
should bar a man's hand, turn a man's mind away from entering.

Why the hex should invisibly repeat itself as far as it could, and the
more perfect the hex, the farther the net it threw.  all these years of
puzzling things out, and he still knew so little.  Knew so near to
nothing that he despaired, and even now, holding the springhouse
fittings in his hands, he wondered if in fact he shouldn't content
himself to be a good smith and forget these tales of Makering.

With all his wondering and questioning, Alvin never did ask himself what
should have been the plainest question of all.  Why would a
schoolmistress need such a perfectly hexed, powerful lock?  Alvin didn't
even try to guess.  He wasn't thinking like that.  Instead he just knew
that such a lock was something fine, and this little house had to be as
fine as he could make it.  Later on he'd wonder about it, wonder if he
knew even then, before he met her, what this schoolmistress would mean
to him.  Maybe he already had a plan in the back of his mind, just like
Old Peg Guester did.  But he sure didn't know about it yet, and that was
the truth.  When he made all those fancy fittings, with patterns cut in
them so the door would look pretty, he most likely was doing it for
Arthur Stuart; maybe he was halfway thinking that if the schoolmistress
had a right pretty little place to live, she'd be more inclined to give
Arthur Stuart his private lessons.

It was time to quit for the day, but Alvin didn't quit.  He pushed all
the fittings up to the springhouse in a wheelbarrow, along with a couple
of other tools he figured to need, and some scrap tin for the flaring of
the chimney.  He worked fast, and without quite meaning to, he used his
knack to smooth the labor.  Everything fit first time; the doors rehung
as nice as could be, and the lock fitted exactly to the inside face of
the door, bolted on so tight that it'd never come off.

This was a door no man could fore asier to chop through the split-log
wall than attack this door.  And with the hexes inside, a man ouldn't
dare to lift his axe against the house, or if he did, he'd be too weak
to strike a telling blow-these were hexes that even a Red might not
laugh at.

Al took another trip back to the shed outside the smithy and chose the
best of the old broke-down pot-belly stoves that Makepeace had bought
for the iron in them.  Carrying a whole stove wasn't easy even for a man
strong as a blacksmith, but it was sure the wheelbarrow couldn't handle
such a load.  So Alvin hefted it up the hill by main strength.  He left
it outside while he brought stones from the old streambed to make a
foundation under the floor at the place where the stove would go.  The
floor of the springhouse was set on beams running the length of the
house inside, but they hadn't planked over the strip where the stream
used to go-it wouldn't have been much of a springhouse if they covered
over the cold water.  Anyway he put a tight stone foundation under an
upstream corner where the floor was done but not too high off the
ground, and then bolted sheets of thinbeat iron on top of the planks to
make a fireproof floor.  Then he hefted the stove into place and piped
it up to the hole he knocked in the roof.

He set Arthur Stuart to work with a rasp, tearing the dead moss off the
inside of the walls.  It came off easy, but it mostly kept Arthur
distracted so he didn't notice that Alvin was fixing things on that
brokedown stove that couldn't be fixed by a natural man.  Good as new,
and all fittings tight.

"I'm hungry," said Arthur Stuart.

Get on up to Gertie and tell her I'm working late and please send food
down for both of us, since you're helping."

Arthur Stuart took off running.  Alvin knew that he'd deliver the
message word for word, and in Alvin's own voice, so that Gertie'd laugh
out loud and give him a good supper in a basket.  Probably such a good
supper that Arthur'd have to stop and rest three or four times on the
way back, it'd be so heavy.

All this time Makepeace Smith never so much as showed his face.

When Arthur Stuart finally got back, Alvin was on the roof putting the
final touch on the flaring, and fixing some of the shingles while he was
up there.  The flaring fit so tight water'd never get into the house, he
saw to that.  Arthur Stuart stood below, waiting and watching, not
asking if he could go ahead and eat, not even asking how long till
Alvin'd come down; he wasn't the type of child to whine or complain.

When Alvin was done, he dropped over the edge of the roof, caught
himself on the lip of the eaves, then dropped to the ground.

"Cold chicken be mighty good after a hot day's work," said Arthur
Stuart, in a voice that was exactly Gertie Smith's, except pitched in a
child's high voice.

Alvin grinned at him and opened the basket.  They fell to eating like
sailors who'd been on short rations for half the voyage, and in no time
they was both lying there on their backs, bellies packed full, belching
now and then, watching the white clouds move like placid cattle grazing
across the sky.

The sun was getting low toward the west now.  Definitely time to pack in
for the day, but Alvin just couldn't feel good about that.

"Best you get home," he said.  "Maybe if you just run that empty basket
back up to Gertie Smith's, you can get in without your Ma gets too upset
at you."

"What you doing now?"

"Got windows to frame and re-hang."

"Well I got walls to finish rasping down," said Arthur Stuart.

Alvin grinned, but he also knew that what he planned to do to the
windows wasn't a thing he wanted witnesses for.  He had no intention of
actually doing a lot of carpentry, and he didn't ever let anybody watch
him do something obvious with his knack.  "Best you go home now," said
Alvin.

Arthur sighed.

"You been a good help to me, but I don't want you getting in trouble."

To Alvin's surprise, Arthur just returned his own words back to him in
his own voice.  "You been a good help to me, but I don't want you
getting in trouble."

"I mean it," said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart rolled over, got up, came over and sat down astride of
Alvin's belly-which Arthur often did, but it didn't feel none too
comfortable at the moment, there being about a chicken and a half inside
that belly.

"Come on, Arthur Stuart," said Alvin.

"I never told nobody bout no redbird," said Arthur Stuart.

Well, that just sent a chill right through Alvin.  Somehow he'd figured
that Arthur Stuart was just too young that day more than three years ago
to even remember that anything happened.  But Alvin should've knowed
that just because Arthur Stuart didn't talk about something didn't mean
that he forgot.  Arthur never forgot so much as a caterpillar crawling
on a leaf.

If Arthur Stuart remembered the redbird, then he no doubt remembered
that day when it was winter out of season, when Alvin's knack dug a well
and made the stone come clean of dirt without using his hands.  And if
Arthur Stuart knew all about Alvin's knack, then what point was there in
trying to sneak around and make it secret?

"All right then," said Alvin.  "Help me hang the windows." Alvin almost
added, "as long as you don't tell a soul what you see." But Arthur
Stuart already understood that.  It was just one of the things that
Arthur Stuart understood.

They shed before dark, Alvin cutting into the wood of the window frames
with his bare fingers, shaping what was just wood nailed into wood until
it was windows that could slide free, up and down.

He made little holes in the sides of the window frames and whittled
plugs of wood to fit them, so the window would stay up as far as a body
might want.  Of course, he didn't quite whittle like a natural man,
since each stroke of the knife took off a perfect arc.

Each plug was done in about six passes of the knife.

Meantime Arthur Stuart finished the rasping, and then they swept out the
house, using a broom of course, but Alvin helped with his knack so that
every scrap of sawdust and iron filings and flakes of moss and ancient
dust ended up outside the house.  Only thing they didn't do was try to
cover the strip of open dirt down the middle of the springhouse, where
once the stream flowed.  That'd take felling a tree to get the planks,
and anyway Alvin was starting to get a little scared, seeing how much
he'd done and how fast he'd done it.  What if somebody came tonight and
realized that all this work was done in a single long afternoon? There'd
be questions.  There'd be guesses.

"Don't tell anybody that we did this all in a day," said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart just grinned.  He'd lost one of his front teeth recently,
so there was a spot where his pink gums showed up.  Pink as a White
person's gums, Alvin thought.  Inside his mouth he's no different from a
White.  Then Alvin had this crazy idea of God taking all the people in
the world who ever died and flaying them and hanging up their bodies
like pigs in the butcher's shop, just meat and bones hanging there by
the heel, even the guts and the head gone, just meat.  And then God
would ask folks like the Hatrack River School Board to come in and pick
out which was Black folks and which was Red and which was White.  They
couldn't do it.  Then God would say, "Well why in hell did you say that
this one and this one and this one couldn't go to school with this one
and this one and this one?" What answer would they have then?  Then God
would say, "You people, you're all the same rare meat under the skin.
But I tell you, I don't like your flavor.  I'm going to toss your
beefsteaks to the dogs."

Well, that was such a funny idea that Alvin couldn't help but tell it to
Arthur Stuart, and Arthur Stuart laughed just as hard as Alvin.

Only after it was all said and the laughing was done did Alvin remember
that maybe nobody'd told Arthur Stuart about how his ma tried to get him
into the school and the school board said no.  "You know what this is
all about?"

Arthur Stuart didn't understand the question, or maybe he understood it
even better than Alvin did.  Anyways, he answered, 'Ma's hoping the
teacher lady'll learn me to read and write here in this springhouse."

"Right," said Alvin.  No point in explaining about the school, then.

Either Arthur Stuart already knew how some White folks felt about
Blacks, or else he'd find out soon enough without Alvin telling him now.

"We're all the same rare meat," said Arthur Stuart.  He used a funny
voice that Alvin had never heard before.

"Whose voice was that?" asked Alvin.

"God, of course," said Arthur Stuart.

"Good imitation," said Alvin.  He was being funny.

"Sure is," said Arthur Stuart.  He wasn't.

Turned out nobody came to the springhouse for a couple of days and more.
It was Monday of the next week when Horace ambled into the smithy.  He
came early in the morning, at a time when Makepeace was most likely to
be there, ostentatiously "teaching" Alvin to do something that Alvin
already knew how to do.

"My masterpiece was a ship's anchor," said Makepeace.  "Course,

that was back in Newport, afore I come west.  Them ships, them whaling
ships, they weren't like little bitty houses and wagons.  They needed
real ironwork.  A boy like you, you do well enough out here where they
don't know better, but you'd never make a go of it there, where a smith
has to be a man."

Alvin was used to such talk.  He let it roll right off him.  But he was
grateful anyway when Horace came in, putting an end to Makepeace's brag.

After all the good-mornings and howdy-dos, Horace got right to business.
"I just come by to see when you'll have a chance to get started on the
springhouse."

Makepeace raised an eyebrow and looked at Alvin.  Only then did Alvin
realize that he'd never mentioned the job to Makepeace.

"It's already done, sir," Alvin said to Makepeace-for all the world as
if Makepeace's unspoken question had been, "Are you finished yet?" and
not, "What is this springhouse job the man's talking about?"

"Done?" said Horace.

Alvin turned to him.  "I thought you must've noticed.  I thought you
were in a hurry, so I did it right off in my free time."

"Well, let's go see it," said Horace.  "I didn't even think to look on
my way down here."

"Yes, I'm dying to look at it myself," said the smith.

"I'll just stay here and keep working," said Alvin.

"No," said Makepeace.  "You come along and show off this work you done
in your free time." Alvin didn't hardly notice how Makepeace emphasized
the last two words, he was so nervous to show off what he done at the
springhouse.  He only barely had sense enough to drop the keys he made
into his pocket.

They made their way up the hill to the springhouse.  Horace was the kind
of man who could tell when somebody did real good work, and wasn't shy
to say so.  He fingered the fancy new hingework and admired the lock
afore he put in the key.  To Alvin's pride it turned smooth and easy.
The door swung open quiet as a leaf in autumn.  If Horace noticed the
hexes, he didn't let on.  It was other things he noticed, not hexery.

"Why, you cleaned off the walls," said Horace.

"Arthur Stuart did that," said Alvin.  "Rasped it off neat as you
please."

"And this stove-I tell you, Makepeace, I didn't figure the price of a
new stove in this."

"It isn't a new stove," said Alvin.  "I mean, begging your pardon, but
it was a brokedown stove we kept for the scrap, only when I looked it
over I saw we could fix it up, so why not put it here?"

Makepeace gave Alvin a cool look, then turned back to Horace.

"That don't mean it's free, of course."

"Course not," said Horace.  "If you bought it for scrap, though .

.  ."

"Oh, the price won't be too terrible high."

Horace admired how it joined to the roof.  "Perfect work," he said.

He turned around.  To Alvin he looked a little sad, or maybe just
resigned.  "Have to cover the rest of the floor, of course."

"Not our line of work," said Makepeace Smith.

"Just talking to myself, don't mind me." Horace went over to the east
window, pushed against it with his fingers, then raised it.  He found
the pegs on the sill and put them into the third hole on each ide, then
let the window fall back down to rest against the pegs.  He looked at
the pegs, then out the window, then back at the pegs, for a long time.
Alvin dreaded having to explain how he, not trained as a fine carpenter,
managed to hang such a fine window.  Worse yet, what if Horace guessed
that this was the original window, not a new one?

That could only be explained by Alvin's knack-no carpenter could get
inside the wood to cut out a sliding window like that.

But all Horace said was, "You did some extra work."

"Just figured it needed doing," said Alvin.  If Horace wasn't going to
ask about how he did it, Alvin was just as happy not to explain.

"I didn't reckon to have it done so fast," said Horace.  "Nor to have so
much done.  The lock looks to be an expensive one, and the stoveI hope I
don't have to pay for all at once."

Alvin almost said, You don't have to pay for any of it, but of course
that wouldn't do.  It was up to Makepeace Smith to decide things like
that.

But when Horace turned around, looking for an answer, he didn't face
Makepeace Smith, he stood square on to Alvin.  "Makepeace Smith here's
been charging full price for your work, so I reckon I shouldn't pay you
any less."

Only then did Alvin realize that he made a mistake when he said he did
the work in his free time, since work a prentice did in his official
free time was paid for direct to the prentice, and not the master.

Makepeace Smith never gave Alvin free time-whatever work anyone wanted
done, Makepeace would hire Alvin out to do, which was his right under
the Prentice contract.  By calling it free time, Alvin seemed to be
saying that Makepeace had given him time off to earn money for himself
"Sir, l' Makepeace spoke up before Alvin could explain the mistake.
"Full price wouldn't be right," said Makepeace.  "Alvin getting so close
to the end of his contract, I thought he should start trying things on
his own, see how to handle money.  But even though the work looks right
to you, to me it detely looks second rate.  So half price is right.  I
figure it took at least twenty hours to do all this-right, Alvin?"

It was more like ten, but Alvin just nodded.  He didn't know what to
say, anyway, since his master was obviously not committed to telling the
plain truth about this job.  And the job he did would have been at least
twenty hours-two full days' labor-for a smith without Alvin's knack.

"So," said Makepeace, "between Al's labor at half price and the cost of
the stove and the iron and all, it comes to fifteen dollars."

Horace whistled and rocked back on his heels.

"You can have my labor free, for the experience," Alvin said.

Makepeace glared at him.

"Wouldn't dream of it," said Horace.  "The Savior said the laborer is
worthy of his hire.  It's the sudden high price of iron I'm a little
skeptical about."

"It's a stove, " said Makepeace Smith.

Wasn't till I fixed it, Alvin said silently.

"You bought it as scrap iron," said Horace.  "As you said about Al's
labor, full price wouldn't be right."

Makepeace sighed.  "For old times' sake, Horace, cause you brought me
here and helped set me up on my own when I came west eighteen years ago.
Nine dollars."

Horace didn't smile, but he nodded.  "Fair enough.  And since you
usually charge four dollars a day for AI'yin's hire, I guess his twenty
hours at half price comes to four bucks.  You come by the house this
afternoon, Alvin, I'll have it for you.  And Makepeace, I'll pay you the
rest when the inn fills up at harvest time."

Fair enough," said Makepeace.

"Glad to see that you're giving Alvin free time now," said Horace.

"There's been a lot of folks criticizing you for being so tight with a
good Prentice, but I always told them, Makepeace is just biding his
time, you'll see."

"That's right," said Makepeace.  "I was biding my time."

"You don't mind if I tell other folks that the biding's done?"

"Alvin still has to do his work for me," said Makepeace.

Horace nodded wisely.  "Reckon so," he said.  "He works for you
mornings, for himself afternoons-is that right?  That's the way most
fair-minded masters do it, when a Prentice gets so near to journeyman.

MakePeace began to turn a little red.  Alvin wasn't surprised.  He could
see what was happening-Horace Guester was being like a lawyer for him,
seizing on this chance to shame Makepeaee into treating Alvin fair for
the fast time in more than six Years of prenticing.

When Makepeace decided to pretend that Alvin really did have free time,
why, that was a crack in the door, and Horace was muscling his way
through by main force.  Pushing Makepeace to give Alvin half days, no
less!  That was surely too much for Makepeace to swallow.

But Makepeace swallowed.  "Half days is fine with me.  Been meaning to
do that for some time."

"So you'll be working afternoons yourself now, right, Makepeace?

Oh, Alvin had to gaze at Horace with pure admiration.  He wasn't going
to let Makepeace get away with lazing around and forcing Alvin to do all
the work at the smithy.

"When I work's my own business, Horace."

"Just want to tell folks when they can be sure to find the master in,
and when the Prentice."

"I'll be in all day.  "

"Why, glad to hear it," said Horace.

"Well, fine work, I must say, Alvin.  Your master done a good job
teaching you, and you been carefuler than I ever seen before.  You make
sure to come by this evening for your four dollars."

"Yes sir.  Thank you, sir."

"I'll just let you two get back to work now," said Horace.  "Are these
the only two keys to the door?"

"Yes sir," said Alvin.  "I oiled them up so they won't rust.

"I'll keep them oiled myself.  Thanks for the reminder."

Horace opened the door and pointedly held it open till Makepeace and
Alvin came on out.  Horace carefully locked the door, as they watched.
He turned and grinned at Alvin.  "Maybe first thing I'll have you do is
make a lock this fine for my front door." Then he laughed out loud and
shook his head.  "No, I reckon not.  I'm an innkeeper.

My business is to let people in, not lock them out.  But there's others
in town who'll like the look of this lock."

"Hope so, sir.  Thank you."

Horace nodded again, then took a cool gaze at Makepeace as if to say,
Don't forget all you promised to do here today.  Then he ambled off up
the path to the roadhouse.

Alvin started down the hill to the smithy.  He could hear Makepeace
following him, but Alvin wasn't exactly hoping for a conversation with
his master just now.  As long as Makepeace said nothing that was good
enough for Alvin.

That lasted only till they were both inside the smithy.

"That stove was broke to hell and back," said Makepeace.

That was the last thing Alvin expected to hear, and the most fearful. No
chewing-out for claiming free time; no attempt to take back what he'd
promised in the way of work schedule.  Makepeace Smith had remembered
that stove better than Alvin expected.

"Looked real bad, all right," said Alvin.

"No way to fix it without recasting," said Makepeace.  "If I didn't know
it was impossible, I would've fixed it myself."

"I thought so, too," said Alvin.  "But when I looked it over-" The look
on Makepeace Smith's face silenced him.  He knew.  There was no doubt in
Alvin's mind.  The master knew what his prentice boy could do.

Alvin felt the fear of being found out right down to his bones; it felt
just like hide-and-go-find with his brothers and sisters when he was
little, back in Vigor Church.  The worst was when you were the last one
still hid and unfound, all the waiting and waiting, and then you hear
the footsteps coming, and you tingle all over, you feel it in every part
of your body, like as if your whole self was awake and itching to move.
It gets so bad you want to jump out and scream, "Here I am!  I'm here!"
and then run like a rabbit, not to the haven tree, but just anywhere,
just run full out until every muscle of your body was wore out and you
fell down on the earth.  It was crazy-no good came of such craziness.
But that's how it felt playing with his brothers and sisters, and that's
how it felt now on the verge of being found out.

To Alvin's surprise, a slow smile spread across his master's face.

"So that's it," said Makepeace.  "That's it.  Ain't you full of
surprises.

I see it now.  Your pa said when you was born, he's the seventh son of a
seventh son.  Your way with horses, sure, I knew about that. And what
you done finding that well, sense like a doodlebug, I could see that,
too.  But now." Makepeace grinned.  "Here I thought you were a smith
like never was born, and all the time you was fiddling with it like an
alchemist."

"No sir," said Alvin.

"Oh, I'll keep your secret," said Makepeace.  "I won't tell a soul."

But he was laughing in the way he had, and Alvin knew that while
Makepeace wouldn't tell straight out, he'd be dropping hints from here
to the Ohio.  But that wasn't what bothered Alvin most.

"Sir," said Alvin, "all the work I ever done for you, I done honest,
with my own arms and skill."

Makepeace nodded wisely, like he understood some secret meaning in
Alvin's words.  "I get it," he said.  "Secret's safe with me.  But I
knew it all along.  Knew you couldn't be as good a smith as you seemed."

Makepeace Smith had no idea how close he was to death.  Alvin wasn't a
murderous soul-any lust for blood that might have been born in him was
driven out of him on a certain day inside Eight-Face Mound near seven
years ago.  But during all the years of his prenticeship, he had never
heard one word of praise from this man, nothing but complaints about how
lazy Alvin was, and how second-rate his work was, and all the time
Makepeace Smith was lying, all the time he knew Alvin was good.

Not till Makepeace was convinced Alvin had used hidden knackery to do
his smithwork, not till now did Makepeace ever let Alvin know that he
was, in fact, a good smith.

Better than good.  Alvin knew it, of course, knew he was a natural
smith, but never having it said out loud hurt him deeper than he
guessed.  Didn't his master know how much a word might have meant, even
half an hour ago, just a word like, "You've got some skill at this,
boy," or, "You have a right good hand with that sort of work"?  But
Makepeace couldn't do it, had to lie and pretend Alvin had no skill
until now, when Makepeace believed that he didn't have a smith's skill
after all.

Alvin wanted to reach out and take hold of Makepeace's head and ram it
into the anvil, ram it so hard that the truth would be driven right
through Makepeace's skull and into his brain.  I never used my Maker's
knack in any of my smithwork, not since I got strong enough to do it
with my own strength and skill, so don't smirk at me like I'm just a
trickster, and no real smith.  Besides, even if I used my Maker's art,
do you think that's easy, either?  Do you think I haven't paid a price
for that as well?

All the fury of Alvin's life, all these years of slavery, all these
years of rage at the unfairness of his master, all these years of
secrecy and disguise, all his desperate longing to know what to do with
his life and having no one in the world to ask, all this was burning
inside Alvin hotter than the forge fire.  Now the itching and tingling
inside him wasn't a longing to run.  No, it was a longing to do
violence, to stop that smile on Makepeace Smith's face, to stop it
forever against the anvil's beak.

But somehow Alvin held himself motionless, speechless, as still as an
animal trying to be invisible, trying not to be where he is.  And in
that stillness Alvin heard the greensong all around him, and he let the
life of the woodland come into him, fill his heart, bring him peace.

The greensong wasn't loud as it used to be, farther west in wilder
times, when the Red man still sang along with the greenwood music.

It was weak, and sometimes got near drowned out by the unharmonious
noise of town life or the monotones of well-tended fields.

But Alvin could still find the song at need, and sing silently along
with it, and let it take over and calm his heart.

Did Makepeace Smith know how close he came to death?  For it was sure
he'd be no match for Alvin rassling, not with Al so young and tall and
so much terrible righteous fire in his heart.  Whether he guessed or
not, the smile faded from Makepeace Smith's face, and he nodded
solemnly.  "I'll keep all I said, up there, when Horace pushed me so
hard.  I know you probably put him up to it, but I'm a fair man, so I'll
forgive you, long as you still pull some weight here for me, till your
contract's up."

Makepeace's accusation that Alvin conspired with Horace should have made
Alvin angrier, but by now the greensong owned him, and Alvin wasn't
hardly even in the smithy.  He was in the kind of trance he learned when
he ran with Ta-Kumsaw's Reds, where you forget who and where you are,
and your body's just a far-off creature running through the woods.

Makepeace waited for an answer, but it didn't come.  So he just nodded
wisely and turned to leave.  "I got business in town," he said.

"Keep at it." He stopped at the wide doorway and turned back into the
smithy.  "While you're at it, you might as well fix those other
brokedown stoves in the shed."

Then he was gone.

Alvin stood there a long time, not moving, not hardly even knowing he
had a body to move.  It was full noon before he came to himself and took
a step.  His heart was utterly at peace then, with not a spot of rage
left in it.  If he'd thought about it, he probably would've knowed that
the anger was sure to come back, that he wasn't so much healed as
soothed.  But soothing was enough for now, it'd do.  His contract would
be up this spring, and then he'd be out of this place, a free man at
last.

One thing, though.  It never did occur to him to do what Makepeace Smith
asked, and fix those other brokedown stoves.  And as for Makepeace, he
never brought it up again, neither.  Alvin's knack wasn't a part of his
prenticeship, and Makepeace Smith must've knowed that, deep down,
must've knowed he didn't have the right to tell young Al what to do when
he was a-Making.

A few days later Alvin was one of the men who helped lay the new floor
in the springhouse.  Horace took him aside and asked him why he never
came by for his four dollars.

Alvin couldn't very well tell him the truth, that he'd never take money
for work he did as a Maker.  "Call it my share of the teacher's salary,"
said Alvin.

"You got no property to pay tax on," said Horace, "nor any children to
go to the school, neither."

"Then say I'm paying you for my share of the land my brother's body
sleeps in up behind the roadhouse," said Alvin.

Horace nodded solemnly.  "That debt, if there was a debt, was paid in
full by your father's and brothers' labor seventeen year gone, young
Alvin, but I respect your wish to pay your share.  So this time I'll
consider you paid in full.  But any other work you do for me, you take
full wages, you hear me?"

"I will, sir," said Alvin.  "Thank you sir."

"Call me Horace, boy.  When a growed man calls me sir it just makes me
feel old."

They went back to work then, and said nary another word about Alvin's
work on the springhouse.  But something stuck in Alvin's mind all the
same: what Horace said when Alvin offered to let his wages be a share of
the teacher's salary.  "You got no property, nor any children to go to
the school." There it was, right there, in just a few words.

That was why even though Alvin had his full growth on him, even though
Horace called him a growed man, he wasn't really a man yet, not even in
his own eyes.  Because he had no family.  Because he had no property.

Till he had those, he was just a big old boy.  Just a child like Arthur
Stuart, only taller, with some beard showing when he didn't shave.

And just like Arthur Stuart, he had no share in the school.  He was too
old.  It wasn't built for the likes of him.  So why did he wait so
anxious for the schoolmistress to come?  Why did he think of her with so
all-fired much hope?  She wasn't coming here for him, and yet he knew
that he had done his work on the springhouse for her, as if to put her
in his debt, or perhaps to thank her in advance for what he wanted her,
so desperately, to do for him.

Teach me, he said silently.  I got a Work to do in this world, but
nobody knows what it is or how it's done.  Teach me.  That's what I want
from you, Lady, to help me find my way to the root of the world or the
root of myself or the throne of God or the Unmaker's heart, wherever the
secret of Making lies, so that I can build against the snow of winter,
or make a light to shine against the fall of night.

River Rat

Alvin was in Hatrack Mouth the afternoon the teacher came.

Makepeace had sent him with the wagon, to fetch a load of new iron that
come down the Ohio.  Hatrack Mouth used to be just a single wharf, a
stop for riverboats unloading stuff for the town of Hatrack River.

Now, though, as river traffic got thicker and more folks were settling
out in the western lands on both sides of the Ohio, there was a need for
a couple of inns and shops, where farmers could sell provender to
passing boats, and river travelers could stay the night.  Hatrack Mouth
and the town of Hatrack River were getting more important all the time,
since this was the last place where the Ohio was close to the great
Wobbish Road-the very road that Al's own father and brothers cut through
the wilderness west to Vigor Church.  Folks would come down river and
unship their wagons and horses here, and then move west overland.

There was also things that folks wouldn't tolerate in Hatrack River
itself- gaming houses, where poker and other games got played and money
changed hands, the law not being inclined to venture much into the dens
of river rats and other such scum.  And upstairs of such houses, it was
said there was women who wasn't ladies, plying a trade that decent folks
scarcely whispered about and boys of Alvin's age talked of in low voices
with lots of nervous laughter.

It wasn't the thought of raised skirts and naked thighs that made Alvin
look forward to his trips to Hatrack Mouth.  Alvin scarce noticed those
buildings, knowing he had no business there.  It was the wharf that drew
him, and the porthouse, and the river itself, with boats and rafts going
by all the time, ten going downstream for every one coming up.  His
favorite boats were the steamboats, whistling and spitting their way
along at unnatural speeds.  With heavy engines built in Irrakwa, these
riverboats were wide and long, and yet they moved upstream against the
current faster than rafts could float downstream.

There was eight of them on the Ohio now, going from Dekane down to
Sphinx and back again.  No farther than Sphinx, though, since the
Mizzipy was thick with fog, and nary a boat dared navigate there.

Someday, thought Alvin, someday a body could get on such a boat as Pride
of the Ohio and just float away.  Out to the West, to the wild lands,
and maybe catch a glimpse of the place where Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa
live now.  Or upriver to Dekane, and thence by the new stream train that
rode on rails up to Irrakwa and the canal.  From there a body could
travel the whole world, oceans across.  Or maybe he could stand on this
bank and the whole world would someday pass him by.

But Alvin wasn't lazy.  He didn't linger long at riverside, though he
might want to.  Soon enough he went into the porthouse and turned in
Makepeace Smith's chit to redeem the iron packed in nine crates on the
dock.

"Don't want you using my hand trucks to tote those, now," said the
portmaster.  Alvin nodded-it was always the same.  Folks wanted iron bad
enough, the portmaster included, and he'd be up to the smithy soon
enough asking for this or that.  But in the meantime, he'd let Alvin
heft the iron all himself, and not let him wear out the portmaster's
trucks moving such a heavy load.  Nor did Makepeace ever give Alvin
money enough to hire one of the river rats to help with the toting.

Truth to tell, Alvin was glad enough of that.  He didn't much like the
sort of man who lived the river life.  Even though the day of brigands
and pirates was pretty much over, there being too much traffic on the
water now for much to happen in secret, still there was thievery enough,
and crooked dealing, and Alvin looked down hard on the men who did such
things.  To his way of thinking, such men counted on the trust of honest
folks, and then betrayed them; and what could that do, except make it so
folks would stop trusting each other at all?  I'd rather face a man with
raw fighting in him, and match him arm for arm, than face a man who's
full of lies.

So wouldn't you know it, Alvin met the new teacher and matched himself
with a river rat all in the same hour.

The river rat he fought was one of a gang of them lolling under the
eaves of the porthouse, probably waiting for a gaming house to open.

Each time Alvin came out of the porthouse with a crate of iron bars,
they'd call out to him, taunting him.  At first it was sort of
goodnatured, saying things like, "Why are you taking so many trips, boy?

Just tuck one of those crates under each arm!" Alvin just grinned at
remarks like that, since he knew that they knew just how heavy a load of
iron was.  Why, when they unloaded the iron from the boat yesterday, the
boatmen no doubt hefted two men to a crate.  So in a way, teasing him
about being lazy or weak was a kind of compliment, since it was only a
joke because the iron was heavy and Alvin was really very strong.

Then Alvin went on to the grocer's, to buy the spices Gertie had asked
him to bring home for her kitchen, along with a couple of Irrakwa and
New England kitchen tools whose purpose Al could only half guess at.

When he came back, both arms full, he found the river rats still
loitering in the shade, only they had somebody new to taunt, and their
mockery was a little ugly now.  It was a middle-aged woman, some forty
years old by Alvin's guess, her hair tied up severe in a bun and a p in
atop it, her dark dressing up to t neck and down the wrist as if she was
afraid sunlight on her skin might kill her.  She was staring stonily
ahead while the river rats had words at her.

"You reckon that dress is sewed on, boys?"

They reckoned so.

"Probably never comes up for no man."

"Why no, boys, there's nothing under that skirt, she's just a doll's
head and hands sewed onto a stuffed dress, don't you think?"

"No way could she be a real woman."

"I can tell a real woman when I see one, anyway.  The minute they lay
eyes on me, real women just naturally start spreading their legs and
raising their skirts."

"Maybe if you helped her out a little, you could turn her into a real
woman."

"This one?  This one's carved out of wood.  I'd get splinters in my oar,
trying to row in such waters."

Well, that was about all Alvin could stand to hear.  It was bad enough
for a man to think such thoughts about a woman who invited it-the girls
from the gaming houses, who opened their necklines down to where you
could count their breasts as plain as a cow's teats and flounced along
the streets kicking up their skirts tdl you could see their knees.  But
this woman was plainly a lady, and by rights oughtn't to have to hear
the dirty thoughts of these low men.  Alvin figured she must be waiting
for somebody to fetch her-the stagecoach to Hatrack River was due, but
not for a couple of hours yet.

She didn't look fearful-she probably knew these men was more brag than
action, so her virtue was safe enough.  And from her face Alvin couldn't
guess whether she was even listening, her expression was so cold and
faraway.  But the river rats' words embarrassed him so much he couldn't
stand it, and couldn't feel right about just driving his wagon off and
leaving her there.  So he put the parcels he got from the port grocer
into the wagon and then walked up to the river rats and spoke to the
loudest and crudest talker among them.

"Maybe you'd best speak to her like a lady," said Alvin.  "Or perhaps
not speak to her at all."

Alvin wasn't surprised to see the gt these boys all got in their eyes
the minute he spoke.  Provoking a lady was one kind of fun, but he knew
they were sizing him up now to see how easy he'd be to whup.  They
always loved a chance to teach a lesson to a town boy, even one built up
as strong as Alvin was, him being a blacksmith.

"Maybe you'd best not speak to us at all," said the loud one.

"Maybe you already said more than you ought."

One of the river rats didn't understand, and thought the game was still
talking dirty about the lady.  "He's just jealous.  He wants to pole her
muddy river himself."

"I haven't said enough," said Alvin, "not while you still don't have the
manners to know how to speak to a lady."

Only now did the lady speak for the first time.  "I don't need
protection, young man," she said.  "Just go along, please." Her voice
was strange-sounding.  Cultured, like Reverend Thrower, with all the
words clear.  Like people who went to school in the East.

It would have been better for her not to speak, since the sound of her
voice only encouraged the river rats.

"Oh, she's sweet on this boy!"

"She's making a move on him!"

"He wants to row our boat!"

"Let's show her who the real man is!"

"If she wants his little mast, let's cut it off and give it to him."

A knife appeared, then another.  Didn't she know enough to keep her
mouth shut?  If they dealt with Alvin alone, they'd set up to have a
single fight, one to one.  But if they got to showing off for her,
they'd be happy enough to gang up on him and cut him bad, maybe kill
him, certainly take an ear or his nose or, like they said, geld him.

Alvin glared at her for a moment, silently telling her to shut her
mouth.  Whether she understood his look or just figured things out for
herself or got plain scared to say more, she didn't offer any more
conversation, and Alvin set to turning things in a direction he could
handle.

"Knives," said Alvin, with all the contempt he could muster.  "So you're
afraid to face a blacksmith with bare hands?"

They laughed at him, but the knives got pulled back and put away.

"Blacksmith's nothing compared to the muscles we get poling the river."

"You don't pole the river no more, boys, and everybody knows that," said
Alvin.  "You just set back and get fat, watching the paddlewheel push
the boat along."

The loudest talker got up and stepped out, pulling his filthy shirt off
over his head.  He was strongly muscled, all right, with more than a few
scars making white and red marks here and there on his chest and arms.
He was also missing an ear.

"From the look of you," said Alvin, "you've fought a lot of men."

"Damn straight," said the river rat.

"And from the look of you, I'd say most of them was better than you. The
man turned red, blushing under his tan clear down to his chest.

"Can't you give me somebody who's worth rassling?  Somebody who mostly
wins his fights?"

"I win my fights!" shouted the man-getting mad, so he'd be easy to lick,
which was Al's plan.  But the others, they started pulling him back.

"The blacksmith boy's right, you're no great shakes at rassling."

"Give him what he wants."

"Mike, you take this boy."

"He's yours, Mike."

From the back-the shadiest spot, where he'd been sitting on the only
chair with a back to it-a man stood up and stepped forward.

"I'll take this boy," he said.

At once the loud one backed off and got out of the way.  This wasn't
what Alvin wanted at all.  The man they called Mike was bigger and
stronger than any of the others, and as he stripped his shirt off, Al
saw that while he had a scar or two, he was mostly clean, and he had
both his ears, a sure sign that if he ever lost a rassling match, he
sure never lost bad.

He had muscles like a buffalo.

"My name is Mike Fink!" he bellowed.  "And I'm the meanest, toughest
son-of-a-bitch ever to walk on the water!  I can orphan baby alligators
with my bare hands!  I can throw a live buffalo up onto a wagon and slap
him upside the head until he's dead!  If I don't like the bend of a
river, I grab ahold of the end of it and give it a shake to straighten
it out!  Every woman I ever put down come up with triplets, if she come
up at all!  When I'm done with you, boy, your hair will hang down
straight on both sides cause you won't have no more ears.  You'll have
to sit down to piss, and you'll never have to shave again!"

All the time Mike Fink was making his brag, Alvin was taking off his
shirt and his knife belt and laying them on the wagon seat.  Then he
marked a big circle in the dirt, making sure he looked as calm and
relaxed as if Mike Fink was a spunky seven-year-old boy, and not a man
with murder in his eyes.

So when Fink was shut of boasting, the circle was marked.  Fink walked
to the circle, then rubbed it out with his foot, raising a dust.

He walked all around the circle, rubbing it out.  "I don't know who
taught you how to rassle, boy," he said, "but when you rassle me, there
ain't no lines and there ain't no rules."

Once again the lady spoke up.  "Obviously there are no rules when you
speak, either, or you'd know that the word ain't is a sure sign of
ignorance and stupidity."

Fink turned to the woman and made as if to speak.  But it was like he
knew he had nothing to say, or maybe he figured that whatever he said
would make him sound more ignorant.  The contempt in her voice enraged
him, but it also made him doubt himself.  At first Alvin thought the
lady was making it more dangerous for him, meddling again.

But then he realized that she was doing to Fink what Alvin had tried to
do to the loudmouth-make him mad enough to fight stupid. Trouble was, as
Alvin sized up the river man, he suspected that Fink didn't fight stupid
when he was mad-it just made him fight meaner. Fight to kill.

Act out his brag about taking off parts of Alvin's body.  This wasn't
going to be a friendly match like the ones Alvin had in town, where the
game was just to throw the other man, or if they was fighting on grass,
to pin him down.

"You're not so much," Alvin said, "and you know it, or you wouldn't have
a knife hid in your boot."

Fink looked startled, then grinned.  He pulled up his pantleg and took a
long knife out of his boot, tossed it to the men behind him.  "I won't
need a knife to fight you, " he said.

"Then why don't you take the knife out of the other boot?" asked Alvin.

Fink frowned and raised the other pantleg.  "Ain't no knife here," he
said.

Alvin knew better, of course, and it pleased him that Fink was worried
enough about this fight not to part with his most secret knife.

Besides which, probably nobody else knew about that knife but Alvin,
with his ability to see what others couldn't see.  Fink didn't want to
let on to the others that he had such a knife, or word would spread fast
along the river and he'd get no advantage from it.

Still, Alvin couldn't afford to let Fink fight with the knife on him.

"Then take off the boots and we'll fight barefoot," Alvin said.

It was a good idea anyway, knife or no knife.  Alvin knew that when the
river rats fought, they kicked like mules with their boots. Fighting
barefoot might take some of the spunk out of Mike Fink.

But if Fink lost any spunk, he didn't show it.  Just sat down in the
dust of the road and pulled off his boots.  Alvin did the same, and his
socks too-Fink didn't wear socks.  So now the two of them had on nothing
but their trousers, and already out in the sunlight there was enough
dust and sweat that their bodies were looking a little streaked and
cakey with clay.

Not so caked up, though, that Alvin couldn't feel a hex of protection
drawn over Mike Fink's whole body.  How could such a thing be?

Did he have a hex on some amulet in his pocket?  The pattern was
strongest near his backside, but when Alvin sent his bug to search that
pocket, there was nothing but the rough cotton canvas of Fink's
trousers.  He wasn't carrying so much as a coin.

By now a crowd was gathered.  Not just the river rats who'd been resting
in the porthouse shade, but a whole slew of others, and it was plain
they all expected Mike Fink to win.  He must be something of a legend on
the river, Alvin realized, and no surprise, with this mysterious hex he
had.  Alvin could imagine folks poking a knife at Fink, only to twist at
the last moment, or lose their grip, or somehow keep the knife from
doing harm.  It was a lot easier to win all your rassling if no man's
teeth could bite into you, and if a knife couldn't do much more than
graze your skin.

Fink tried all the obvious stuff first, of course, because it made the
best show: Roaring, rushing at Alvin like a buffalo, trying to get a
bear hug on him, trying to grab onto Alvin and give him a swing like a
rock on a string.  But Alvin wouldn't have none of that.  He didn't even
have to use knackery to get away, neither.  He was younger and quicker
than Fink, and the river man hardly so much as laid a hand on him, Al
dodged away so sudden.  At first the crowd hooted and called Alvin
coward.  But after a while of this, they began to laugh at Fink, since
he looked so silly, rushing and roaring and coming up empty all the
time.

In the meantime, Alvin was exploring to find the source of Fink's hex,
for there was no hope of winning this fight if he couldn't get rid Of
that strong web.  He found it soon enough-a pattern of dye embedded deep
in the skin of Fink's buttock.  It wasn't a perfect hex anymore, since
the skin had changed shape somewhat as Fink grew over the years, but it
was a clever pattern, with strong locks and links -good enough to cast a
strong net over him, even if it was misshapen.

If he hadn't been in the middle of a rassling match with Fink, Alvin
might have been more subtle, might have just weakened the hex a little,
for he had no will to deprive Fink of the hex that had protected him for
so long.  Why, Fink might die of it, losing his hex, especially if he
had let himself get careless, counting on it to protect him.  But what
choice did Alvin have?  So he made the dyes in Fink's skin start to
flow, seeping into his bloodstream and getting carried away.  Alvin
could do without full concentration-just set it to happening and let it
glide on, while he worked on dodging out of Fink's way.

Soon enough Al could sense the hex weakening, fading, finally collapsing
completely.  Fink wouldn't know it, but Alvin did-he could now be hurt
like any other man.

By this time, though, Fink was no longer making those rough and stupid
rushes at him.  He was circling, feinting, looking to grapple in a
square, then use his greater bulk to throw Alvin.  But Alvin had a
longer reach, and there was no doubt his arms were stronger, so whenever
Fink reached to grab, Alvin batted the river man's arms out of the way.

With the hex gone, however, Alvin didn't slap him away.  Instead, he
reached inside Fink's arms, so that as Fink grasped his arms Alvin got
his hands hooked behind Fink's neck.

Alvin pulled down hard, bowing Fink down so his head was even with
Alvin's chest.  It was too easy-Fink was letting him, and Alvin guessed
why.  Sure enough, Fink pulled Alvin closer and brought his head up
fast, expecting to catch Alvin on the chin with the back of his head. He
was so strong he might've broke Alvin's neck doing thatonly Alvin's chin
wasn't where Fink thought it would be.  In fact, Alvin had already rared
his own head back, and when Fink came up hard and out of control, Alvin
rammed forward and smashed his forehead into Fink's face.  He could feel
Fink's nose crumple under the blow, and blood erupted down both their
faces.

It wasn't all that surprising, for a man's nose to get broke during a
rassle like this.  It hurt like blazes, of course, and it would've
stopped a friendly match-though of course a friendly match wouldn't have
included head butts.  Any other river rat would've shook his head,
roared a couple of times, and charged back into the fight.

Instead, Fink backed away, a look of real surprise on his face, his
hands gripping his nose.  Then he let out a howl like a whupped dog.

Everybody else fell silent.  It was such a funny thing to happen, a
river rat like Mike Fink howling at a broke-up nose.  No, it wasn't
rightly funny, but it was strange.  It wasn't how a river rat was
supposed to act.

"Come on, Mike," somebody murmured.

"You can take him, Mike."

But it was a half-hearted sort of encouragement.  They'd never seen Mike
Fink act hurt or scared before.  He wasn't good at hiding it, either.
Only Al knew why.  Only Al knew that Mike Fink had never in his life
felt such a pain, that Fink had never once shed his own blood in a
fight.  So many times he'd broke the other fellow's nose and laughed at
the pain-it was easy to laugh, because he didn't know how it felt.  Now
he knew.  Trouble was, he was learning what others learned at six years
old, and so he was acting like a six-year-old.  Not crying, exactly, but
howling.

For a minute Alvin thought that maybe the match was over.  But Fink's
fear and pain soon turned to rage, and he waded back into the fight.
Maybe he'd learned pain, but he hadn't learned caution from it.

So it took a few more holds, a few more wrenches and twists, before
Alvin got Fink down onto the ground.  Even as frightened and surprised
as Fink was, he was the strongest man Alvin had ever rassled.

Till this fight with Fink, Alvin had never really had occasion to find
out just how strong he was; he'd never been pushed to his limit. Now he
was, and he found himself rolling over and over in the dust, hardly able
to breathe it was so thick, Fink's own hot panting breath now above him,
now below, knees ramming, arms pounding and gripping, feet scrabbling in
the dust, searching for purchase enough to get leverage.

In the end it came down to Fink's inexperience with weakness.

Since no man could ever break a bone of his, Fink had never learned to
tuck his legs, never learned not to expose them to where a man could
stomp them.  When Alvin broke free and scrambled to his feet, rolled
over quick and, for just a moment, lying there on the Fink round, he
drew one leg across the other like a pure invitation.  Alvin didn't even
think, he just jumped into the air and came down with both feet onto
Fink's top leg, jamming downward with all his weight, so the bones of
the top leg were bowed over the lower one.  So sharp and hard was the
blow that it wasn't just the top leg that shattered, but the bottom one,
too.  Fink screamed like a child in the fire.

Only now did Alvin realize what he'd done.  Oh, yes, of course he'd
ended the fight-nobody's tough enough to fight on with two broken legs.
But Alvin could tell at once, without looking-or at least without
looking with his eyes-that these were not clean breaks, not the kind
that can heal easy.  Besides, Fink wasn't a young man now, and sure he
wasn't a boy.  If these breaks healed at all, they'd leave him lame at
best, outright crippled at the worst.  His livelihood would be gone.
Besides, he must have made a lot of enemies over the years.

What would they do now, with him broken and halt?  How long would he
live?

So Alvin knelt on the ground beside where Mike Fink writhed-or rather,
the upper half of him writhed, while he tried to keep his legs from
moving at all-and touched the legs.  With his hands in contact with
Fink's body, even through the cloth of hispants, Alvin could find his
way easier, work faster, and in just a few moments, he had knitted the
bones together.  That was all he tried to do, no more-the bruise, the
torn muscle, the bleeding, he had to leave that or Fink might get up and
attack him again.

He pulled his hands away, and stepped back from Fink.  At once the river
rats gathered around their fallen hero.

"Is his legs broke?" asked the loudmouth river rat.

"No," said Alvin.

"They're broke to pieces!" howled Fink.

By then, another man had slit right up the pantleg.  Sure enough he
found the bruise, but as he felt along the bone, Fink screeched and
pulled away.  "Don't touch it!"

"Didn't feel broke to me," said the man.

"Look how he's moving his legs.  They ain't broke."

It was true enough-Fink was no longer writhing with just the top half of
his body, his legs were wiggling now as much as any other part of him.

One man helped Fink to his feet.  Fink staggered, almost fell, caught
himself by leaning against the loudmouth, smearing blood from his nose
on the man's shirt.  The others pulled away from him.

"Just a boy," muttered one.

"Howling like a puppydog."

"Big old baby."

"Mike Fink." And then a chuckle.

Alvin stood by the wagon, putting on his shirt, then sat up on the wagon
seat to pull on his shoes and socks.  He glanced up to find the lady
watching him.  She stood not six feet off, since the smith's wagon was
pulled right up against the loading dock.  She had a look of sour
distaste.  Alvin realized she was probably disgusted at how dirty he
was.  Maybe he shouldn't have put his shirt right back on, but then, it
was also impolite to go shirtless in front of a lady.  In fact, the town
men, especially the doctors and lawyers, they acted ashamed to be out in
public without a proper coat and waistcoat and cravat.  Poor folks
usually didn't have such clothes, and a prentice would be putting on
airs to dress like that.  But a shirt-he had to have his shirt on,
whether he was filthy with dust or not.

"Beg pardon, Ma'am," he said.  "I'll wash when I get home."

"Wash?" she asked.  "And when you do, will your brutality also wash
away?"

"I reckon I don't know, since I never heard that word."

"I daresay you haven't," she said.  "Brutality.  From the word brute.

Meaning beast."

Alvin felt himself redden with anger.  "Maybe so.  Maybe I should've let
them go on talking to you however they liked."

"I paid no attention to them.  They didn't bother me.  You had no need
to protect me, especially not that way.  Stripping naked and rolling
around in the dirt.  You're covered with blood."

Alvin hardly knew what to answer, she was so snooty and boneheaded.  "I
wasn't naked," Alvin said.  Then he grinned.  "And it was his blood."

"And are you proud of that?"

Yes, he was.  But he knew that if he said so, it would diminish him in
her sight.  Well, what of that?  What did he care what she thought of
him?  Still, he said nothing.

In the silence between them, he could hear the river rats behind him,
hooting at Fink, who wasn't howling anymore, but wasn't saying much,
either.  It wasn't just Fink they were thinking about now, though.

"Town boy thinks he's tough."

"Maybe we ought to show him a real fight."

"Then we'll see how uppity his ladyfriend is."

Alvin couldn't rightly tell the future, but it didn't take no torch to
guess at what was going to happen.  Al's boots were on, his horse was
full-hitched, and it was time to go.  But snooty as she was, he couldn't
leave the lady behind.  He knew she'd be the river rats' target now, and
however little she thought she needed protection, he knew that these
river men had just watched their best man get whupped and humbled, and
all on account of her, which meant she'd likely end up lying in the dirt
with her bags all dumped in the river, if not worse.

"Best you get in," Alvin said.

"I wonder that you dare to give me instructions like a commonWhat are
you doing?"

Alvin was tossing her trunk and bags into the back of the wagon.

It seemed so obvious to him that he didn't bother answering her.

"I think you're robbing me, sir!"

"I am if you don't get in," said Alvin.

By now the river rats were gathering near the wagon, and one of them had
hold of the horse's harness.  She glanced around, and her angry
expression changed.  Just a little.  She stepped from the dock onto the
wagon seat.  Alvin took her hand and helped her arrange herself on the
seat.  By now, the loudmouth river rat was standing beside him, leaning
on the wagon, grinning wickedly.  "You beat one Of us, blacksmith, but
can you beat us all?"

Alvin just stared at him.  He was concentrating on the man holding the
horse, making his hand suddenly tingle with pain, like he was being
punctured with a hundred pins.,The man cried out and let go the horse.

The loudmouth looked away from Alvin, toward the sound of the cry, and
in that moment Alvin kicked him in the ear with his boot.  It wasn't
much of a kick, but then, it wasn't much of an ear, either, and the man
ended up sitting in the dirt, holding his head.

"Gee-yap!" shouted Alvin.

The horse obediently lunged forward-and the wagon moved about an inch.
Then another inch.  Hard to get a wagonload of iron moving fast, at
least all of a sudden.  Alvin made the wheels turn smooth and easy, but
he couldn't do a thing about the weight of the wagon or the strength of
the horse.  By the time the horse got moving, the wagon was a good deal
heavier, with the weight of river rats hanging on it, pulling back,
climbing aboard.

Alvin turned around and swung his whip at them.  The whip was for
show-it didn't hit a one.  Still, they all fell off or let go of the
wagon as if it had hit them, or scared them anyway.  What really
happened was that all of a sudden the wood of the wagon got as slick as
if it was greased.  There was no way for them to hold onto it.  So the
wagon lurched forward as they collapsed back into the dust of the road.

They weren't done, though.  After all, Alvin had to turn around and head
back up the road right past them in order to get to Hatrack River.  He
was trying to figure what to do next when he heard a musket go off, loud
as a cannonshot, the sound hanging on in the heavy summer air.  When he
got the wagon turned around, he saw the portmaster standing on the dock,
his wife behind him.  He was holding one musket, and she was reloading
the one he had just fired.

"I reckon we get along well enough most of the time, boys," said the
portmaster.  "But today you just don't seem to know when you been beat
fair and square.  So I guess it's about time you settled down in the
shade, cause if you make another move toward that wagon, them as don't
die from buckshot'll be standing trial in Hatrack River, and if you
think you won't pay dear for assaulting a local boy and the new
schoolteacher, then you really are as dumb as you look."

It was quite a little speech, and it worked better than most speeches
Alvin had heard in his life.  Those river rats just settled right down
in the shade, taking a couple of long pulls from a jug and watching Al
and the lady with a real sullen look.  The portmaster went back inside
before the wagon even turned the corner onto the town road.

"You don't suppose the portmaster is in danger from having helped us, do
you?" asked the lady.  Alvin was pleased to hear that the arrogance was
gone from her voice, though she still spoke as clear and even as the
ringing of a hammer on iron.

"No," said Alvin.  "They all know that if ever a portmaster got harmed,
them as did it would never work again on the river, or if they did, they
wouldn't live through a night ashore."

"What about you?"

"Oh, I got no such guarantee.  So I reckon I won't come back to Hatrack
Mouth for a couple of weeks.  By then all those boys'll have jobs and be
a hundred miles up or downstream from here." Then he remembered what the
postmaster had said.  "You're the new schoolteacher?"

She didn't answer.  Not directly, anyway.  "I suppose there are men like
that in the East, but one doesn't meet them in the open like this."

"Well, it's a whole lot better to meet them in the open than it is to
meet them in private!" Al said, laughing.

She didn't laugh.

"I was waiting for Dr.  Whitley Physicker to meet me.  He expected my
boat later in the afternoon, but he may be on his way."

"This is the only road, Ma'am," Alvin said.

"Miss," she said.  "Not madame.  That title is properly reserved for
married women."

"Like I said, it's the only road.  So if he's on his way, we won't miss
him.  Miss."

This time Alvin didn't laugh at his own joke.  On the other hand, he
thought, looking out of the corner of his eye, that he just might have
caught a glimpse of her smiling.  So maybe she wasn't as hoity-toity as
she seemed, Alvin thought.  Maybe she's almost human.

Maybe she'll even consent to give private schooling to a certain little
half-Black boy.  Maybe she'll be worth the work I went to fixing up the
springhouse.

Because he was facing forward, driving the wagon, it wouldn't be
natural, let alone good manners, for him to turn and stare right at her
like he wanted to.  So he sent out his bug, his spark, that part of him
that "saw" what no man or woman could rightly with -their own eyes see.

For Alvin this was near second nature by now, to explore people under
the skin so to speak.  Keep in mind, though, that it wasn't like he
could see with his eyes.  Sure enough he could tell what was under a
body's clothes, but he still didn't see folks naked.  Instead he just
got a close-in experience of the surface of their skin, almost like he'd
took up residence in one of their pores.  So he'didn't think of it like
he was peeping in windows or nothing.  It was just another way of
looking at folks and understanding them; he wouldn't see a body's shape
or color, but he'd see whether they was sweating or hot or healthy or
tensed-up.  He'd see bruises and old healed-up injuries.  He'd see
hidden money or secret papers-but if he was to read the papers, he had
to discover the feel of the ink on the surface and then trace it until
he could build up a picture of the letters in his mind.  It was very
slow.

Not like seeing, no sir.

Anyhow, he sent his bug to "see" this high-toned lady that he couldn't
exactly look at.  And what he found caught him by surprise.

Cause she was every bit as hexed-up as Mike Fink had been.

No, more.  She was layers deep in it, from hexy amulets hanging around
her neck to hexes stitched into her clothes, even a wire hex embedded in
the bun of her hair.  Only one of them was for protection, and it wasn't
half so strong as Mike Fink's had been.  The rest were all-for what?
Alvin hadn't seen such work before, and it took some thought and
exploration to figure out what these hexwork webs that covered her were
doing.  The best he could get, riding along in the wagon, keeping his
eyes on the road ahead, was that somehow these hexes were doing a
powerful beseeming, making her look to be something that she wasn't.

The first thought he had, as I suppose was natural, was to try to
discover what she really was, under her disguise.  The clothes she wore
were real enough-the hexery was only changing the sound of her voice,
the hue and texture of the surface of her skin.  But Alvin had little
practice with beseemings, and none at all with beseemings wove from
hexes.  Most folks did a beseeming with a word and a gesture, tied up
with a drawing of what they wanted to seem to be.  It was a working on
other folks' minds, and once you saw through it, it didn't fool you at
all.  Since Alvin always saw through it, such beseemings had no hold on
him.

But hers was different.  The hex changed the way light hit her and
bounced off, so that you weren't fooled into thinking you saw what
wasn't there.  Instead you really saw her different, the light actually
struck your eyes that way.  Since it wasn't a change made on Alvin's
mind, knowing the trickery didn't help him see the truth.  And usin his
bug, he couldn't tell much about what was hidden away behind the hexes,
except that she wasn't quite so wrinkled-up and bony as she looked,
which made him guess she might be younger.

It was only when he gave up trying to guess at what lay under the
disguise that he came to the real question: Why, if a woman had the!e
power to disguise herself and seem to be anything she wanted, why would
she choose to look like that?  Cold, severe, getting old, bony,
unsmiling, pinched-up, angry, aloof.  All the things a woman ought to
hope she never was, this teacher lady chose to be.

Maybe she was a fugitive in disguise.  But she was detely a woman
underneath the hexes, and Alvin never heard of a woman outlaw, so it
couldn't be that.  Maybe she was just young, and figured other folks
wouldn't take her serious if she didn't look older.  Alvin knew about
that right enough.  Or maybe she was pretty, and men kept thinking of
her the wrong way-Alvin tried to conjure up in his mind what might've
happened with those river rats if she'd been real beautiful.  But truth
to tell, the river men probably would've been polite as they knew how,
if she was pretty.  It was only ugly women they felt free to taunt,
since ugly women probably reminded them of their mothers.  So her
plainness wasn't exactly protection.  And it wasn't designed to hide a
scar, neither, cause Alvin could see her skin wasn't pocked or blemished
or marred.

Truth was he couldn't guess at why she was all hid up under so many
layers of lies.  She could be anything or anybody.  He couldn't even ask
her, since to tell her he saw through her disguise was the same as to
tell her of his knack, and how could he know she could be trusted with
such a secret as that, when he didn't even know who she really was or
why she chose to live inside a lie?

He wondered if he ought to tell somebody.  Shouldn't the school board
know, before putting the town's children into her care, that she wasn't
exactly what she seemed to be?  But he couldn't tell them, either,
without giving himself away; and besides, maybe her secret was her own
business and no harm to anyone.  Then if he told the truth on her, it
would ruin both him and her, with no good done for anybody.

No, best to watch her, real careful, and learn who she was the only way
a body can ever truly know other folks: by seeing what they do.

That's the best plan Alvin could think of, and the truth is, now that he
knew she had such a secret, how could he keep from paying special
attention to her?  Using his bug to explore around him was such a habit
for him that he'd have to work not to check up on her, especially if she
was living up at the springhouse.  He half hoped she wouldn't, so he
wouldn't be bothered so much by this mystery; but he just as much hoped
she would, so he could keep watch and make sure she was a rightful sort
of person.

And I could watch her even better if I studied from her.  I could watch
her with her own eyes, ask her questions, listen to her answers, and
judge what kind of person she might be.  Maybe if she taught me long
enough, she'd come to trust me, and I her, and then I'd tell her I'm to
be a Maker and she'd tell her deep secrets to me and we'd help each
other, we'd be true friends the way I haven't had no true friend since I
left my brother Measure behind me in Vigor Church.

He wasn't pushing the horse too hard, the load being so heavy, what with
her trunk and bags on top of the iron-and herself, to boot.

So after all their talk, and then all this silence as he tried to figure
out who she really was, they were still only about a half a mile out of
Hatrack Mouth when Dr.  Physicker's fancy carriage came along.

Alvin recognized the carriage right off, and hailed Po Doggly, who was
driving.  It took all of a couple of minutes to move the teacher and her
things from wagon to carriage.  Po and Alvin did all the lifting-Dr.
Physicker used all his efforts to help the teacher lady into the
carriage.  Alvin had never seen the doctor act so elegant.

"I'm terribly sorry you had to suffer the discomforts of a ride in that
wagon," said the doctor.  "I didn't think that I was late."

"In fact you're early," she said.  And then, turning graciously to
Alvin, she added, "And the wagon ride was surprisingly pleasant."

Since Alvin hadn't said a word for most of the journey, he didn't
rightly know whether she meant it as a compliment for him being good
company, or as gratitude that he kept his mouth shut and didn't bother
her.  Either way, though, it made him feel a kind of burning in his
face, and not from anger.

As Dr.  Physicker was climbing into the carriage, the teacher asked him,
"What is this young man's name?" Since she spoke to the doc for, Alvin
didn't answer.

"Alvin," said the doctor, settling into his seat.  "He was born here.

He's the smith's apprentice."

"Alvin," she said, now directing herself to him through the carriage
window.  "I thank you for your gallantry today, and I hope you'll
forgive the ungraciousness of my first response.  I had underestimated
the villainous nature of our unwelcome companions."

Her words were so elegant-sounding it was like music hearing her talk,
even though Alvin could only half-guess what she was saying.

Her expression, though, was about as kindly as her forbidding face could
look, he reckoned.  He wondered what her real visage might look like
underneath.

"My pleasure, Ma'am," he said.  "I mean Miss."

From the driver's bench, Po Doggly gee-ed the pair of mares and the
carriage took off, still heading toward Hatrack Mouth, of course.

It wasn't easy for Po to find a place on that road to turn around,
either, so Alvin was well on his way before the carriage came back and
passed him.  Po slowed the carriage, and Dr.  Physicker leaned over and
tossed a dollar coin into the air.  Alvin caught it, more by reflex than
by thought.

"For your help for Miss Lamer," said Dr.  Physicker.  Then Po gee-ed the
horses again and they went on, leaving Alvin to chew on the dust in the
road.

He felt the weight of the coin in his hand, and for a moment he wanted
to throw it after the carriage.  But that wouldn't do no good at all.
No, he'd give it back to Physicker some other time, in some way that
wouldn't get nobody riled up.  But still it hurt, it stung deep, to be
paid for helping a lady, like as if he was a servant or a child or
something.  And what hurt worst was wondering if maybe it was her idea
to pay him.  As if she thought he had earned a quarter-day's wages when
he fought for her honor.  It was sure that if he'd been wearing a coat
and cravat instead of one filthy shirt, she'd have thought he done the
service due a lady from any Christian gentleman, and she'd know she owed
him gratitude instead of payment.

Payment.  The coin burned in his hand.  Why, for a few minutes there
he'd almost thought she liked him.  Almost he had hoped that maybe she'd
agree to teach him, to help him work out some understanding of how the
world works, of what he could do to be a true Maker and tame the
Uranaker's terrible power.  But now that it was plain she despised him,
how could he even ask?  How could he even pretend to be worthy of
teaching, when he knew that all she saw about him was fflth and blood
and stupid poverty?  She knew he meant well, but he was still a brute in
her eyes, like she said first off.  It was still in her heart.

Brutality.

Miss Lamer.  That's what the doctor called her.  He tasted the name as
he said it.  Dust in his mouth.  You don't take animals to school.

Teacher

Miss Lamer had no intention of giving an inch to these people.

She had heard enough horror stories about frontier school boards to know
that they would try to get out of keeping most of the promises they made
in their letters.  It was beginning already.

"In your letters you represented to me that I would have a residence
provided as part of my salary.  I do not regard an inn as a private
residence."

"You'll have your own private room," said Dr.  Physicker.

"And take all my meals at a common table?  This is not acceptable.

If I stay, I will be spending all my days in the company of the children
of this town, and when that day's work is over, I expect to be able to
prepare my own meals in private and eat them in solitude, and then spend
the evening in the company of books, without distraction or annoyance.
That is not possible in a roadhouse, gentlemen, and so a room in a
roadhouse does not constitute a private residence.  She could see them
sizing her up.  Some were abashed by the mere precision of her
speech-she knew perfectly well that country lawyers put on airs in their
own towns, but they were no match for someone of real education. The
only real trouble was going to come from the sheriff, Pauley Wiseman.
How absurd, for a grown man still to use a child's nickname.

"Now see here, young lady," said the sheriff.

She raised an eyebrow.  It was typical of such a man that, even though
Miss Lamer seemed to be on the greying side of forty, he would assume
that her unmarried status gave him the right to call her young lady," as
one addresses a recalcitrant girlchild.

"What is 'here' that I am failing to see?"

"Well, Horace and Peg Guester did plan to offer you a small house off by
yourself, but we said no to it, plain and simple, we said no to them,
and we say no to you."

"Very well, then.  I see that you do not, after all, intend to keep your
word to me.  Fortunately, gentlemen, I am not a common schoolteacher,
grateful to take whatever is offered.  I had a good position at the Penn
School, and I assure you that I can return there at will.

Good day."

She rose to her feet.  So did all the men except the sheriff-but they
weren't rising out of courtesy.

"Please."

"Sit down."

"Let's talk about this."

"Don't be hasty."

It was Dr.  Physicker, the perfect conciliator, who took the floor now,
after giving the sheriff a steady look to quell him.  The sheriff,
however, did not seem particularly quelled.

"Miss Lamer, our decision on the private house was not an irrevocable
one.  But please consider the problems that worried us.

First, we were concerned that the house would not be suitable. It's not
really a house at all, but a mere room, made out of an abandoned
springhouse-" The old springhouse.  "Is it heated?"

"Yes- "Has it windows?  A door that can be secured?  A bed and table and
chair?"

"All of that, yes."

"Has it a wooden floor?"

"A nice one."

"Then I doubt that its former service as a springhouse will bother me.
Had you any other objections?"

"We damn well do!" cried Sheriff Wiseman.  Then, seeing the horrified
looks around the room, he added, "Begging the lady's pardon for my rough
language."

"I am interested in hearing those objections," said Miss Lamer.

"A woman alone, in a solitary house in the woods!  It ain't proper!"

"It is the word ain't which is not proper, Mr.  Wiseman," said Miss
Lamer.  "As to the propriety of my living in a house to myself, I assure
you that I have done so for many years, and have managed to pass that
entire time quite unmolested.  Is there another house within hailing
distance?"

"The roadhouse to one side and the smith's place to the other," said Dr.
Physicker.

"Then if I am under some duress or provocation, I can assure you that I
will make myself heard, and I expect those who hear will come to my aid.
Or are you afraid, Mr.  Wiseman, that I may enter into some improper
activity voluntarily?"

Of course that was exactly what he was thinking, and his reddening face
showed it.

"I believe you have adequate references concerning my moral character,"
said Miss Lamer.  "But if you have any doubts on that score, it would be
better for me to return to Philadelphia at once, for if at my age I
cannot be trusted to live an upright life without supervision, how can
you possibly trust me to supervise your young children?"

"It just ain't decent!" cried the sheriff.  "Aren't."

"Isn't." She smiled benignly at Pauley Wiseman.  "It has been my
experience, Mr.  Wiseman, that when a person assumes that others are
eager to commit indecent acts whenever given the opportunity, he is
merely confessing his own private struggle."

Pauley Wiseman didn't understand that she had just accused him, not
until several of the lawyers started in laughing behind their hands.

"As I see it, gentlemen of the school board, you have only two
alternatives.  First, you can pay my boat passage back to Dekane and my
overland passage to Philadelphia, plus the salary for the month that I
will have expended in traveling."

"If you don't teach, you get no salary," said the sheriff.

"You speak hastily, Mr.  Wiseman," said Miss Lamer.  "I believe the
lawyers present will inform you that the school board's letters
constitute a contract, of which you are in breach, and that I would
therefore be entitled to collect, not just a month's salary, but the
entire year's."

"Well, that's not certain, Miss Lamer," began one of the lawyers.

"Ohio is one of the United States now, sir," she answered, "and there is
ample precedent in other state courts, precedent which is binding until
and unless the government of Ohio makes specific legislation to the
contrary."

"Is she a schoolteacher or a lawyer?" asked another lawyer, and they all
laughed.

"Your second alternative is to allow me to inspect this-this
springhouse-and determine whether I find it acceptable, and if I do, to
allow me to live there.  If you ever find me engaging in morally
reprehensible behavior, it is within the terms of our contract that you
may discharge me forthwith."

"We can put you in jail, that's what we can do," said Wiseman.

"Why, Mr.  Wiseman, aren't we getting ahead of ourselves, talking of
jail when I have yet to select which morally hideous act I shall
perform?"

"Shut up, Pauley," said one of the lawyers.

"Which alternative do you choose, gentlemen?" she asked.

Dr.  Physicker was not about to let Pauley Wiseman have at the more
weak-willed members of the board.  He'd see to it there was no further
debate.  "We don't need to retire to consider this, do we, gentlemen? We
may not be Quakers here in Hatrack River, so we aren't used to thinking
of ladies as wanting to live by themselves and engage in business and
preach and whatnot, but we're open-minded and willing to learn new ways.
We want your services, and we'll keep to the contract.  All in favor?"

Aye.

"Opposed?  The ayes have it."

"Nay," said Wiseman.

"The voting's over, Pauley."

"You called it too damn fast!"

"Your negative vote has been recorded, Pauley."

Miss Lamer smiled coldly.  "You may be sure I won't forget it, Sheriff
Wiseman."

Dr.  Physicker tapped the table with his gavel.  "This meeting is
adjourned until next Tuesday afternoon at three.  And now, Miss Lamer,
I'd be delighted to escort you to the Guesters' springhouse, if this is
a convenient hour.  Not knowing when you would arrive, they have given
me the key and asked me to open the cottage for you; they'll greet you
later."

Miss Lamer was aware, as they all were, that it was odd, to say the
least, for the landlord not to greet his guest in person.

"You see, Miss Lamer, it wasn't certain whether you'd accept the
cottage.  They wanted you to make your decision when you saw the
place-and not in their presence, lest you feel embarrassed to decline
it.

"Then they have acted graciously," said Miss Lamer, "and I will thank
them when I meet them."

It was humiliating, Old Peg having to walk out to the springhouse all by
herself to plead with this stuck-up snooty old Philadelphia spinster.
Horace ought to be going out there with her.  Talk man to man with
her-that's what this woman seemed to think she was, not a lady but a
lord.  Might as well come from Camelot, she might, thinks she's a
princess giving orders to the common folk.  Well, they took care of it
in France, old Napoleon did, put old Louis the Seventeenth right in his
place.  But lordly women like this teacher lady, Miss Lamer, they never
got their comeuppance, just went on through life thinking folks what
didn't talk perfect was too low to take much account of.

So where was Horace, to put this teacher lady in her place?

Setting by the fire.  Pouting.  Just like a four-year-old.  Even Arthur
Stuart never got such a pout on him.

"I don't like her," says Horace.

"Well like her or not, if Arthur's to get an education it's going to be
from her or nobody," says Old Peg, talking plain sense as usual, but
does Horace listen?  I should laugh.

"She can live there and she can teach Arthur if she pleases, or not if
she don't please, but I don't like her and I don't think she belongs in
that springhouse."

"Why, is it holy ground?" says Old Peg.  "Is there some curse on it?

Should we have built a palace for her royal highness?" Oh, when Horace
gets a notion on him it's no use talking, so why did she keep on trying?

"None of that, Peg," said Horace.

"Then what?  Or don't you need reasons anymore?  Do you just decide and
then other folks better make way?"

"Because it's Little Peggy's place, that's why, and I don't like having
that benoctious woman living there!"

Wouldn't you know?  It was just like Horace, to bring up their runaway
daughter, the one who never so much as wrote to them once she ran away,
leaving Hatrack River without a torch and Horace without the love of his
life.  Yes ma'am, that's what Little Peggy was to him, the love of his
life.  If I ran off, Horace, or, God forbid, if I died, would you
treasure my memory and not let no other woman take my place?

I reckon not.  I reckon there wouldn't be time for my spot on the sheet
to get cold afore you'd have some other woman lying there.  Me you could
replace in a hot minute, but Little Peggy, we have to treat the
springhouse as a shrine and make me come out here all by myself to face
this highfalutin old maid and beg her to teach a little Black child.

Why, I'll be lucky if she doesn't try to buy him from me.

Miss Lamer took her time about answering the door, too, and when she
did, she had a handkerchief to her face-probably a perfumed one, so she
wouldn't have to smell the odor of honest country folks.

"If you don't mind I've got a thing or two I'd like to discuss with
you," said Old Peg.

Miss Lamer looked away, off over Old Peg's head, as if studying some
bird in a far-off tree.  "If it's about the school, I was told I'd have
a week to prepare before we actually registered students and began the
autumn session."

From down below, Old Peg could hear the ching-ching-ching of one of the
smiths a-working at the forge.  Against her will she couldn't help
thinking of Little Peggy, who purely hated that sound.  Maybe Horace was
right in his foolishness.  Maybe Little Peggy haunted this springhouse.

Still, it was Miss Lamer standing in the doorway now, and Miss Lamer
that Old Peg had to deal with.  "Miss Lamer, I'm Margaret Guester.  My
husband and I own this springhouse."

"Oh.  I beg your pardon.  You're my landlady, and I'm being ungracious.
Please come in."

That was a bit more like it.  Old Peg stepped up through the open door
and stood there a moment to take in the room.  Only yesterday it had
seemed bare but clean, a place full of promise.  Now it was almost
homey, what with a doily and a dozen books on the armoire, a small woven
rug on the floor, and two dresses hanging from hooks on the wall.

The trunks and bags filled a corner.  It looked a bit like somebody
lived there.  Old Peg didn't know what she'd expected.  Of course Miss
Lamer had more dresses than this dark traveling outfit. It's just Old
Peg hadn't thought of her doing something so ordinary as changing
clothes.  Why, when she's got one dress off and before she puts on
another, she probably stands there i' her underwear, just like anybody.

"Do sit down, Mrs.  Guester."

"Around here we ain't much with Mr.  and Mrs., except them lawyers, Miss
Lamer.  I'm Goody Guester, mostly, except when folks call me Old Peg."

"Old Peg.  What a-what an interesting name."

She thought of spelling out why she was called "Old" Peg-how she had a
daughter what run off, that sort of thing.  But it was going to be hard
enough to explain to this teacher lady how she come to have a Black son.
Why make her family life seem even more strange?

"Miss Lamer, I won't beat around the bush.  You got something that I
need."

"Oh?"

"That is, not me, to say it proper, but my son, Arthur Stuart."

If she recognized that it was the King's proper name, she gave no sign.
"And what might he need from me, Goody Guester?"

"Book-learning."

"That's what I've come to provide to all the children in Hatrack River,
Goody Guester."

"Not Arthur Stuart.  Not if those pin-headed cowards on the school board
have their way."

"Why should they exclude your son?  Is he over-age, perhaps?"

"He's the right age, Miss Lamer.  What he ain't is the right color."

Miss Lamer waited, no expression on her face.

"He's Black, Miss Lamer."

"Half-Black, surely," offered the teacher.

Naturally the teacher was trying to figure how the innkeeper's wife came
to have her a half-Black boy-baby.  Old Peg got some pleasure out of
watching the teacher act polite while she must surely be cringing in
horror inside herself.  But it wouldn't do to let such a thought linger
too long, would it?  "He's adopted, Miss Lamer," said Old Peg.

"Lxtls just say that his Black mama got herself embarrassed with a
half-White baby."

"And you, out of the goodness of your heart-" Was there a nasty edge to
Miss Lamer's voice?  "I wanted me a child.  I ain't taking care of
Arthur Stuart for pity.  He's my boy now."

"I see," said Miss Lamer.  "And the good people of Hatrack River have
determined that their children's education will suffer if halfBlack ears
should hear my words at the same time as pure White ears.

Miss Lamer sounded nasty again, only now Old Peg dared to let herself
rejoice inside, hearing the way Miss Lamer said those words.

"Will you teach him, Miss Lamer?"

"I confess, Goody Guester, that I have lived in the City of Quakers too
long.  I had forgotten that there were places in this world where people
of small minds would be so shameless as to punish a mere child for the
sin of being born with skin of a tropical hue.  I can assure you that I
will refuse to open school at all if your adopted son is not one of my
pupils."

"No!" cried Old Peg.  "No, Miss Lamer, that's going too far."

"I am a committed Emancipationist, Goody Guester.  I will not join in a
conspiracy to deprive any Black child of his or her intellectual
heritage."

Old Peg didn't know what in the world an intellectual heritage was, but
she knew that Miss Lamer was in too much sympathy.  If she kept UP this
way, she'd be like to ruin everything.  "You got to hear me out, Miss
Lamer.  They'll just get another teacher, and I'll be worse off, and so
will Arthur Stuart.  No, I just ask that you give him an hour in I'll
make him study somewhat in the the evening, a few days a week daytime,
to learn proper what you teach him quick.  He's a bright boy, you'll see
that.  He already knows his letter s-he can A it and Z it better than my
Horace.  That's my husband, Horace Guester.  So I'm not asking more than
a few hours a week, if you can spare it.

That's why we worked up this springhouse, so you could do it and none
the wiser."

Miss Lamer arose from where she sat on the edge of her bed, and walked
to the window.  "This is not what I ever imagined-to teach a child in
secret, as if I were committing a crime."

"In some folks' eyes, Miss Lamer-"

"Oh, I have no doubt of that."

"Don't You Quakers have silent meetings?  All I ask is a kind of quiet
meeting, don't you know-"

"I am not a Quaker, Goody Guester.  I am merely a human being who
refuses to deny the humanity of others, unless their own acts prove them
unworthy of that noble kinship."

"Then you'll teach him?"

"After hours, yes.  Here in my home, which you and your husband so
kindly provided, yes.  But in secret?  Never!  I shall proclaim to all
in this place that I am teaching Arthur Stuart, and not just a few
nights a week, but daily.  I am free to tutor such pupils as I desire-my
contract is quite specific on that point-and as long as I do not violate
the contract, they must endure me for at least a year.

Will that do?"

Old Peg looked at the woman in pure admiration.  "I'll be jiggered," she
said, "you're mean as a cat with a burr in its behind."

"I regret that I've never seen a cat in such an unfortunate situation,
Goody Guester, so that I cannot estimate the accuracy of your simile."

Old Peg couldn't make no sense of the words Miss Lamer said, but she
caught something like a twinkle in the lady's eye, so it was all right.

"When should I send Arthur to you?" she asked.

"As I said when I first opened the door, I'll need a week to prepare.

When school opens for the White children, it opens for Arthur Stuart as
well.  There remains only the question of payment."

Old Peg was taken aback for a moment.  She'd come here prepared to offer
money, but after the way Miss Lamer talked, she thought there'd be no
cost after all.  Still, teaching was Miss Lamer's livelihood, so it was
only fair.  "We thought to offer you a dollar a month, that being most
convenient for us, Miss Lamer, but if you need more-"

"Oh, not cash, Goody Guester.  I merely thought to ask if you might
indulge me by allowing me to hold a weekly reading of poetry in your
roadhouse on Sunday evenings, inviting all in Hatrack River who aspire
to improve their acquaintance with the best literature in the English
language."

"I don't know as how there's all that many who hanker after poetry, Miss
Lamer, but you're welcome to have a go of it."

"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the number of people who wish
to be thought educated, Goody Guester.  We shall have difficulty finding
seats for all the ladies of Hatrack River who compel their husbands to
bring them to hear the immortal words of Pope and Dryden, Donne and
Milton, Shakespeare and Gray andh, I shall be daring-Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and perhaps even an American poet, a wandering spinner of
strange tales named Blake."

"You don't mean old Taleswapper, do you?"

"I believe that is his most common sobriquet."

"You've got some of his poems wrote down?"

"Written?  Hardly necessary, for that dear friend of mine.  I have
committed many of his verses to memory."

"Well, don't that old boy get around.  Philadelphia, no less."

"He has brightened many a parlor in that city, Goody Guester.

Shall we hold our first soiree this Sunday?"

"What's a swore raid?"

"Soiree.  An evening gathering, perhaps with ginger punch-"

"Oh, you don't have to teach me nothing about hospitality, Miss Lamer.
And if that's the price for Arthur Stuart's education, Miss Lamer, I'm
sore afraid I'm cheating you, because it seems to me you're doing us the
favor both ways."

"You're most kind, Goody Guester.  But I must ask you one question."

"Ask away.  Can't promise I'm too good at answers."

"Goody Guester," said Miss Lamer.  "Are you aware of the Fugitive Slave
Treaty?"

Fear and anger stabbed right through Old Peg's heart, even to hear it
mentioned.  "A devilish piece of work!"

"Slavery is a devilish work indeed, but the treaty was signed to bring
Appalachee into the Compact, and to keep our fragile nation from war
with the Crown Colonies.  Peace is hardly to be labeled devilish."

"It is when it's a peace that says they can send their damned Finders
into the free states and bring back captive Black people to be slaves!"

"Perhaps you're right, Goody Guester.  Indeed, one could say that the
Fugitive Slave Treaty is not so much a treaty of peace as it is an
article of surrender.  Nevertheless, it is the law of the land."

Only now did Old Peg realize what this teacher just done.  What could it
mean, her bringing up the Fugitive Slave Treaty, excepting to make sure
Old Peg knew that Arthur Stuart wasn't safe here, that Finders could
still come from the Crown Colonies and claim him as the property of some
family of White so-called Christians?  And that also meant that Miss
Lamer didn't believe a speck of her story about where Arthur Stuart come
from.  And if she saw through the lie so easy-like, why was Old Peg fool
enough to think everybody else believed it?  Why, as far as Old Peg
knew, the whole town of Hatrack River had long since guessed that Arthur
Stuart was a slave boy what somehow run off and got hisself a White
mama.

And if everybody knew, what was to stop somebody from giving report on
Arthur Stuart, sending word to the Crown Colonies about a runaway
slavechild living in a certain' roadhouse near the Hatrack River?  The
Fugitive Slave Treaty made her adoption of Arthur Stuart plain illegal.
They could take the boy right out of her arms and she'd never have the
right to see him again.  In fact, if she ever went south they could
arrest her and hang her under the slave-poaching laws of King Arthur.
And thinking of that monstrous King in his lair in Camelot made her
remember the unkindest thing of all-that if they ever took Arthur Stuart
south, they'd change his name.  Why, it'd be high treason in the Crown
Colonies, having a slavechild named with the same name as the King.  So
all of a sudden poor Arthur would find hisself with some other name he
never heard of afore.  She couldn't help thinking of the boy all
confused, somebody calling him and calling him, and whipping him for not
coming, but how could he know to come, since nobody called him by his
right name?

Her face must've painted a plain picture of all the thoughts going
through her head, because Miss Lamer walked behind her and put her hands
on Old Peg's shoulders.

"You've nought to fear from me, Goody Guester.  I come from
Philadelphia, where people speak openly of defying that treaty.  A young
New Englander named Thoreau has made quite a nuisance of himself,
preaching that a bad law must be defied, that good citizens must be
prepared to go to jail themselves rather than submit to it.  It would do
your heart good to hear him speak."

Old Peg doubted that.  It only froze her to the heart to think of the
treaty at all.  Go to jail?  What good would that do, if Arthur was
being whipped south in chains?  No matter what, it was none of Miss
Lamer's business.  "I don't know why you're saying all this, Miss Lamer.
Arthur Stuart is the freeborn son of a free Black woman, even if she got
him on the wrong side of the sheets.  The Fugitive Slave Treaty means
nothing to me."

"Then I shall think no more of it, Goody Guester.  And now, if you'll
forgive me, I'm somewhat weary from traveling, and I had hoped to retire
early, though it's still light outside."

Old Peg sprang to her feet, mighty relieved at not talking anymore about
Arthur and the treaty.  "Why, of course.  But you ain't hopping into bed
without taking a bath, are you?  Nothing like a bath for a traveler."

"I quite agree, Goody Guester.  However, I fear my luggage was not
copious enough for me to bring my tub along."

"I'll send Horace over with my spare tub the second I get back, and if
you don't mind hotting up your stove there, we can get water from
Gertie's well yonder and set it to steaming in no time."

"Oh, Goody Guester, I fear you'll convince me before the evening's out
that I'm in Philadelphia after all.  It shall be almost disappointing,
for I had steeled myself to endure the rigors of primitive life in the
wilderness, and now I find that you are prepared to offer all the
convivial blessings of civilization."

"I'll take it that what you said mostly means thank you, and so I say
you're welcome, and I'll be back in no time with Horace and the tub. And
don't you dare fetch your own water, at least not today.  You just set
there and read or philosophate or whatever an educated person does
instead of dozing off."

With that Old Peg was out of the springhouse.  She like to flew along
the path to the inn.  Why, this teacher lady wasn't half so bad as she
seemed at first.  She might talk a language that Old Peg couldn't hardly
understand half the time, but at least she was willing to talk to
folks-and she'd teach Arthur at no cost and hold poetry readings in_ the
roadhouse to boot.  Best of all, though, best of all she might even be
willing to talk to Old Peg sometimes and maybe some o t at smartness
might rub off on her.  Not that smartness was all that much good to a
woman like Old Peg, but then, what good was a jewel on a rich lady's
finger, either?  And if being around this educated eastern spinster gave
Old Peg even a jigger more understanding of the great world outside
Hatrack River, it was more than Old Peg had dared to hope for in her
life.  Like daubing just a spot of color on a drab moth's wing.  It
don't make the moth into a butterfly, but maybe now the moth won't
despair and'fly into the fire.

Miss Lamer watched Old Peg walk away.  Mother, she whispered.

No, didn't even whisper.  Didn't even open her mouth.  But her lips
pressed together a bit tighter with the M, and her tongue shaped the
other sounds inside her mouth.

It hurt her, to deceive.  She had promised never to lie, and in.

a sense she wasn't lying even now.  The name she had ta cen, amer, meant
nothing more than teacher, and since she was a teacher, it was as truly
her name as Father's name was Guester and Makepeace's name was Smith.
And when people asked her questions, she never lied to them, though she
did refuse to answer questions that might tell them more than they ought
to know, that might set them wondering.

Still, despite her elaborate avoidance'of an open lie, she feared that
she merely deceived herself.  How could she believe that her presence
here, so disguised, was anything but a lie?

And yet surely even that deception was the truth, at its root.

She was no longer the same person she had been when she was torch of
Hatrack River.  She was no longer connected to these people in the
former ways.  If she claimed to be Little Peggy, that would be a deeper
lie than her disguise, for they would suppose that she was the girl they
once knew, and treat her accordingly.  In that sense, her disguise was a
reflection of who she really was, at least here and nowducated, aloof, a
deliberate spinster, and sexually unavailable to men.

So her disguise was not a lie, surely it was not; it was merely a way to
keep a secret, the secret of who she used to be, but was no longer.

Her vow was still unbroken.

Mother was long since out of sight in the woods between the springhouse
and the inn, but still Peggy looked after her.  And if she wanted, Peggy
could have seen her even yet, not with her eyes, but with her torch
sight, finding Mother's heartfire and moving close, looking tight.
Mother, don't you know you have no secrets from your daughter Peggy?

But the fact was that Mother could keep all the secrets she desired.

Peggy would not look into her heart.  Peggy hadn't come home to be the
torch of Hatrack River again.  After all these years of study, in which
Peggy had read so many books so rapidly that she feared once that she
might run out, that there might not be books enough in America to
satisfy her-after all these years, there was only one skill she was
certain of.  She had finally mastered the ability not to see inside the
hearts of other people unless she wanted to.  She had finally tamed her
torchy sight.

Oh, she still looked inside other people when she needed to, but she
rarely did.  Even with the school board, when she had to tame them, it
took no more than her knowledge of human nature to guess their present
thoughts and deal with them.  And as for the futures revealed in the
heartfire, she no longer noticed them.

I am not responsible for your futures, none of you.  Least of all you,
Mother.  I have meddled enough in your life, in everyone's lives.

If I know all your futures, all you people in Hatrack River, then I have
a moral imperative to shape my own actions to help you achieve the
happiest possible tomorrow.  Yet in so doing, I cease to exist myself.

My own future becomes the only one with no hope, and why should that be?
By shutting my eyes to what will happen, I become like you, able to live
my life according to my guesses at what may happen.  I couldn't
guarantee you happiness anyway, and this way at least I also have a
chance of it myself.

Even as she justified herself, she felt the same sour guilt well up
inside her.  By rejecting her knack, she was sinning against the God
that gave it to her.  That great magister Erasmus, he had taught as
much: Your knack is your destiny.  You'll never know joy except through
following the path laid out before you by what is inside you.

But Peggy refused to submit to that cruel discipline.  Her childhood had
already been stolen from her, and to what end?  Her mother disliked her,
the people of Hatrack River feared her, often hated her, even as they
came to her again and again, seeking answers to their selfish, petty
questions, blaming her if any seeming ill came into their lives, but
never thanking her for saving them from dire events, for they never knew
how she had saved them because the evils never happened.

It wasn't gratitude she wanted.  It was freedom.  It was a lightening of
her burden.  She had started bearing it too young, and they had shown
her no mercy in their exploitation.  Their own fears always outweighed
her need for a carefree girlhood.  Did any of them understand that?  Did
any of them know how gratefully she left them an behind?

Now Peggy the torch was back, but they'd never know it.  I did not come
back for you, people of Hatrack River, nor did I come to serve your
children.  I came back for one pupil only, the man who stands even now
at the forge, his heartfire burning so brightly that I can see it even
in my sleep, even in my dreams.  I came back having learned all that the
world can teach, so I in turn can help that young man achieve a labor
that means more than any one of us.  That is my destiny, if I have one.

Along the way I'll do what other good I can-I'll teach Arthur Stuart,
I'D try to fulfill the dreams his brave young mother died for; I'll
teach all the other children as much as they're willing to learn, during
those certain hours of the day that I've contracted for; I'll bring such
poetry and learning into the town of Hatrack River as you're willing to
receive.

Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my
torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I daresay poetry will do
you far more good.  For knowing the future only makes you timid and
complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls
who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that
you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an
opportunity forgreatness, if you have greatness in you.  Can I teach you
to see in yourselves what Gray saw?

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire, Hands that the rod of
empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But she doubted that any of these ordinary souls in Hatrack River were
really mute, inglorious Miltons.  Pauley Wiseman was no secret Caesar.
He might wish for it, but he lacked the wit and self-control.

Whitley Physicker was no Hippocrates, however much he tried to be a
healer and conciliator-his love of luxury undid him, and like many
another well-meaning physician he had come to work for what the fee
could buy, and not for joy of the work itself.

She picked up the water bucket that stood by the door.  Weary as she
was, she would not allow herself to seem helpless even for a moment.
Father and Mother would come and find Miss Lamer had already done for
herself all that she could do before the tub arrived, Ching-ching-ching.
Didn't Alvin rest?  Didn't he know the sun was boiling the western sky,
turning it red before sinking out of sight behind the trees?  As she
walked down the hill toward the smithy, she felt as if she might
suddenly begin to run, to fly down the hill to the smithy as she had
flown the day that Alvin was born.  It was raining that day, and Alvin's
mother was stuck in a wagon in the river.  It was Peggy who saw them
all, their heartfires off in the blackness of the rain and the flooding
river.  It was Peggy who gave alarm, and then Peggy who stood watch over
the birthing, seeing Alvin's futures in his heartfire, the brightest
heartfire she had ever seen or would ever see in all her life.  It was
Peggy who saved his life then by peeling the caul away from his face;
and, by using bits of that caul, Peggy who had saved his life so many
times over the years.  She might turn her back on being torch of Hatrack
River, but she'd never turn her back on him.

But she stopped herself halfway down the hill.  What was she thinking
of?  She could not go to him, not now, not yet.  He had to come to her.
Only that way could she become his teacher; only that way was there a
chance of becoming anything more than that.

She turned and walked across the face of the hill, slanting down and
eastward toward the well.  She had watched Alvin dig the wellboth
wells-and for once she was helpless to help him when the Unmaker came.

Alvin's own anger and destructiveness had called his enemy, and there
was nothing Peggy could do with the caul to save him that time. She
could only watch as he purged the unmaking that was inside himself, and
so defeated, for a time, the Umnaker who stalked him on the outside.

Now this well stood as a monument both to Alvin's power and to his
frailty.

She dropped the copper bucket into the well, and the windlass clattered
as the rope unwound.  A muffled splash.  She waited a moment for the
bucket to fill, then wound it upward.  It arrived brimming.

She meant to pour it out into the wooden bucket she brought with her,
but instead she brought the copper bucket to her lips and drank from the
cold heavy load of water that it bore.  So many years she had waited to
taste that water, the water that Alvin tamed the night he tamed himself
She had been so afraid, watching him ill night, and when at last in the
morning he filled up the first vengeful hole he dug, she wept in relief.
This water wasn't salty, but still it tasted to her like her own tears.

The hammer was silent.  As always, she found Alvin's heartfire at once,
without even trying.  He was leaving the smithy, coming outside.

Did he know she was there?  No.  He always came for water when he
finished his work for the day.  Of course she could not turn to him, not
yet, not until she actually heard his step.  Yet, though she knew he was
coming and listened for him, she couldn't hear him; he moved as silently
as a squirrel on a limb.  Not until he spoke did he make a sound.

"Pretty good water, ain't it?"

She turned around to face him.  Turned too quickly, too eagerlythe rope
still held the bucket, so it lurched out of her hands, splashed her with
water, and clattered back down into the well.

"I'm Alvin, you remember?  Didn't mean to frighten you, Ma'am.

Miss Lamer."

"I foolishly forgot the bucket was tied," she said.  "I'm used to pumps
and taps, I'm afraid.  Open wells are not common in Philadelphia."

She turned back to the well to draw the bucket up again.

"Here, let me," he said.

"There's no need.  I can wind it well enough."

"But why should you, Miss Lamer, when I'm glad to do it for you?"

She stepped aside and watched as he cranked the windlass with one hand,
as easily as a child might swing a rope.  The bucket fairly flew to the
top of the well.  She looked into his heartfire, just dipped in, to see
if he was showing off for her.  He was not.  He could not see how
massive his own shoulders were, how his muscles danced under the skin as
his arm moved.  He could not even see the peacefulness of his own face,
the same quiet repose that one might see in the face of a fearless stag.
There was no watchfulness in him.  Some people had darting eyes, as if
they had to be alert for danger, or perhaps for prey.

Others looked intently at the task at hand, concentrating on what they
were doing.  But Alvin had a quiet distance, as if he had no particular
concern about what anyone else or he himself might be doing, but instead
dwelt on inward thoughts that no one else could hear.

Again the words of Gray's Elegy played out in her mind.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never
learned to stray" Along the cool, sequestered vale of life ey the noise
tenor their way.

Poor Alvin.  When I'm done with you, there'll be no cool sequestered
vale.  You'll look back on your prenticeship as the last peaceful days
of your life.

He gripped the full, heavy bucket with one hand on the rim, and easily
tipped it to pour it out into the bucket she had brought, which he held
in his other hand; he did it as lightly and easily as a housewife pours
cream from one cup into another.  What if those hands as lightly and
easily held my arms?  Would he break me without meaning to, being so
strong?  Would I feel manacled in his irresistible grasp?

Or would he burn me up in the white heat of his heartfire?

She reached out for her bucket.

"Please let me carry it, Ma'am.  Miss Lamer."

"There's no need."

"I know I'm dirtied up, Miss Lamer, but I can carry it to your door and
set it inside without messing anything."

Is my disguise so monstrously aloof that you think I refuse your help
out of excessive cleanliness?  "I only meant that I didn't want to make
you work anymore today.  You've helped me enough already for one day."

He looked straight into her eyes, and now he lost that peaceful
expression.  There was even a bit of anger in his eyes.  "If you're
afraid I'll want you to pay me, you needn't have no fear of that.  If
this is your dollar, you can have it back.  I never wanted it." He held
out to her the coin that Whitley Physicker had tossed him from the
carriage.

"I reproved Dr.  Physicker at the time.  I thought it insulting that he
should presume to pay you for the service you did me out of pure
gallantry.  It cheapened both of us, I thought, for him to act as if the
events of this morning were worth exactly one dollar."

His eyes had softened now.

t on in her Miss Lamer voice.  "But you must forgive Dr.  Peggy well
Physicker.  He is uncomfortable with wealth, and looks for opportunities
to share it with others.  He has not yet learned how to do it with
perfect tact."

"Oh, it's no never mind now, Miss Lamer, seeing how it didn't come from
you." He put the coin back in his pocket and started to carry the full
bucket up the hill toward the house.

It was plain he was unaccustomed to walking with a lady.  His strides
were far too long, his pace too quick, for her to keep up with him.  She
couldn't even walk the same route he took-he seemed oblivious to the
degree of slope.  He was like a child, not an adult, taking the most
direct route even if it meant unnecessary clambering over obstacles.

And yet I'm barely five years older than he is.  Have I come to believe
my own disguise?  At twenty-three, am I already thinking and acting and
living like a woman of twice that age?  Didn't I once love to walk just
as he does, over the most difficult ground, for the sheer love of the
exertion and accomplishment?

Nevertheless, she walked the easier path, skirting the hill and then
climbing up where the slope was longer and gentler.  He was already
there, waiting at the door.

"Why didn't you open the door and set the bucket inside?  The door isn't
locked," she said.

"Begging your pardon, Miss Lamer, but this is a door that asks not to be
opened, whether it's locked or not."

So, she thought, he wants to make sure I know about the hidden hexes he
put in the locks.  Not many people could see a hidden hexnor could she,
for that matter.  She wouldn't have known about them if she hadn't
watched him put the hexes in the lock.  But of course she couldn't very
well tell him that.  So she asked, "Oh, is the-re some protection here
that I can't see?"

"I just put a couple of hexes into the lock.  Nothing much, but it
should make it fairly safe here.  And there's a hex in the top of the
stove, so I don't think you have to worry much about sparks getting
free.

LL "You have a great deal of confidence in your hexery, Alvin."

"I do them pretty good.  Most folks knows a few hexes, anyway, Miss
Lamer.  But not many smiths can put them into the iron.  I just wanted
you to know."

He wanted her to know more than that, of course.  So she gave him the
response he hoped for.  "I take it, then, that you did some of the work
on this springhouse."

done the windows, Miss Lamer.  They glide up and down sweet as you
please, and there's pegs to hold them in place.  And the stove, and the
locks, and all the iron fittings.  And my helper, Arthur Stuart, he
scraped down the walls."

For a young man who seemed artless, he was steering the conversation
rather well.  For a moment she thought of toying with him, of pretending
not to make the connections he was counting on, just to see how he
handled it.  But no-he was only planning to ask her to do what she came
here to do.  There was no reason to make it hard for him.

The teaching itself would be hard enough.  "Arthur Stuart," she said.

"He must be the same boy that Goody Guester asked me to teach
privately."

"Oh, did she already ask you?  Or shouldn't I ask?"

"I have no intention of keeping it a secret, Alvin.  Yes, I'll be
teaching Arthur Stuart."

"I'm glad of that, Miss Lamer.  He's the smartest boy you ever knew. And
a mimic!  Why, he can hear anything once and say it back to you in your
own voice.  You'll hardly believe it even when he's a-doing it."

"I only hope he doesn't choose to play such a game when I'm teaching
him."

Alvin frowned.  "Well, it isn't rightly a game, Miss Lamer.  It's just
something he does without meaning to in particular.  I mean to say, if
he starts talking back to you in your own voice, he isn't making fun or
nothing.  It's just that when he hears something he remembers it voice
and all, if you know what I mean.  He can't split them up and remember
the words without the voice that gave them."

"I'll keep that in mind."

In the distance, Peggy heard a door slam closed.  She cast out and
looked, finding Father's and Mother's heartfires coming toward her.

They were quarreling, of course, but if Alvin was to ask her, he'd have
to do it quickly.

"Was there something else you wanted to say to me, Alvin?"

This was the moment he'd been leading up to, but now he was turning shy
on her.  "Well, I had some idea of asking you-but you got to understand,
I didn't carry the water for you so you'd feel obliged or nothing.  I
would've done that anyway, for anybody, and as for what happened today,
I didn't rightly know that you were the teacher.  I mean maybe I
might've guessed, but I just didn't think of it.  So what I done was
just itself, and you don't owe me nothing."

"I think I'll decide how much gratitude I owe, Alvin.  What did you want
to ask me?"

"Of course you'll be busy with Arthur Stuart, so I can't expect you to
have much time free, maybe just one day a week, just an hour even.

It could be on Saturdays, and you could charge whatever you want, my
master's been giving me free time and I've saved up some of my own
earnings, and-"

"Are you asking me to tutor you, Alvin?"

Alvin didn't know what the word meant.

"Tutor you.  Teach you privately."

"Yes, Miss Lamer."

"The charge is fifty cents a week, Alvin.  And I wish you to come at the
same time as Arthur Stuart.  Arrive when he does, and leave when he
does."

"But how can you teach us both at once?"

"I daresay you could benefit from some of the lessons I'll be giving
him, Alvin.  And when I have him writing or ciphering, I can converse
with you."

"I just don't want to cheat him out of his lesson time."

"Think clearly, Alvin.  It would not be proper for you to take lessons
with me alone.  I may be somewhat older than you, but there are those
who will search for fault in me, and giving private instruction to a
young bachelor would certainly give cause for tongues to wag.

Arthur Stuart will be present at all your lessons, and the door of the
springhouse will stand open."

"We could go up and you could teach me at the roadhouse."

"Alvin.  I have told you the terms.  Do you wish to engage me as your
tutor?"

"Yes, Miss Lamer." He dug into his pocket and pulled out a coin.

"Here's a dollar for the first two weeks."

Peggy looked at the coin.  "I thought you meant to give this dollar back
to Dr.  Physicker."

"I wouldn't want to make him uncomfortable about having so much money,
Miss Lamer." He grinned.

Shy he may be, but he can't stay serious for long.  There'll always be a
tease in him, just below the surface, and eventually it will always come
out.

"No.  I imagine not," said Miss Lamer.  "Lessons will begin next week.
Thank you for your help."

At that moment, Father and Mother came up the path.  Father carried a
large tub over his head, and he staggered under the weight.

Alvin immediately ran to belr, rather, to simply take the tub and carry
it himself.

That was how Peggy saw her father's face for the first time in more than
six years-red, sweating, as he puffed from the labor of carrying the
tub.  And angry, too, or at least sullen.  Even though Mother had no
doubt assured him that the teacher lady wasn't half so arrogant as she
seemed at first, still Father was resentful of this stranger living in
the springhouse, a place that belonged only to his long-lost daughter.

Peggy longed to call out to him, call him Father, and assure him that it
was his daughter who dwelt here now, that all his labor to make a home
of this old place was really a gift of love to her.  How it comforted
her to know how much he loved her, that he had not forgotten her after
all these years; yet it also made her heart break for him, that she
couldn't name herself to him truly, not yet, not if she was to
accomplish all she needed to.  She would have to do with him what she
was already trying to do with Alvin and with Mother-not reclaim old
loves and debts, but win new love and friendship.

She could not come home as a daughter of this place, not even to Father,
who alone would purely rejoice at her coming.  She had to come home as a
stranger.  For surely that's what she was, even if she had no disguise,
for after three years of one kind of learning in Dekane and another
three of schooling and study, she was no longer Little Peggy, the quiet,
sharp-tongued torch; she had long since become something else.  She had
learned many graces under the tutelage of Mistress Modesty; she had
learned many other things from books and teachers.

She was not who she had been.  It would be as much a lie to say, Father,
I am your daughter Little Peggy, as it was to say what she said now:
"Mr.  Guester, I am your new tenant, Miss Lamer.  I'm very glad to meet
you."

He huffed up to her and put out his hand.  Despite his misgivings,
despite the way he had avoided meeting her when first she arrived at the
roadhouse an hour or so past, he was too much the consummate innkeeper
to refuse to greet her with courtesy-or at least the rough country
manners that passed for courtesy in this frontier town.

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Lamer.  I trust your accommodation is
satisfactory?"

it made her a little sad, to hear him trying fancy language on her, the
way he talked to those customers he thought of as "dignitaries," meaning
that he believed their station in life to be above his.  I've learned
much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any
other, if it's occupied by someone with a good heart.

As to whether Father's heart was good, Peggy believed it but refused to
look.  She had known his heartfire far too well in years past.

If she looked too closely now, she might find things a daughter had no
right to see.  She'd been too young to control herself when she explored
his heartfire all those years ago; in the innocence of childhood she had
learned things that made both innocence and childhood impossible.  Now,
though, with her knack better tamed, she could at last give him privacy
in his own heart.  She owed him and Mother that.

Not to mention that she owed it to herself not to know exactly what they
thought and felt about everything.

They set up the tub in her little house.  Mother had brought another
nucket and a kettle, and now Father and Alvin both set to toting water
up from the well, while Mother boiled some on the stove.

When the bath was ready, she sent the men away; then Peggy sent Mother
away as well, though not without considerable argument.  "I am grateful
for your solicitude," Peggy said, "but it is my custom to bathe in utter
privacy.  You have been exceptionally kind, and as I now take my bath,
alone, you may be sure I will think of you gratefully every moment."

The stream of high-sounding language was more than even Mother could
resist.  At last the door was closed and locked, the curtains drawn.
Peggy removed her traveling gown, which was heavy with dust and sweat,
and then peeled away her chemise and her pantalets, which clung hotly to
her skin.  It was one of the benefits of her di5guise, that she need not
trouble herself with corsetry.  No one expected a spinster of her
supposed age to have the perversely slender waist of those poor young
victims of fashion who bound themselves until they could not breathe.

Last of all she removed her amulets, the three that hung around her neck
and the one enwrapped with her hair.  The amulets were hard-won, and not
just because they were the new, expensive ones that acted on what others
actually saw, and not just on their opinion of it.

It had taken four visits before the hexman believed that she really did
want to appear ugly.  "A girl so lovely as you, you don't need my art,"
he said it over and over again, until she finally took him by the
shoulders and said, "That's why I need it!  To make me stop being
beautiful." He gave in, but kept muttering that it was a sin to cover
what God created well.

God or Mistress Modesty, thought Peggy.  I was beautiful in Mistress
Modesty's house.  Am I beautiful now, when no one sees me but myself, I
who am least likely to admire?

Naked at last, herself at last, she knelt beside the tub and ducked her
head to begin the washing of her hair.  Immersed in water, hot as it
was, she felt the same old freedom she had felt so long ago in the
springhouse, the wet isolation in which no heartfires intruded, so she
was truly herself alone, and had a chance of knowing what her self might
actually be.

There was no mirror in the springhouse.  Nor had she brought one.

Nevertheless, she knew when her bath was done and she toweled herself
before the stove, already sweating in the steamy room, in the early
August evening-she knew that she was beautiful, as Mistress Modesty had
taught her how to be; knew that if Alvin could see her as she really
was, he would desire her, not for wisdom, but for the more casual and
shallow love that any man feels for a woman who delights his eyes.  So,
just as she had once hidden from him so he wouldn't marry her for pity,
now she hid from him so he wouldn't marry her for boyish love.  This
self, the smooth and youthful body, would remain invisible to him, so
that her truer self, the sharp and well-filled mind, might entice the
finest man in him, the man that would be, not a lover, but a Maker.

If only she could somehow disguise his body from her own eyes, so that
she would not have to imagine his touch, as gentle as the touch of air
on her skin as she moved across the room.

Property

The Blacks started in a-howling before the roosters got up.  Cavil
Planter didn't get up right away; the sound of it sort of fit into his
dream.  Howling Blacks figured in his dreams pretty common these days.

Anyway it finally woke him, and he bounded up out of bed.

Barely light outside; he had to open the curtain to get light enough to
find his trousers.  He could make out shadows moving down near the slave
quarters, but couldn't see what all was going on.  He thought the worst,
of course, and pulled his shotgun down from the rack on his bedroom
wall.  Slaveowners, in case you didn't guess, always keep their firearms
in the same room where they sleep.

Out in the hall, he nearly bumped into somebody.  She screeched.

It took Cavil a moment to realize it was his wife, Dolores. Sometimes he
forgot she knew how to walk, seeing how she only left her room at
certain times.  He just wasn't used to seeing her out of bed, moving
around the house without a slave or two to lean on.

"Hush now, Dolores, it's me, Cavfl."

"Oh, what is it, Cavil!  What's happening out there!" She was clinging
to his arm, so he couldn't move on.

"Don't you think I can tell you better if you let me go find out?"

She hung on tighter.  "Don't do it, Cavil!  Don't go out there alone!

They might kill you!"

"Why would they kill me?  Am I not a righteous master?  Will the Lord
not protect me?" All the same, he felt a thrill of fear.  Could this be
the slave revolt that every master feared but none spoke of?

He realized now that this very thought had been lingering at the back of
his mind since he first woke up.  Now Dolores had put it into words.

"I have my shotgun," said Cavil.  "Don't worry about me."

"I'm afraid," said Dolores.

You know what I'm afraid of?  That you'll stumble in the dark and really
hurt yourself.  Go back to bed, so I don't have to worry about you while
I'm outside."

Somebody started pounding at the door.

"Master!  Master!" cried a slave.  "We need you, Master!"

"Now see?  That's Fat Fox," said Cavil.  "If it was a revolt, my love,
they'd strangle him first off, before they ever came after me."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" she asked.

"Master!  Master!"

"To bed," said Cavil.

For a moment her hand rested on the hard cold barrel of the shotgun.
Then she turned and, like a pale grey ghost in the darkness of the hall,
she disappeared into the shadows toward her room.

Fat Fox was near to jumping up and down he was so agitated.  Cavil
looked at him, as always, with disgust.  Even though Cavil depended on
Fat Fox to let him know which slaves talked ugly behind his back, Cavil
didn't have to like him.  There wasn't a hope in heaven of saving the
soul of any full-blood Black.  They were all born in deep corruption,
like as if they embraced original sin and sucked more of it with their
mother's milk.  It's a wonder their milk wasn't black with all the
foulness that must be in it.  I wish it wasn't such a slow process,
turning the Black race White enough to be worth trying to save their
souls.

"It's that Salamandy girl, Master," said Fat Fox.

"Is her baby coming early?" said Cavil.

"Oh no," said Fat Fox.  "No, no, it ain't coming, no Master.  Oh please
come on down.  It ain't that gun you needing, Master.  It's your big old
buck knife I think."

"I'll decide that," said Cavil.  If a Black suggests you ought to put
your gun away, that's when you hang onto it tightest of all.

He strode toward the slave women's quarters.  It was getting light
enough by now that he could see the ground, could see the Blacks all
slinking here and there in the dark, watching him, white eyes watching.

That was a mercy from the Lord God, making their eyes white, else you
couldn't see them at all in the shadows.

There was a passel of women all outside the door to the cabin where
Salamandy slept.  Her being so close to her time, she didn't have to do
any field work these days, and she got a bed with a fine mattress.
Nobody could say Cavil Planter didn't take care of his breeding stock.

One of the women-in the darkness he couldn't tell who, but from the
voice he thought it was maybe Coppy, the one baptized as Agnes but who
chose to call herself after the copperhead rattler-anyway she cried out,
"Oh, Master, you got to let us bleed a chicken on this one!"

"No heathen abominations shall be practiced on my plantation," said
Cavil sternly.  But he knew now that Salamandy was dead.  Only a month
from delivery, and she was dead.  It stabbed his heart deep.

One child less.  One breeding ewe gone.  0 God have mercy on me!

How can I serve thee aright if you take away my best concubine?

It smelled like a sick horse in the room, from her bowel opening up as
she died.  She'd hung herself with the bedsheet.  Cavil damned himself
for a fool, giving her such a thing.  Here he meant it as a sign of
special favor, her being on her sixth half-White baby, to let her have a
sheet on her mattress, and now she turned around and answered him like
this.

Her feet dangled not three inches from the floor.  She must have stood
on the bed and then stepped off.  Even now, as she swayed slightly in
the breeze of his movement in the room, her feet bumped into the
bedstead.  It took a second or two for Cavil to realize what that meant.
Since her neck wasn't broke, she must have been a long time strangling,
and the whole time the bed was inches away, and she knew it.  The whole
time, she could have stopped strangling at any time.  Could have changed
her mind.  This was a woman who wanted to die.  No, wanted to kill.
Murder that baby she was carrying.

Proof again how strong these Blacks were in their wickedness.

Rather than give birth to a half-White child with a hope of salvation,
she'd strangle to death herself.  Was there no limit to their
perversity?

How could a godly man save such creatures?

"She kill herself, Master!" cried the woman who had spoke before.

He turned to look at her, and now it was light enough to see for sure
that it was Coppy talking.  "She waiting for tomorrow night to kill
somebody else, less we bleed a chicken on her!"

"It makes me ill, to think you'd use this poor woman's death as an
excuse to roast a chicken out of turn.  She'll have a decent burial, and
her soul will not hurt anyone, though as a suicide she will surely burif
in hell forever."

At his words Coppy wailed in grief.  The other women joined in her
keening.  Cavil had Fat Fox set a group of young bucks digging a
grave-not in the regular slaveyard, of course, since as a suicide she
couldn't lie in consecrated ground.  Out among the trees, with no
marker, as befit a beast that took the life of her own young.

She was in the ground before nightfall.  Since she was a suicide, Cavil
couldn't very well ask the Baptist preacher or the Catholic priest to
come help with it.  In fact, he figured to say the words himself, only
it happened that tonight was the night he'd already invited a traveling
preacher to supper.  That preacher showed up early, and the house slaves
sent him around back where he found the burial in progress and offered
to help.

"Oh, you don't need to do that," said Cavil.

"Let it never be said that Reverend Philadelphia Thrower did not extend
Christian love to all the children of God-White or Black, male or
female, saint or sinner."

The slaves perked up at that, and so did Cavil-for the opposite reason.
That was Emancipationist talk, and Cavil felt a sudden fear that he had
invited the devil into his own house by bringing this Presbyterian
preacher.  Nevertheless, it would probably do much to quiet the Blacks'
superstitious fears if he allowed the rites to be administered by a real
preacher.  And sure enough, when the words were said and the grave was
covered, they all seemed right quiet-none of that ghastly howling.

At dinner, the preacher-Thrower, that was his named Cavil's fears
considerably.  "I believe that it is part of God's great plan for the
Black people to be brought to America in chains.  Like the children of
Israel, who had to suffer years of bondage to the Egyptians, these Black
souls are under the Lord's own lash, shaping them to His own purposes.
The Emancipationists understand one truth-that God loves his Black
children-but they misunderstand everything else.  Why, if they had their
way and freed all the slaves at once, it would accomplish the devil's
purpose, not God's, for without slavery the Blacks have no hope of
rising out of their savagery."

"Now, that sounds downright theological," said Cavil.

"Don't the Emancipationists understand that every Black who escapes from
his rightful master into the North is doomed to eternal damnation, him
and all his children?  Why, they might as well have remained in Africa
as go north.  The Whites up north hate Blacks, as well they should,
since only the most evil and proud and stiff-necked dare to offend God
by leaving their masters.  But you here in Appalachee and in the Crown
Colonies, you are the ones who truly love the Black man, for only you
are willing to take responsibility for these wayward children and help
them progress on the road to full humanity."

"You may be a Presbyterian, Reverend Thrower, but you know the true
religion."

"I'm glad to know I'm in the home of a godly man, Brother Cavil."

"I hope I am your brother, Reverend Thrower."

And that's how the talk went on, the two of them liking each other
better and better as the evening wore.  By nightfall, when they sat on
the porch cooling off, Cavil began to think he had met the first man to
whom he might tell some part of his great secret.

Cavil tried to bring it up casual.  "Reverend Thrower, do you think the
Lord God speaks to any men today?"

Thrower's voice got all solemn.  "I know He does."

"Do you think He might even speak to a common man like me?"

"You mustn't hope for it, Brother Cavil," said Thrower, "for the Lord
goes where He will, and not where we wish.  Yet I do know that it's
possible for even the humblest man to have a-Visitor."

Cavil felt a trembling in his belly.  Why, Thrower sounded like he
already knew Cavil's secret.  But still he didn't blurt it out all at
once.

"You know what I think?" said Cavil.  "I think that the Lord God can't
appear in His true form, because His glory would kill a natural man.

"Oh, indeed," said Thrower.  "As when Moses craved a vision of the Lord,
and the Lord covered his eyes with His hand, only letting Moses see His
back parts as he passed by."

"I mean, what if a man like me saw the Lord Jesus himself, only not
looking like any painting of him, but instead looking like an overseer.
I reckon that a man sees only what will make him understand the power of
God, not the true majesty of the Lord."

Thrower nodded wisely.  "It may well be," he said.  "That's a plansible
explanation.  Or it might be that you only saw an angel."

There it was-that simple.  From "what if a man like me" to Thrower
saying "you saw an angel." That's how much alike these two men were.

So Cavil told the whole story, for the first time ever, near seven years
after it happened.

When he was done, Thrower took his hand and held it in a brotherly grip,
looking him in the eye with a fierce-looking kind of expression.

"To think of your sacrifice, mingling your flesh with that of these
Black women, in order to serve the Lord.  How many children?"

"Twenty-five that got born alive.  You helped me bury the twentysixth
inside Salarnandy's belly this evening."

"Where are all these hopeful half-White youngsters?"

"Oh, that's half the labor I'm doing," said Cavil.  "Till the Fugitive
Slave Treaty, I used to sell them all south as soon as I could, so
they'd grow up there and spread White blood throughout the Crown
Colonies.  Each one will be a missionary through his seed.  Of course,
the last few I've kept here.  It ain't the safest thing, neither,
Reverend Thrower.  All my breeding-age stock is pure Black, and folks
are bound to wonder where these mixup children come from.  So far,
though, my overseer, Lashman, he keeps his mouth shut if he notices, and
nobody else ever sees them."

Thrower nodded, but it was plain his mind was on something else, "Only
twenty-five of these children?"

"It's the best I could do," said Cavil.  "Even a Black woman can't make
a baby right off after a birthing."

"I meant-you see, I also had a-visitation.  It's the reason why I came
here, came touring through Appalachee.  I was told that I would meet a
farmer who also knew my Visitor, and who had produced twenty-six living
gifts to God."

"Twenty-six.

"Living."

"Well, you see-well, ain't that just the way of it.  You see, I wasn't
including in my tally the very first one born, because his mother run
off and stole him from me a few days before he was due to be sold.  I
had to refund the money in cash to the buyer, and it was no good
tracking, the dogs couldn't pick up her scent.  Word among the slaves
was that she turned into a blackbird andflew, but you know the tales
they tell.

"So-twenty-six then.  And tell me this-is there some reason why the name
"Hagar' should mean anything to you?"

Cavil gasped.  "No one knows I called the mother by that name!"

"My Visitor told me that Hagar had stolen away your first gift."

"It's Him.  You've seen Him, too."

"To me He comes as-not an overseer.  More like a scientists man of
unguessable wisdom.  Because I am a scientist, I imagine, besides my
vocation as a minister.  I have always supposed that He was a mere
angel-listen to me, a mere angel-because I dared not hope that He
was-was the Master himself.  But now what you tell me-could it be that
we have both entertained the presence of our Lord?  Oh, Cavil, how can I
doubt it?  Why else would the Lord have brought us together like this?
It means that 1-that I'm forgiven."

"Forgiven?"

At Cavil's question, Thrower's face darkened.

Cavil hastened to reassure him.  "No, you don't need to tell me if you
don't want."

"I-it is almost unbearable to think of it.  But now that I am clearly
deemed acceptabler at least, now that I've been given another
chance-Brother Cavil, once I was given a mission to perform, one as dark
and difficult and secret as your own.  Except that where you havehad the
courage and strength to prevail, I failed.  I tried, but I had not wit
or vigor enough to overcome the power of the devil.  I thought I was
rejected, cast off.  That's why I became a traveling preacher, for I
felt myself unworthy to take a pulpit of my own.  But now-" Cavil
nodded, holding the man's hands as tears flowed down his cheek.

At last Thrower looked up at him.  "How do you suppose ourFriend-meant
me to help you in your work?"

"I can't say," said Cavil.  "But there's only one way I can think of,
offhand."

"Brother Cavil, I'm not sure if I can take upon myself that loathsome
duty."

"In my experience, the Lord strengthens a man, and makes itbearable."

"But in my case, Brother Cavil-you see, I've never known a woman, as the
Bible speaks of it.  Only once have my lips touched a woman's, and that
was against my will."

"Then I'll do my best to help you.  How if we pray together good and
long, and then I show you once?"

Well, that seemed like the best idea either of them could think of right
offhand, and so they did it, and it turned out Reverend Thrower was a
quick learner.  Cavil felt a great sense of relief to have someone else
join in, not to mention a kind of peculiar pleasure at having somebody
watch him and then watching the other fellow in turn.

It was a powerful sort of brotherhood, to have their seed mingled in the
same vessel, so to speak.  Like Reverend Thrower said, "When this field
comes to harvest, Brother Cavil, we shall not guess whose seed came unto
ripeness, for the Lord gave us this field together, for this time."

Oh, and then Reverend Thrower asked the girl's name.  "Well, we baptized
her as 'Hepzibah,' but she goes by the name 'Roach."

"Roach!"

"They all take animal names.  I reckon she doesn't have too high an
opinion of herself."

At that, Thrower just reached over and took Roach's hand and patted it,
as kindly a gesture as if Thrower and Roach was man and wife, an idea
that made Cavil almost laugh right out.  "Now, Hepzibah, you must use
your Christian name," said Thrower, "and not such a debasing animal
name."

Roach just looked at him wide-eyed, lying there curled up on the
mattress.

"Why doesn't she answer me, Brother Cavil'?"

"Oh, they never talk during this.  I beat that out of them earlythey
always tried to talk me out of doing it.  I figure better to have no
words than have them say what the devil wants me to hear."

Thrower turned back to the woman.  "But now I ask You to speak to me,
Roach.  You won't say devil words, will you?"

In answer, Roach's eyes wandered upward to where part of a bedsheet was
still knotted around a rafter.  It had been raggedly hacked off below
the knot.

Thrower's face got kind of sick-looking.  "You mean this is the room
where-the girl we buried-"

"This room has the best bed," said Cavil.  "I didn't want us doing this
on a straw pallet if we didn't have to."

Thrower said nothing.  He just left the room, pretty quick, plunging
outside into the darkness.  Cavil sighed, picked up the lantern, and
followed him.  He found Thrower leaning over the pump.  He could hear
Roach skittering out of the room where Salamandy died, heading for her
own quarters, but he didn't give no never mind to her.

It was Thrower-surely the man wasn't so beside himself that he'd throw
up on the drinking water!

"I'm all right," whispered Thrower.  "I just-the same room-I'm not at
all superstitious, you understand.  It just seemed disrespectful to the
dead.  " These northerners.  Even when they understood somewhat about
slavery, they couldn't get rid of their notion of Blacks as if they was
people.  Would you stop using a room just because a mouse died there, or
you once killed a spider on the wall?  Do you burn down your stable just
because your favorite horse died there?

Anyway, Thrower got himself together, hitched up his trousers and
buttoned them up proper, and they went back in the house.  Brother Cavil
put Thrower in their guest room, which wasn't all that much used, so
there was a cloud of dust when Cavil slapped the blanket.

"Should have known the house slaves'd be slacking in this room," said
Brother Cavil.

"No matter," said Thrower.  "On a night this warm, I'll need no
blanket."

On the way down the hall to his own bedroom, Cavil paused a moment to
listen for his wife's breathing.  As sometimes happened, he could hear
her whimpering softly in her bedroom.  The pain must be bad indeed.  Oh
Lord, thought Cavil, how many more times must I do Thy bidding before
You'll have mercy and heal my Dolores?  But he didn't go in to her-there
was nothing he could do to help her, besides prayer, and he'd need his
sleep.  This had been a late night, and tomorrow had work enough.

Sure enough, Dolores had had a bad night-she was still asleep at
breakfast time.  So Cavil ended up eating with Thrower.  The preacher
put away an astonishingly large portion of sausage and grits.  When his
plate was clean for the third time, he looked at Cavil and smiled.

"The Lord's service can give a man quite an appetite!" They both had a
good laugh at that.

After breakfast, they walked outside.  It happened they went near the
woods where Salamandy had been buried.  Thrower suggested looking at the
grave, or else Cavil probably never would have known what the Blacks did
in the night.  There were footprints all over the grave itself, which
was churned into mud.  Now the drying mud was covered with ants.

"Ants!" said Thrower.  "They can't possibly smell the body under the
ground."

"No," said Cavil.  "What they're finding is fresher and right on top.

Look at thatut-up entrails."

"They didn't-exhume her body and-"

"Not her guts, Reverend Thrower.  Probably a squirrel or blackbird or
something.  They did a devil sacrifice last night."

Thrower immediately began murmuring a prayer.

"They know I forbid such things," said Cavil.  "By evening, the proof of
it would no doubt be gone.  They're disobeying me behind my back.  I
won't have it."

"Now I understand the magnitude of the work you slaveowners have.

The devil has an iron grip upon their souls."

"Well, never you mind.  They'll pay for it today.  They want blood
dropped on her grave?  It'll be their own.  Mr.  Lashman!  Where are
you!  Mr.  Lashman!"

The overseer had only just arrived for the day's work.

"A little half-holiday for the Blacks this morning, Mr.  Lashman," said
Thrower.

Lashman didn't ask why.  "Which ones you want whipped?"

"All of them.  Ten lashes each.  Except the pregnant women, of course.
But even they-one lash for each of them, across the thighs.

And all to watch."

"They get a bit unruly, watching it, sir," said Lashman.

"Reverend Thrower and I will watch also," said Cavil.

While Lashman was off assembling the slaves, Thrower murmured something
about not really wanting to watch.

"It's the Lord's work," said Cavil.  "I have stomach enough to watch any
act of righteousness.  I thought after last night that you did too."

So they watched together as each slave in turn was whipped, the blood
dripping down onto Salamandy's grave.  After a while Thrower didn't even
flinch.  Cavil was glad to see it-the man wasn't weak, after all, just a
little soft from his upbringing in Scotland and his life in the North.

Afterward, as Reverend Thrower prepared to be on his way-he had promised
to preach in a town a half-day's ride south-he happened to ask Cavil a
question.

"I noticed that all your slaves seem-not old, you understand, but not
young, either."

Cavil shrugged.  "It's the Fugitive Slave Treaty.  Even though my farm's
prospering, I can't buy or sell any slaves-we're part of the United
States now.  Most folks keep up by breeding, but you know all my
pickaninnies ended up south, till lately.  And now I've lost me another
breeder, so I'm down to five women now.  Salamandy was the best.  The
others don't have so many years of babies left in them."

"It occurs to me," said Thrower.  He paused in thought.

"What occurs to you?"

"I've traveled a lot in the North, Brother Cavil, and in most every town
in Ohio and Suskwahenny and Irrakwa and Wobbish, there's a family or two
of Blacks.  Now, you know and I know that they didn't grow on northern
trees."

"All runaways."

"Some, no doubt, have their freedom legally.  But manyertainly there are
many runaways.  Now, I understand that it's a custom for every
slaveowner to keep a cachet of hair and nail clippings and-"

"Oh, yes, we take them from the minute they're born or the minute we buy
them.  For the Finders."

"Exactly."

"But we can't exactly send the Finders to walk every foot of ground in
the whole North, hoping to run into one particular runaway buck.  It'd
cost more than the price of the slave."

"It seems to me that the price of slaves has gone up lately."

"If you mean that we can't buy one at any price-"

"That's what I mean, Brother Cavil.  And what if the Finders don't have
to go blindly through the North, relying on chance?  What if you
arranged to hire people in the North to scour the papers and take note
of the name and age of every Black they see there?  Then the Finders
could go armed with information."

Well, that idea was so good that it stopped Cavil right short.

"There's got to be something wrong with that idea, or somebody'd already
be doing it."

"Oh, I'll tell you why nobody's done it so far.  There's a good deal of
ill-feeling toward slaveowners in the North.  Even though northerners
hate their Black neighbors, their misguided consciences won't let them
cooperate in any kind of slave search.  So any southerner who ever went
north searching for a runaway soon learned that if he didn't have his
Finder right with him, or if the trail was cold, then there was no use
searching."

"That's the truth of it.  Like a bunch of thieves up North, conspiring
to keep a man from recovering his run-off stock."

"But what if you had northerners doing the searching for you?

What if you had an agent in the North, a minister perhaps, who could
enlist others in the cause, who could find people who could be trusted?
Such an endeavor would be expensive, but given the impossibility of
buying new slaves in Appalachee, don't you imagine people would be
willing to pay enough to finance the work of recovering their runaways?"

"Pay?  They'd pay double what you ask.  They'd pay up front on the
chance of you doing it."

"Suppose I charged twenty dollars to register their runawaybirthdate,
name, description, time and circumstances of escape-and then charged a
thousand dollars if I provide them with information leading to
recovery?"

"Fifty dollars to register, or they won't believe you're serious.

And another fifty whenever you send them information, even if it doesn't
turn out to be the right one.  And three thousand for runaways recovered
healthy."

Thrower smiled slightly.  "I don't wish to make an unfair profit from
the work of righteousness."

"Profit!  You got a lot of folks up there to pay if you're going to do a
good job.  I tell you, Thrower, you write up a contract, and then get
the printer in town to run you off a thousand copies.  Then you just go
around and tell what you plan to one slaveowner in each town you come to
in Appalachee.  I reckon you'll have to get a new printing done within a
week.  We're not talking profit here, we're talking a valuable service.
Why, I'll bet you get contributions from folks what never had a runaway.
If you can make it so the Ohio River stops being the last barrier before
they get away clean, it'll not only return old runaways, it'll make the
other slaves lose hope and stay home!"

Not half an hour later, Thrower was back ouside and on his horse -but
now he had notes written up for the contract and letters of introduction
from Cavil to his lawyer and to the printer, along with letters of
credit to the tune of five hundred dollars.  When Thrower protested that
it was too much, Cavil wouldn't even hear him out.

"To get you started," said Cavil.  "We both know whose work we're doing.
It takes money.  I have it and you don't, so take it and get busy."

"That's a Christian attitude," said Thrower.  "Like the saints in the
early Church, who had all things in common."

Cavil patted Thrower's thigh, where he sat stiff in the
saddlenortherners just didn't know how to sit a horse.  "We've had more
in common than any other two men alive," said Cavil.  "We've had the
same visions and done the same works, and if that don't make us two peas
in a pod, I don't know what will."

"When next I see the Visitor, if I should be so fortunate, I know that
he'll be pleased."

"Amen," said Cavil.

Then he slapped Thrower's horse and watched him out of sight.

My Hagar.  He's going to find my Hagar and her little boy.  Nigh on
seven years since she stole my firstborn child from me.  Now she'll come
back, and this time she'll stay in chains and give me more children
until she can't have no more.  And as for the boy, he'll be my Ishmael.
That's what I'll call him, too.  Ishmael.  I'll keep him right here, and
raise him up to be strong and obedient and a true Christian.

When he's old enough I'll hire him out to other plantations, and during
the nights he'll go and carry on my work, spreading the chosen seed
throughout Appalachee.  Then my children will surely be as numberless as
the sands of the sea, just like Abraham.

And who knows?  Maybe then the miracle will happen, and my own dear wife
will be healed, and she'll conceive and bear me a pure White child, my
Isaac, to inherit all my land and all my work.  Lord my Overseer, be
merciful to me.

Spelling Bee

Early January, with deep snow, and a wind sharp enough to slice your
nose off-so of course that was a day for Makepeace Smith to decide he
had to work in the forge all day, while Alvin went into town to buy
supplies and deliver finished work.  In the summer, the choice of jobs
tended to go the other way.

Never mind, thought Alvin.  He is the master here.  But if I'm ever
master of my own forge, and if I have me a prentice, you can bet he'll
be treated fairer than I've been.  A master and prentice ought to share
the work alike, except for when the prentice plain don't know how, and
then the master ought to teach him.  That's the bargain, not to have a
slave, not to always have the prentice take the wagon into town through
the snow.

Truth to tell, though, Alvin knew he wouldn't have to take the wagon.
Horace Guester's sleigh-and-two would do the job, and he knew Horace
wouldn't mind him taking it, as long as Alvin did whatever errands the
roadhouse needed doing in town.

Alvin bundled himself tight and pushed out into the wind-it was right in
his face, from the west, the whole way up to the roadhouse.

He took the path up by Miss Lamer's house, it being the closest way with
the most trees to break the wind.  Course she wasn't in.  It being
school hours, she was with the children in the schoolhouse in town.

But the old springhouse, it was Alvin's schoolhouse, and just passing by
the door got him to thinking about his studies.

She had him learning things he never thought to learn.  He was expecting
more of ciphering and reading and writing, and in a way that's what she
had him doing, right enough.  But she didn't have him reading out of
those primers like the children-like Arthur Stuart, who plugged away at
his studies by lamplight every night in the springhouse.  No, she talked
to Alvin about ideas he never would've' thought of, and all his writing
and calculating was about such things.

Yesterday: "The smallest particle is an atom," she said.

"According to the theory of Demosthenes, everything is made out of
smaller things, until you come to the atom, which is smallest of all and
cannot be divided."

"What's it look like?" Alvin asked her.

"I don't know.  It's too small to see.  Do you know?"

"I reckon not.  Never saw anything so small but what you could cut it in
half."

"But can't you imagine anything smaller?"

"Yeah, but I can split that too."

She sighed.  "Well, now, Alvin, think again.  If there were a thing so
small it couldn't be divided, what would it be like?"

"Real small, I reckon."

But he was joking.  It was a problem, and he set out to answer it the
way he answered any practical problem.  He sent his bug out into the
floor.  Being wood, the floor was a jumble of things, the broke-up
once-alive hearts of living trees, so Alvin quickly sent his bug on into
the iron of the stove, which was mostly all one thing inside.

Being hot, the bits of it, the tiniest parts he ever saw clear, they
were a blur of movement; while the fire inside, it made its own outward
rush of light and heat, each bit of it so small and fine that he could
barely hold the idea of it in his mind.  He never really saw the bits of
fire.  He only knew that they had just passed by.

"Light," he said.  "And heat.  They can't be cut up."

"True.  Fire isn't like earth-it can't be cut.  But it can be changed.

can't it?  It can be extinguished.  It can cease to be itself.

And therefore the parts of it must become something else, and so they
were not the unchangeable and indivisible atoms."

"Well, there's nothing smaller than those bits of fire, so I reckon
there's no such thing as an atom."

"Alvin, you've got to stop being so empirical about things."

"If I knowed what that was, I'd stop being it."

"If I knew."

"Whatever."

"You can't always answer every question by sitting back and
doodlebugging your way through the rocks outside or whatever."

Alvin sighed.  "Sometimes I wish I never told you what I do."

"Do you want me to teach you what it means to be a Maker or not?"

in

"That's just what I want!  And instead you talk about atoms and gravity
and-I don't care what that old humbug Newton said, nor anybody else!  I
want to know how to make thplace.  " He remembered only just in time
that there was Arthur Stuart in the corner, memorizing every word they
said, complete with tone of voice.  No sense filling Arthur's head with
the Crystal City.

"Don't you understand, Alvin?  It's been so long-thousands of years-that
no one knows what a Maker really is, or what he does.

Only that there were such men, and a few of the tasks that they could
do.  Changing lead or iron into gold, for instance.  Water into wine.

That sort of thing."

"I expect iron to gold'd be easier," said Alvin.  "Those metals are
pretty much all one thing inside.  But wine-that's such a mess of
different stuff inside that you'd have to be a-a-" He couldn't think of
a word for the most power a man could have.

"Maker."

That was the word, right enough.  "I reckon."

"I'm telling you, Alvin, if you want to learn how to do the things that
Makers once did, you have to understand the nature of things.

You can't change what you don't understand."

"And I can't understand what I don't see."

"Wrong!  Absolutely false, Alvin Smith!  It is what you can see that
remains impossible to understand.  The world you actually see is nothing
more than an example, a special case.  But the underlying principles,
the order that holds it all together, that is forever invisible.  It can
only be discovered in the imagination, which is precisely the aspect of
your mind that is most neglected."

Well, last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee
that he'd stay stupid, which he said was just fine with him as he'd
stayed alive against long odds by being as pure stupid as he was without
any help from her.  Then he stormed on outside and walked around
watching the first flakes of this storm start coming down.

He'd only been walking a little while when he realized that she was
right, and he knowed it all along.  Knew it.  He always sent out his bug
to see what was there, but then when he got set to make a change, he
first had to think up what he wanted it to be.  He had to think of
something that wasn't there, and hold a picture of it in his mind, and
then, in that way he was born with and still didn't understand, he'd
say, See this?  This is how you ought to be!  And then, sometimes fast,
sometimes slow, the bits of it would move around until they lined up
right.  That's how he always did it: separating a piece off of living
rock; joining together two bits of wood; making the iron line up strong
and true; spreading the heat of the fire smooth and even along the
bottom of the crucible.  So I do see what isn't there, in my mind, and
that's what makes it come to be there.

For a terrible dizzying moment he wondered if maybe the whole world was
maybe no more than what he imagined it to be, and if that was true then
if he stopped imagining, it'd just go away.  Of course, once he got his
sense together he knew that if he'd been thinking it up, there wouldn't
be so many strange things in the world that he never could've thought of
himself.

So maybe the world was all dreamed up in the mind of God.  But no, can't
be that neither, because if God dreamed up men like White Murderer
Harrison then God wasn't too good.  No, the best Alvin could think of
was that God worked pretty much the way Alvin did -told the rocks of the
earth and the fire of the sun and stuff like that, told it all how it
was supposed to be and then let it be that way.  But when God told
people how to be, why, they just thumbed their noses and laughed at him,
mostly, or else they pretended to obey while they still went on and did
what they pleased.  The planets and the stars and the elements, they all
might be thought up from the mind of God, but people were just too
cantankerous to blame them on anybody but their own self.

Which was about the limit of Alvin's thinking last night, in the
snow-wondering about what he could never know.  Things like I wonder
what God dreams about if he ever sleeps, and if all his dreams come
true, so that every night he makes up a whole new world full of people.

Questions that couldn't never get him a speck closer to being a Maker.

So today, slogging through the snow, pushing against the wind toward the
roadhouse, he started thinking again about the original question-what an
atom would be like.  He tried to picture something so tiny that he
couldn't cut it.  But whenever he imagined something like that-a little
box or a little ball or something-why, then he'd just up and imagine it
splitting right in half.

The only way he couldn't split something in half was if it was so thin
nothing could be thinner.  He thought of it squished so flat it was
thinner than paper, so thin that in that direction it didn't even exist,
if you looked at it edge-on it would just plain not be there.

But even then, he might not be able to split it along the edge, but he
could still imagine turning it and slicing it across, just like paper.

So-what if it was squished up in another direction, too, so it was all
edge, going on like the thinnest thread you ever dreamed of?

Nobody could see it, but it would still be there, because it would
stretch from here to there.  He sure couldn't split that along the edge,
and it didn't have any flat surface like paper had.  Yet as long as it
stretched like invisible thread from one spot to another, no matter how
short the distance was, he could still imagine snipping it right in
half, and each half in half again.

No, the only way something could be small enough to be an atom is if it
had no size at all in any direction, not length nor breadth nor depth.
That would be an atom all right-only it wouldn't even exist, it'd just
be nothing.  Just a place without anything in it.

He stood on the porch of the roadhouse, stamping snow off his feet,
which did better than knocking for telling folks he was there.

He could hear Arthur Stuart's feet running to open the door, but all he
was thinking about was atoms.  Because even though he'd just figured out
that there couldn't be no atoms, he was beginning to realize it might be
even crazier to imagine there not being atoms, so things could always
get cut into smaller bits and those things into smaller bits, and those
into even smaller bits, forever and ever.  And when you think about it,
it's got to be one or the other.  Either you get to the bit that can't
be split, and it's an atom, or you never do, and so it goes on forever,
which is more than Alvin's head could hold.

Alvin found himself in the roadhouse kitchen, with Arthur Stuart
piggyback, playing with Alvin's hat and scarf.  Horace Guester was out
in the barn stuffing straw into new bedticks, so Alvin asked Old Peg for
use of the sleigh.  It was hot in the kitchen, and Goody Guester didn't
look to be in good temper.  She allowed as how he could take the sled,
but there was a price to pay.

"Save the life of a certain child, Alvin, and take Arthur Stuart with
you," she said, "or I swear he'll do one more thing to rile me and end
up in the pudding tonight."

It was true that Arthur Stuart seemed to be in a mood to make trouble-he
was strangling Alvin with his own scarf and laughing like a fool.

"Let's do some lessons, Arthur," said Alvin.  "Spell 'choking to death."

"C-H-0-K-I-N-G," said Arthur Stuart.  "T-W-0.  D-E-A-T-H."

Mad as she was, Goody Guester just had to break up laughingnot because
he spelled "to" wrong, but because he'd spelled out the words in the
most perfect imitation of Miss Lamer's voice.  "I swear, Arthur Stuart,"
she said, "you best never let Miss Lamer hear you go on like that or
your schooling days are over."

"Good!  I hate school!" said Arthur.

"You don't hate school so much as you'd hate working with me in the
kitchen every day," said Goody Guester.  "All day every day, summer and
winter, even swimming days."

"I might as well be a slave in Appalachee!" shouted Arthur Stuart.

Goody Guester stopped teasing and being mad, both, and turned solemn.
"Don't even joke like that, Arthur.  Somebody died once just to keep you
from being such a thing."

"I know," said Arthur.

"No you don't, but you'd better just think before you-"

"It was my mama," said Arthur.

Now Old Peg started looking scared.  She took a glance at Alvin and then
said, "Never mind about that, anyway."

"My mama was a blackbird," said Arthur.  "She flew so high, but then the
ground caught her and she got stuck and died."

Alvin saw how Goody Guester looked at him, even more nervouslike.

So maybe there was something to Arthur's story of flying after all.

Maybe somehow that girl buried up beside Vigor, maybe somehow she got a
blackbird to carry her baby somehow.  Or maybe it was just some vision.

Anyway, Goody Guester had decided to act like it was nothing after
all-too late to fool Alvin, of course, but she wouldn't know that.

"Well, that's a pretty story, Arthur," said Old Peg.

"It's true," said Arthur.  "I remember."

Goody Guester started looking even more upset.  But Alvin knew better
than to argue with Arthur about this blackbird idea he had, and about
him flying once.  The only way to stop Arthur talking about it was to
get his mind on something else.  "Better come with me, Arthur Stuart,"
said Alvin.  "Maybe you got a blackbird mama sometime in your past, but
I have a feeling your mama here in this kitchen is about to knead you
like dough."

"Don't forget what I need you to buy for me," said Old Peg.

"Oh, don't worry.  I got a list," said Alvin.

"I didn't see you write a thing!"

"Arthur Stuart's my list.  Show her, Arthur."

Arthur leaned close to Alvin's ear and shouted so loud it like to split
Alvin's eardrums right down to his ankles.  "A keg of wheat flour and
two cones of sugar and a pound of pepper and a dozen sheets of paper and
a couple of yards of cloth that might do for a shirt for Arthur Stuart."

Even though he was shouting, it was his mama's own voice.

She purely hated it when he mimicked her, and so here she came with the
stirring fork in one hand and a big old cleaver in the other.

"Hold still, Alvin, so I can stick the fork in his mouth and shave off a
couple of ears!"

"Save me!" cried Arthur Stuart.

Alvin saved him by running away, at least till he got to the back door.
Then Old Peg set down her instruments of boy-butchery and helped Alvin
bundle Arthur Stuart up in coats and leggings and boots and scarves till
he was about as big around as he was tall.  Then Alvin pitched him out
the door into the snow and rolled him with his foot till he was covered
with snow.

Old Peg barked at him from the kitchen door.  "That's right.

Alvin Junior, freeze him to death right before his own mother's eyes,
you irresponsible prentice boy you!"

Alvin and Arthur Stuart just laughed.  Old Peg told them to be careful
and get home before dark and then she slammed the door tight.

They hitched up the sleigh, then swept out the new snow that had blown
in while they were hitching it and got in and pulled up the lap robe.
They first went on down to the forge again to pick up the work Alvin had
to deliver-mostly hinges and fittings and tools for carpenters and
leatherworkers in town, who were all in the midst of their busiest
season of the year.  Then they headed out for town.

They didn't get far before they caught up to a man trudging townward-and
none too well dressed, either, for weather like this.

When they were beside him and could see his face, Alvin wasn't surprised
to see it was Mock Berry.

"Get on this sleigh, Mock Berry, so I won't have your death on my
conscience," said Alvin.

Mock looked at Alvin like his words was the first Mock even noticed
somebody was there on the road, even though he'd just been passed by the
horses, snorting and stamping through the snow.

"Thank you, Alvin," said the man.  Alvin slid over on the seat to make
room.  Mock climbed up beside himlumsy, cause his hands were cold.  Only
when he was sitting down did he seem to notice Arthur Stuart sitting on
the bench.  And then it was like somebody slapped him-he started to get
right back down off the sleigh.

"Now hold on!" said Alvin.  "Don't tell me you're just as stupid as the
White folks in town, refusing to sit next to a mixup boy!  Shame on
you!"

Mock looked at Alvin real steady for a long couple of seconds before he
decided how to answer.  "Look here, Alvin Smith, you know me better than
that.  I know how such mixup children come to be, and I don't hold
against them what some White man done to their mama.

But there's a story in town about who's the real mama of this child, and
it does me no good to be seen coming into town with this child nearby."

Alvin knew the story well enough-how Arthur Stuart was supposedly the
child of Mock's wife Anga, and how, since Arthur was plainly fathered by
some White man, Mock refused even to have the boy in his own house,
which led to Goody Guester taking Arthur in.

Alvin also knew the story wasn't true.  But in a town like this it was
better to have such a story believed than to have the true story guessed
at.  Alvin wouldn't put it past some folks to try to get Arthur Stuart
declared a slave and shipped on south just to be rid of him so there'd
be no more trouble about schools and such.

"Never mind about that," said Alvin.  "Nobody's going to see you on a
day like this, and even if they do, Arthur looks like a wad of cloth,
and not a boy at all.  You can hop off soon as we get into town."

Alvin leaned out and took Mock's arm and pulled him onto the seat.

"Now pull up the lap robe and snuggle close so I don't have to take you
to the undertaker on account of having froze to death."

"Thank you kindly, you persnickety uppity prentice boy." Mock pulled the
lap robe up so high that it covered Arthur Stuart completely.  Arthur
yelled and pulled it down again so he could see over the top.  Then he
gave Mock Berry such a glare that it might have burnt him to a cinder,
if he hadn't been so cold and wet.

When they got into town, there was sleighs a-plenty, but none of the
merriment of the first heavy snowfwl.  Folks just went about their
business, and the horses stood and waited, stamping their feet and
snorting and steaming in the cold wind.  The lazier sort of folks-the
lawyers and clerks and such-they were all staying at home on a day like
this.  But the people with real work to do, they had their fires hot,
their workshops busy, their stores open for business.  Alvin made his
rounds a-dropping off ironwork with the folks who'd called for it.

They all put their signature on Makepeace's delivery bookthe more
slight, that he wouldn't trust Alvin to take cash, like he was a
nine-year-old prentice boy and not more than twice that age.

On those quick errands, Arthur Stuart stayed bundled up on the
sleigh-Alvin never stayed indoors long enough to warm up from the walk
between sleigh and front door.  It wasn't till they got to Pieter
Vanderwoort's general store that it was worth going inside and warming
up for a spell.  Pieter had his stove going right hot, and Alvin and
Arthur wasn't the first to think of warming up there.  A couple of boys
from town were there warming their feet and sipping tea with a nip or
two from a flask in order to keep warm.  They weren't any of the boys
Alvin spent much time with.  He'd throwed them once or twice, but that
was true of every male creature in town who was willing to rassle.

Alvin knew that these two-Martin, that was the one with pimples, and the
other one was Daisy-I know that sounds like a crazy name for anyone but
a cow, but that was his name all right-anyway, Alvin knew that these two
boys were the kind who like to set cats afire and make nasty jokes about
girls behind their back.  Not the kind that Alvin spent much time with,
but not any that he had any partickler dislike for, neither.  So he
nodded them good afternoon, and they nodded him back.

One of them held up his flask to share, but Alvin said no thanks and
that was that.

At the counter, Alvin pulled off some of his scarves, which felt good
because he was so sweaty underneath; then he set to unwinding Arthur
Stuart, who spun around like a top while Alvin pulled on the end of each
scarf.  Arthur's laughing brought Mr.  Vanderwoort out from the back,
and he set to laughing, too.

"They're so cute when they're little, aren't they," said Mr.
Vanderwoort.

"He's just my shopping list today, aren't you, Arthur?"

Arthur Stuart spouted out his list right off, using his Mama's voice
again.  "A keg of wheat flour and two cones of sugar and a pound of
pepper and a dozen sheets of paper and a couple of yards of cloth that
might do for a shirt for Arthur Stuart."

Mr.  Vanderwoort like to died laughing.  "I get such a kick out of that
boy, the way he talks like his mama."

One of the boys by the stove gave a whoop.

"I mean his adopted mama, of course," said Vanderwoort.

"Oh, she's probably his mama all right!" said Daisy.  "I hear Mock Berry
does a lot of work up to the roadhouse!"

Alvin just set his jaw against the answer that sprang to mind.

Instead he hotted up the flask in Daisy's hand, so Daisy whooped again
and dropped it.

"You come on back with me, Arthur Stuart," said Vanderwoort.

"Like to burned my hand off!" muttered Daisy.

"You just say the list over again, bit by bit, and I'll get what's
wanted," said Vanderwoort.  Alvin lifted Arthur over the counter and
Vanderwoort set him down on the other side.

"You must've set it on the stove like the blamed fool you are, Daisy,"
said Martin.  "What is it, whiskey don't warm you up less it's boiled?"

Vanderwoort led Arthur into the back room.  Alvin took a couple of soda
crackers from the barrel and pulled up a stool near the tire.

"I didn't set it anywheres near the stove," said Daisy.

"Howdy, Alvin," said Martin.

"Howdy, Martin, Daisy," said Alvin.  "Good day for stoves."

"Good day for nothing," muttered Daisy.  "Smart-mouth pickaninnies and
burnt fingers."

"What brings you to town, Alvin?" asked Martin.  "And how come you got
that baby buck with you?  Or did you buy him'off Old Peg Guester?"

Alvin just munched on his cracker.  It was a mistake to punish Daisy for
what he said before, and a worse mistake to do it again.

Wasn't it trying to punish folks that brought the Unmaker down on him
last summer?  No, Alvin was working on curbing his temper, so he said
nothing.  Just broke off pieces of the cracker with his mouth.

"That boy ain't for sale," said Daisy.  "Everybody knows it.  Why, she's
even trying to educate him, I hear."

"I'm educating my dog, too," said Martin.  "You think that boy's learnt
him how to beg or point game or anything useful?"

"But you got yourself the advantage'there, Marty," said Daisy.  "A dog's
got him enough brains to know he's a dog, so he don't try to learn how
to read.  But you get one of these hairless monkeys, they get to
thinking they're people, you know what I mean?"

Alvin got up and walked to the counter.  Vanderwoort was coming back
now, arms full of stuff.  Arthur was tagging along behind.

"Come on behind the counter with me, Al," said Vanderwoort.

"Best if you pick out the cloth for Arthur's shirt."

"I don't know a thing about cloth," said Alvin.

"Well, I know about cloth but I don't know about what Old Peg Guester
likes, and if she ain't happy with what you come home with, I'd rather
it be your fault than mine."

Alvin hitched his butt up onto t e counter and swung his legs over.

Vanderwoort led him back and they spent a few minutes picking out a
plaid flannel that looked suitable enough and might also be tough enough
to make patches on old trousers out of the leftover scraps.

When they came back, Arthur Stuart was over by the fire with Daisy and
Martin.

"Spell 'sassafras,' " said Daisy.

"Sassafras," said Arthur Stuart, doing Miss Lamer's voice as perfect as
ever.  "S-A-S-S-A-F-R-A-S."

"Was he right?" asked Martin.

"Beats hell out of me."

"Now don't be using words like that around a child," said Vanderwoort.

"Oh, never you mind," said Martin.  "He's our pet pickaninny.  We won't
do him no harm."

"I'm not a pickaninny," said Arthur Stuart.  "I'm a mixup boy."

"Well, ain't that the truth!" Daisy's voice went so loud and high that
his voice cracked.

Alvin was just about fed up with them.  He spoke real soft, so only
Vanderwoort could hear him.  "One more whoop and I'll fill that boy's
ears with snow."

"Now don't get riled," said Vanderwoort.  "They're harmless enough."

"That's why I won't kill him." But Alvin was smiling, and so was
Vanderwoort.  Daisy and Martin were just playing, and since Arthur
Stuart was enjoying it, why not?

Martin picked something off a shelf and brought it over to Vanderwoort.
"What's this word?" he asked.

"Eucalyptus," said Vanderwoort.

"Spell 'eucalipidus,' mixup boy."

"Eucalyptus," said Arthur.  "E-U-C-A-L-Y-P-T-U-S."

"Listen to that!" cried Daisy.  "That teacher lady won't give time of
day to us, but here we got her own voice spelling whatever we say."

"Spell 'bosoms,' " said Martin.

"Now that's going too far," said Vanderwoort.  "He's just a boy."

"I just wanted to hear the teacher lady's voice saying it," said Martin.

"I know what you wanted, but that's behind-the-barn talk, not in my
general store."

The door opened and, after a blast of cold wind, Mock Berry came in,
looking tired and half-froze, which of course he was.

The boys took no notice.  "Behind the barn don't got a stove," said
Daisy.

"Then keep that in mind when you decide how to talk," said Vanderwoort.

Alvin watched how Mock Berry took sidelong glances at the stove, but
made no move to go over there.  No man in his right mind would choose
not to go to the stove on a day like this-but Mock Berry knew there was
worse things than being cold.  So instead he just walked up to the
counter.

Vanderwoort must've known he was there, but for a while he just kept on
watching Martin and Daisy play spelling games with Arthur Stuart, paying
no mind to Mock Berry.

"Suskwahenny," said Daisy.

"S-U-S-K-W-A-H-E-N-N-Y," said Arthur.

"I bet that boy could win any spelling bee he ever entered," said
Vanderwoort.

"You got a customer," said Alvin.

Vanderwoort turned real slow and looked at Mock Berry without
expression.  Then, still moving slow, he walked over and stood in front
of Mock without a word.

"Just need me two pounds of flour and twelve feet of that half-inch
rope," said Mock.

"Hear that?" said Daisy.  "He's a-fixing to powder his face white and
then I hang himself, I'll bet."

"Spell suicide,' boy," said Martin.

"S-U-1-C-1-D-E," said Arthur Stuart.

"No credit," said Vanderwoort.

Mock laid down some coins on the counter.  Vanderwoort looked at them a
minute.  "Six feet of rope."

Mock just stood there.

Vanderwoort just stood there.

Alvin knew it was more than enough money for what Mock wanted to buy. He
couldn't hardly believe Vanderwoort was raising his price for a man
about as poor but hard-working as any in town.  In fact, Alvin began to
understand a little about why Mock stayed so poor.  Now, Alvin knew
there wasn't much he could do about it-but he could at least do what
Horace Guester had once done for him with his master Makepeace-make
Vanderwoort put things out in the open and stop pretending he wasn't
being as unfair as he was being.  So Alvin laid down the paper
Vanderwoort had just written out for him.

"I'm sorry to hear there's no credit," Alvin said.  "I'll go fetch the
money from Goody Guester."

Vanderwoort looked at Alvin.  Now he could either make Alvin go fetch
the money or say right out that there was credit for the Guesters, just
not for Mock Berry.

Of course he chose another course.  Without a word he went into the back
and weighed out the flour.  Then he measured out twelve feet of
half-inch rope.  Vanderwoort was known for giving honest measure.

But then, he was also known for giving a fair price, which is why it
took Alvin aback to see him do otherwise with Mock Berry.

Mock took his rope and his flour and started out.

"You got change," said Vanderwoort.

Mock turned around, looking surprised though he tried not to.  He came
back and watched as Vanderwoort counted out a dime and three pennies
onto the counter.  Then, hesitating a moment, Mock scooped them off the
counter and dropped them into his pocket.

"Thank you sir," he said.  Then he went back out into the cold.

Vanderwoort turned to Alvin, looking angry or maybe just resentful.  "I
can't give credit to everybody."

Now, Alvin could've said something about at least he could give the same
price to Blacks as Whites, but he didn't want to make an enemy out of
Mr.  Vanderwoort, who was after all a mostly good man.

So Alvin grinned real friendly and said, "Oh, I know you can't.

Them Berrys, they're almost as poor as me."

Vanderwoort relaxed, which meant it was Alvin's good opinion he wanted
more than to get even for Alvin embarrassing him.  "You got to
understand, Alvin, it ain't good for trade if they come in here all the
time.  Nobody minds that mixup boy of yours-they're cute when they're
little-but it makes folks stay away if they think they might run into
one of them here."

"I always knowed Mock Berry to keep his word," said Alvin.

"And nobody ever said he stole or slacked or any such thing."

"No, nobody ever told such a tale on him."

IL

"I'm glad to know you count us both among your customers," said Alvin.

"Well, lookit here, Daisy," said Martin.  "I think Prentice Alvin's gone
and turned preacher on us.  Spell 'reverend,' boy."

"R-E-V-E-R-E-N-D."

Vanderwoort saw things maybe turning ugly, so of course he tried to
change the subject.  "Like I said, Alvin, that mixup boy's bound to be
the best speller in the county, don't you think?  What I want to know
is, why don't he go on and get into the county spelling bee next week? I
think he'd bring Hatrack River the championship.  He might even get the
state championship, if you want my opinion."

"Spell 'championship,"' said Daisy.

"Miss Lamer never said me that word," said Arthur Stuart.

"Well figure it out," said Alvin.

"C-H-A-M-P," said Arthur.  "E-U-N-S-H-1-P."

"Sounds right to me," said Daisy.

"Shows what you know," said Martin.

"Can you do better?" asked Vanderwoor-t.

"I'm not going to be in the county spelling bee," said Martin.

"What's a spelling bee?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"Time to go," said Alvin, for he knew full well that Arthur Stuart
wasn't a regular admitted student in the Hatrack River Grammar School,
and so it was a sure thing he wouldn't be in no spelling bee.

"Oh, Mr.  Vanderwoort, I owe you for two crackers I ate."

"I don't charge my friends for a couple of crackers," said Vanderwoort.

"I'm proud to know you count me one of your friends," said Alvin.

Alvin meant it, too-it took a good man to get caught out doing something
wrong, and then turn around and treat the one that caught him as a
friend.

Alvin wound Arthur Stuart back into his scarves, and then wrapped
himself up again, and plunged back into the snow, this time carrying all
that he bought from Vanderwoort in a burlap sack.  He tucked the sack
under the seat of the s leigh so it wouldn't get snowed on.  Then he
lifted Arthur Stuart into place and climbed up after.  The horses looked
happy enough to get moving again-they only got colder and colder,
standing in the snow.

On the way back to the roadhouse they found Mock Berry on the road and
took him on home.  Not a word did he say about what happened in the
store, but Alvin knew it wasn't cause he didn't appreciate it.  He
figured Mock Berry was plain ashamed of the fact that it took an
eighteen-year-old prentice boy to get him honest measure and fair price
in Vanderwoort's general store-only cause the boy was White.  Not the
kind of thing a man loves to talk about.

"Give a howdy to Goody Berry," said Alvin, as Mock hopped off the sleigh
up the lane from his house.

"I'll say you said so," said Mock.  "And thanks for the ride." In six
steps he was clean gone in the blowing snow.  The storm was getting
worse and worse.

Once everything was dropped off at the roadhouse, it was near time for
Alvin's and Arthur's schooling at Miss Lamer's house, so they headed on
down there and threw snowballs at each other all the way.

Alvin stopped in at the forge to give the delivery book to Makepeace.

But Makepeace must've laid off early cause he wasn't there; Alvin tucked
the book onto the shelf by the door, where Makepeace would know to look
for it.  Then he and Arthur went back to snowballs till Miss Lamer came
back.

Dr.  Whitley Physicker drove her in his covered sleigh and walked her
right up to her door.  When he took note of Alvin and Arthur waiting
around, he looked a bit annoyed.  "Don't you boys think Miss Lamer
shouldn't have to do any more teaching on a day like this?"

Miss Lamer laid a hand on Dr.  Physicker's arm.  "Thank you for bringing
me home, Dr.  Physicker," she said.

"I wish you'd call me Whitley."

"You're kind to me, Dr.  Physicker, but I think your honored title suits
me best.  As for these pupils of mine, it's in bad weather that I do my
best teaching, I've found, for they aren't wishing to be at the swimming
hole."

"Not me!" shouted Arthur Stuart.  "How do you spell 'championship'?"

"C-H-A-M-P-1-0-N-S-H-1-P," said Miss Lamer.  "Wherever did you hear that
word?"

"C-H-A-M-P-1-0-N-S-H-1-P," said Arthur Stuart-in Miss Lamer's voice.

"That boy is certainly remarkable," said Physicker.  "A mockingbird, I'd
say."

"A mockingbird copies the song," said Miss Lamer, "but makes no sense of
it.  Arthur Stuart may speak back the spellings in my voice, but he
truly knows the word and can read it or write it whenever he wishes."

"I'm not a mockingbird," said Arthur Stuart.  "I'm a spelling bee
championship."

Dr.  Physicker and Miss Lamer exchanged a look that plainly meant more
than Alvin could understand just from watching.

"Very well," said Dr.  Physicker.  "Since I did in fact enroll him as a
special student-at your insistence-he can compete in the county spelling
bee.  But don't expect to take him any farther, Miss Lamer!"

"Your reasons were all excellent, Dr.  Physicker, and so I agree.

But my reasons-"

"Your reasons were overwhelming, Miss Lamer.  And I can't help but
relish in advance the consternation of the people who fought to keep him
out of school, when they watch him do as well as children twice his
age."

"Consternation, Arthur Stuart," said Miss Lamer.

"Consternation," said Arthur.  "C-0-N-S-T-E-R-N-A-T-1-0-N."

"Good evening, Dr.  Physicker.  Come inside, boys.  Time for school."

Arthur Stuart won the county spelling bee, with the word "celebratory."
Then Miss Lamer immediately withdrew him from further competition;
another child would take his place at the state competition.  As a
result there was little note taken, except among the locals.

Along with a brief notice in the Hatrack River newspaper.

Sheriff Pauley Wiseman folded up that page of the newspaper with a short
note and put them in an envelope addressed to Reverend Philadelphia
Thrower, The Property Rights Crusade, 44 Haon Street, Carthage City,
Wobbis .  It too two wee t newspaper page to be spread open on Thrower's
desk, along with the note, which said simply: Boy turned up here summer
1811, only a few weeks old best guess.  Lives in Horace Guester's
roadhouse, Hatrack River.  Adoption don't hold water I reckon if the
boy's a runaway.

No signature-but Thrower was used to that, though he didn't understand
it.  Why should people try to conceal their identity when they were
taking part in works of righteousness?  He wrote his own letter and sent
it south.

A month later, Cavil Planter read Thrower's letter to a couple of
Finders.  Then he handed them the cachets he'd saved all these years,
those belonging to Hagar and her stole-away Ishmael-child.  "We'll be
back before summer," said the black-haired Finder.  "If he's yourn,
we'll have him."

"Then you'll have earned your fee and a fine bonus as well," said Cavil
Planter.

"Don't need no bonus," said the white-haired Finder.  "Fee and costs is
plenty."

"Well, then, as you wish," said Cavil.  "I know God will bless your
journey."

manacles

It was early spring, a couple of months before Alvin's nineteenth
birthday, when Makepeace Smith come to him and said, "About time you
start working on a journeyman piece, Al, don't you think?"

The words sang like redbird song in Alvin's ears, so he couldn't hardly
speak back except to nod.

"Well, what do you think you'll make?" asked the master.

"I been thinking maybe a plow," said Alvin.

"That's a lot of iron.  Takes a perfect mold, and no easy one, neither.
You're asking me to put a good bit of iron at risk, boy."

"If I fail, you can always melt it back."

Since they both knew that Alvin had about as much chance of falling as
he did of flying, this was pretty much empty talk-just the last rags of
Makepeace's old pretense about how Alvin wasn't much good at smithing.

"Reckon so," said Makepiece.  "You just do your best, boy.  Hard but not
too brittle.  Heavy enough to bite deep, but light enough to pull. Sharp
enough to cut the earth, and strong enough to cast all stones aside."

"Yes sir." Alvin had memorized the rules of the tools back when he was
twelve years old.

There were some other rules that Alvin meant to follow.  He had to prove
to himself that he was a good smith, and not just a half-baked Maker,
which meant that he'd use none of his knack, only the skills that any
smith has-a good eye, knowledge of the black metal, the vigor of his
arms and the skill of his hands.

Working on his journeyman piece meant he had no other duties till it was
done.  He started from scratch on this one, as a good journeyman always
does.  No common clay for the mold-he went upriver on the Hatrack to the
best white clay, so the face of the mold would be pure and smooth and
hold its shape.  Making a mold meant seeing things all inside-out, but
Alvin had a good mind for shapes.  He patted and stroked the clay into
place on the wooden frame, all the time seeing how the different pieces
of the mold would give the cooling iron its plow shape.  Then he baked
the mold dry and hard, ready to receive the iron.

For the metal, he took from the pile of scrap iron and then carefully
filed the iron clean, getting rid of all dirt and rust.  He scoured the
crucible, too.  Only then was he ready to melt and cast.

He hotted up the coal fire, running the bellows himself, raising and
lowering the bellows handle just like he done when he was a new
prentice.  At last the iron was white in the crucible-and the fire so
hot he could scarce bear to come near it.  But he came near it anyway,
tongs in hand, and hoisted the crucible from the fire, then carried it
to the mold and poured.  The iron sparked and dazzled, but the mold held
true, no buckling or breaking in the heat.

Set the crucible back in the fire.  Push the other parts of the mold
into place.  Gently, evenly, getting no splash.  He had judged the
amount of liquid iron just right-when the last part of the form slipped
into place, just a bit of iron squeezed out evenly all around the edges,
showing there was just enough, and scarce any waste.

And it was done.  Nothing for it but to wait for the iron to cool and
harden.  Tomorrow he'd know what he'd wrought.

Tomorrow Makepeace Smith would see his plow and call him a man-a
journeyman, free to practice at any forge, though not yet ready to take
on his own prentices.  But to Alvin-well, he'd reached that point of
readiness years ago.  Makepeace would have only a few weeks short of the
full seven years of Alvin's service-that's what he'd been waiting for,
not for this plow.

No, Alvin's real journeyman work was yet to come.  After Makepeace
declared the plow good enough, then Alvin had yet another work to
perform.

"I'm going to turn it gold," said Alvin.

Miss Lamer raised an eyebrow.  "And what then?  What will you tell
people about a golden plow?  That you found it somewhere?  That you
happened to have some gold lying about, and thought-this is just enough
to make a plow?"

"You're the one what told me a Maker was the one who could turn iron to
gold."

"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's wise to do it." Miss Lamer walked out
of the hot forge into the stagnant air of late afternoon.

It was cooler, but not much-the first hot night of spring.

"More than gold," said Alvin.  "Or at least not normal gold."

"Regular gold isn't good enough for you?"

"Gold is dead.  Like iron."

"It isn't dead.  It's simply-earth without fire.  It never was alive, so
it can't be dead."

"You're the one who told me that if I can imagine it, then maybe I can
make it come to be."

"And you can imagine living gold?"

"A plow that cuts the earth with no ox to draw it."

She said nothing, but her eyes sparkled.

"If I could make such a thing, Miss Lamer, would you consider as how I'd
graduated from your school of Makers?"

"I'd say you were no longer a prentice Maker."

"Just what I thought, Miss Lamer.  A journeyman blacksmith and a
journeyman Maker, both, if I can do it."

"And can you?"

Alvin nodded, then shrugged.  "I think so.  It's what you said about
atoms, back in January."

"I thought you gave up on that."

"No ma'am.  I just kept thinking-what is it you can't cut into smaller
pieces?  And then I thought-why, if it's got any size at all, it can be
cut.  So an atom, it's nothing more than just a place, one exact place,
with no width at all."

"Euclid's geometric point."

"Well, yes ma'am, except that you said his geometry was all imaginary,
and this is real."

"But if it has no size, Alvin-"

"That's what I thought-if it's got no size, then it's nothing.  But it
isn't nothing.  It's a place.  Only then I thought, it isn't a place-it
just has a place.  If you see the difference.  An atom can be in one
place, one pure geometric point like you said, but then it can move.  It
can be somewhere else.  So, you see, it not only has place, it has a
past and a future.  Yesterday it was there, today it's here, and
tomorrow over yonder."

"But it isn't anything, Alvin."

"No, I know that, it isn't anything.  But it ain't nothing, neither."

"Isn't.  Either."

"I know all that grammar, Miss Lamer, but I'm not thinking about that
right now."

"You won't have good grammar unless you use it even when you're not
thinking about it.  But never mind."

"See, I start thinking, if this atom's got no size, how can anybody tell
where it is?  It's not giving off any light, because it's got no fire in
it to give off.  So here's what I come up with: Just suppose this atom's
got no size, but it's still got some kind of mind.

Some kind of tiny little wit, just enough to know where it is. And the
only power it has is to move somewhere else, and know where it is then.

"

"How could that be, a memory in something that doesn't exist?"

"Just suppose it!  Say you got thousands of them just lying around, just
going any which way.  How can any of them tell where they are?

Since all the others are moving any which way, nothing around it stays
the same.  But then suppose somebody comes along-and I'm thinking about
God here-somebody who can show them a pattern.

Show them some way to set still.  Like he says-you, there, you're the
center, and all the rest of you, you just stay the same distance away
from him all the time.  Then what have you got?"

Miss Lamer thought for a moment.  "A hollow sphere.  A ball.  But still
composed of nothing, Alvin."

"But don't you see?  That's why I knew that this was true.  I mean, if
there's one thing I know from doodlebugging, it's that everything's
mostly empty.  That anvil, it looks solid, don't it?  But I tell you
it's mostly empty.  Just little bits of ironstuff, hanging a certain
distance from each other, all patterned there.  But most of the anvil is
the empty space between.  Don't you see?  Those bits are acting just
like the atoms I'm talking about.  So let's say the anvil is like a
mountain, only when you get real close you see it's made of gravel.  And
then when you pick up the gravel, it crumbles in your hand, and you see
it's made of dust.  And if you could pick up a single fleck of dust
you'd see that it was just like the mountain, made of even tinier gravel
all over again."

"You're saying that what we see as solid objects are really nothing but
illusion.  Little nothings making tiny spheres that are put together to
make your bits, and pieces made from bits, and the anvil made from
pieces-"

"Only there's a lot more steps between, I reckon.

Don't you see, this explains everything?  Why it is that all I have to
do is imagine a new shape or a new pattern or a new order, and show it
in my mind, and if I think it clear and strong enough, and command the
bits to change, why-they do.  Because they're alive.  They may be small
and none too bright, but if I show them clear enough, they can do it."

"This is too strange for me, Alvin.  To think that everything is really
nothing."

"No, Miss Lamer, you're missing the point.  The point is that everything
is alive.  That everything is made out of living atoms, all obeying the
commands that God gave them.  And just following those commands, why,
some of them get turned into light and heat, and some of them become
iron, and some water, and some air, and some of them our own skin and
bones.  All those things are real-and so those atoms are real."

"Alvin, I told you about atoms because they were an interesting theory.
The best thinkers of our time believe there are no such things."

"Begging your pardon, Miss Lamer, but the best thinkers never saw the
things I saw, so they don't know diddly.  I'm telling you that this is
the only idea I can think of that explains it all-what I see and what I
do."

"But where did these atoms come from?"

"They don't come from anywhere.  Or rather, maybe they come from
everywhere.  Maybe these atoms, they're just there.  Always been there,
always will be there.  You can't cut them up.  They can't die.

You can't make them and you can't break them.  They're forever."

"Then God didn't create the world."

"Of course he did.  The atoms were nothing, just places that didn't even
know where they were.  It's God who put them all into places so he'd
know where they were, and so they'd know where they wereand everything
in the whole universe is made out of them."

Miss Lamer thought about it for the longest time.  Alvin stood there
watching her, waiting.  He knew it was true, or at least truer than
anything else he'd ever heard of or thought of.  Unless she could think
of something wrong with it.  So many times this year she'd done that,
point out something he forgot some reason why his idea wouldn't work. So
he waited for her to come up with something.

Something wrong.

Maybe she would've.  Only while she was standing there outside the
forge, thinking, they heard the sound of horses cantering up the road
from town.  Of course they looked to see who was coming in such a rush.

It was Sheriff Pauley Wiseman and two men that Alvin never saw before.
Behind them was Dr.  Physicker's carriage, with old Po Doggly driving.
And they didn't just pass by.  They stopped right there at the curve by
the forge.

"Miss Lamer," said Pauley Wiseman.  "Arthur Stuart around here?"

"Why do you ask?" said Miss Lamer.  "Who are these men?"

"He's here," said one of the men.  The white-haired one.  He held up a
tiny box between his thumb and forefinger.  Both the strangers looked at
it, then looked up the hill toward the springhouse.  "In there," said
the white-haired man.

"You need any more proof than that?" asked Pauley Wiseman.  He was
talking to Dr.  Physicker, who was now out of his carriage and standing
there looking furious and helpless and altogether terrible.

"Finders," whispered Miss Lamer.

"That's us," said the white-haired one.  "You got a runaway slave up
there, Ma'am."

"He is not," she said.  "He is a pupil of mine, legally adopted by
Horace and Margaret Guester-"

"We got a letter from his owner, giving his birthdate, and we got his
cachet here, and he's the very one.

We're sworn and certified, Ma'am.  What we Find is found.  That's the
law, and if you interfere, you're obstructing." The man spoke real nice
and quiet and polite.

"Don't worry, Miss Lamer," said Dr.  Physicker.  "I already ave a writ
from the mayor, and that'll hold him till the judge gets back tomorrow."

"Hold him in jail, of course," said Pauley Wiseman.  "Wouldn't want
anybody to try to run off with him, now, would we?"

"Wouldn't do much good if they tried," said the white-haired Finder.
"We'd just follow.  And then we'll probably shoot them dead, seeing how
they was thieves escaping with stolen property."

"You haven't even told the Guesters, have you!" said Miss Lamer.

"How could I?" said Dr.  Physicker.  "I had to stay with them, to make
sure they didn't just take him."

"We obey the law," said the white-haired Finder.

"There he is," said the black-haired Finder.

Arthur Stuart stood in the open door of the springhouse.

"Just stay where you are, boy!" shouted Pauley Wiseman.  "If you move a
muscle I'll whip you to jelly!"

"You don't have to threaten him," said Miss Lamer, but there wasn't
nobody to listen, since they were all running up the hill.

"Don't hurt him!" cried Dr.  Physicker.

"If he don't run, he won't get hurt," said the white-haired Finder.

"Alvin," said Miss Lamer.  "Don't do it."

"They ain't taking Arthur Stuart."

"Don't use your power like that.  Not to hurt someone."

"I tell you-"

"Think, Alvin.  We have until tomorrow.  Maybe the judge-"

"Putting him in jail!"

"If anything happens to these Finders, then the nationals will be in it,
to enforce the Fugitive Slave Treaty.  Do you understand me?

It's not a local crime like murder.  You'd be taken off to Appalachee to
be tried."

"I can't do nothing.

"Run and tell the Guesters."

Alvin waited just a moment.  If it was up to him, he'd burn their hands
right off before he let them take Arthur.  But already the boy was
between them, their fingers digging into Arthur's arms.  Miss Lamer was
right.  What they needed was a way to win Arthur's freedom for sure, not
some stupid blunder that would end up making things worse.

Alvin ran for the Guesters' house.  It surprised him how they took
it-like they'd been expecting it all the time for the last seven years.

Old Peg and Horace just looked at each other, and without a word Old Peg
started in packing-her clothes and Arthur Stuart's.

"What's she packing her things for?" asked Alvin.

Horace smiled, a real tight smile.  "She ain't going to let Arthur spend
a night in jail alone.  So she'll have them lock her up right alongside
him."

It made sense-but it was strange to think of people like Arthur Stuart
and Old Peg Guester in jail.

"What are you going to do?" asked Alvin.

"Load my guns," said Horace.  "And when they're gone, I'll follow."

Alvin told him what Miss Lamer had said about the nationals coming if
somebody laid hand on a Finder.

"What's the worst they can do to me?  Hang me.  I tell you, I'd rather
be hanged than live in this house a single day if they take Arthur
Stuart away and I done nothing to stop them.  And I can do it, Alvin.
HeH, boy, I must've saved fifty runaway slaves in my time.  Po Doggly
and me, we used to pick them up this side of the river and send them on
to safety in Canada.  Did it all the time."

Alvin wasn't a bit surprised to hear of Horace Guester being an
Emancipationist-and not a talker, neither.

"I'm telling you this, Alvin, cause I need your help.  I'm just one man
and there's two of them.  I got no one I can trust-Po Doggly ain't gone
with me on something like this in a week of Christmases, and I don't
know where he stands no more.  But you-I know you can keep a secret, and
I know you love Arthur Stuart near as much as my wife does."

The way he said it gave Alvin pause.  "Don't you love him, sir?"

Horace looked at Alvin like he was crazy.  "They ain't taking a mixup
boy right out from under my roof, Al."

Goody Guester come downstairs then, with two bundles in homespun bags
under her arms.  "Take me into town, Horace Guester."

They heard the horses riding by on the road outside.

"That's probably them," said Alvin.

"Don't worry, Peg," said Horace.

"Don't worry?" Old Peg turned on him in fury.  "Only two things are
likely to happen out of this, Horace.  Either I lose my son to slavery
in the South, or my fool husband gets himself probably killed trying to
rescue him.  Of course I won't worry." Then she burst into tears and
hugged Horace so tight it near broke Alvin's heart to see it.

It was Alvin drove Goody Guester into town on the roadhouse wagon.

He was standing there when she finally wore down Pauley Wiseman so he'd
let her spend the night in the cell-though he made her take a terrible
oath about not trying to sneak Arthur Stuart out of jail before he'd do
it.

As he led the way to the jail cell, Pauley Wiseman said, "You shouldn't
fret none, Goody Guester.  His master's no doubt a good man.

Folks here got the wrong idea of slavery, I reckon."

She whirled on him.  "Then you'll go in his place, Pauley?  Seeing how
it's so fine?"

"Me?" He was no more than amused at the idea.  "I'm White, Goody
Guester.  Slavery ain't my natural state."

Alvin made the keys slide right out of Pauley's fingers.

"I'm sure getting clumsy," said Pauley Wiseman.

Goody Guester's foot just naturally ended up right on top of the key
ring.

"Just lift up your foot, Goody Guester," said the sheriff, "or I'll
charge you with aiding and abetting, not to mention resisting."

She moved her foot.  The sheriff opened the door.  Old Peg stepped
through and gathered Arthur Stuart into her arms.  Alvin watched as
Pauley Wiseman closed and locked the door behind them.  Then he went on
home.

Alvin broke open the mold and rubbed away the clay that still clung to
the face of the plow.  The iron was smooth and hard, as good a plow as
Alvin ever saw cast till then.  He searched inside it and found no
flaws, not big enough to mar the plow, anyway.  He filed and rubbed,
rubbed and filed till it was smooth, the blade sharp as if he meant to
use it in a butcher shop instead of some field somewhere.  He sit it on
top of the workbench.  Then he sat there waiting while the sun rose and
the rest of the world came awake.

In due time Makepeace came down from the house and looked at the plow.
But Alvin didn't see him, being asleep.  Makepeace woke him up enough to
get him to walk back up to the house.

"Poor boy," said Gertie.  "I bet he never even went to sleep last night.
I bet he went on down and worked on that fool plow all night."

"Plow looks fair."

"Plow looks perfect, I'll bet, knowing Alvin."

Makepeace grimaced.  "What do you know about ironwork?"

"I know Alvin and I know you."

"Strange boy.  Ain't it the truth though?  He does his best work when he
stays up all night." Makepeace even had some affection in his voice,
saying that.  But Alvin was asleep in his bed by then and didn't hear.

"Sets such store by that mixup child," said Gertie.  "No wonder he
couldn't sleep."

"Sleeping now," said Makepeace.

"Imagine sending Arthur Stuart into slavery at his age."

"Law's the law," said Makepeace.  "Can't say I like it, but a fellow has
to live by the law or what then?"

"You and the law," said Gertie.  "I'm glad we don't live on the other
side of the Ohio, Makepeace, or I swear you'd be wanting slaves instead
of prentices-if you know the difference."

That was as pure a declaration of war as they ever gave each other, and
they were all set for one of their rip-snorting knock-about breakdish
fights, only Alvin was snoring up in the loft and Gertie and Makepeace
just glared at each other and let this one go.  Since all their quarrels
came out the same, with all the same cruel things said and all the same
hurts and harms done, it was like they just got tired and said, Pretend
I just said all the things you hate worst in all the world to hear, and
I'll pretend you said the things I hate worst back to me, and then let
be.

Alvin didn't sleep all that long, nor all too well, neither.  Fear and
anger and eagerness all played through his body till he could hardly
hold still, let alone keep his brain drifting with the currents of his
dreams.  He woke up dreaming of a black plow turned to gold.  He woke up
dreaming of Arthur Stuart being whipped.  He woke up again thinking of
aiming a gun at one of them Finders and pulling the trigger.  He woke up
again thinking of aiming at a Finder and not pulling the trigger, and
then watching them go away dragging Arthur after them, him screaming all
the time, Alvin, where are you!  Alvin, don't let them take me.

"Wake up or hush up!" shouted Gertie.  "You're scaring the children."

Alvin opened his eyes and leaned over the edge of the loft.  "Your
children ain't even here."

"Then you're scaring me.  I don't know what you was dreaming, boy, but I
hope that dream never comes even to my worst enemywhich happens to be my
husband this morning, if you want to know the truth.  Her mentioning
Makepeace made Alvin alert, yes sir.  He pulled on his trousers,
wondering when and how he got up to this loft and who pulled his pants
and boots off.  In just that little amount of time, Gertie somehow got
food on the table-cornbread and cheese and a dollop of molasses.  "I
don't have time to eat, Ma'am," said Alvin.

"I'm sorry, but I got to-"

"You got time."

"No Ma'am, I'm sorry-"

"Take the bread, then, you plain fool.  You plan to work all day with an
empty belly?  After only a morning's sleep?

Why, it ain't even noon yet.  " So he was chewing on bread when he come
down the hill to the forge.  There was Dr.  Physicker's carriage again,
and the Finders' horses.  For a second Alvin thought-they come here
cause Arthur Stuart got away somehow, and the Finders lost him, andNo.
They had Arthur Stuart with them.

"Good morning, Alvin," said Makepeace.  He turned to the other men.  "I
must be about the softest master I ever heard of, letting my prentice
boy sleep till near noon."

Alvin didn't even notice how Makepeace was criticizing him and calling
him a prentice boy when his journeyman piece stood there finished on the
workbench.  He just squatted down in front of Arthur Stuart and looked
him in the eyes.

"Stand back now," said the white-haired Finder.

Alvin didn't hardly notice him.  He wasn't really seeing Arthur Stuart,
not with his eyes, anyhow.  He was searching his body for some sign of
harm.  None.  Not yet anyway.  Just the fear in the boy.

"You haven't told us yet," said Pauley Wiseman.  "Will you make them or
not?"

Makepeace coughed.  "Gentlemen, I once made a pair of manacles, back in
New England.  For a man convicted of treason, being shipped back to
England in irons.  I hope I never make a manacle for a seven-year-old
boy who done no harm to a living soul, a boy who played around my forge
and-"

"Makepeace," said Pauley Wiseman.  "I told them that if you made the
manacles, they wouldn't have to use this."

Wiseman held up the heavy iron-and-wood collar that he'd left leaning
against his leg.

"It's the law," said the white-haired Finder.  "We bring runaway slaves
back home in that collar, to show the others what happens.  But him
being just a boy, and seeing how it was his mama what run away and not
him, we agreed to manacles.  But it don't make no difference to me.

We get paid either way."

"You and your damned Fugitive Slave Treaty!" cried Makepeace.

"You use that law to make slavers out of us, too."

"I'll make them," said Alvin.

Makepeace looked at him in horror.  "You!"

Better than that collar," said Alvin.  What he didn't say was, I don't
intend for Arthur Stuart to 'Wear those manacles a minute longer than
tonight.  He looked at Arthur Stuart.  "I'll make you some manacles as
don't hurt much, Arthur Stuart."

"Wisely done," said Pauley Wiseman.

"Good to see somebody with sense here," said the white-haired Finder.

Alvin looked at him and tried to hold all his hatred in.  He couldn't
quite do it.  So his spittle ended up spattering the dust at the
Finder's feet.

The black-haired Finder looked ready to throw a punch at him for that,
and Alvin wouldn't've minded a bit to grapple with him and maybe rub his
face in the dirt a minute or two.  But Pauley Wiseman jumped right
between them and he had sense enough to do his talking to the
black-haired Finder, and not to Alvin.  "You got to be a blame fool,
setting to rassle with a blacksmith.  Look at his arms."

"I could take him," said the Finder.

"You folks got to understand," said the white-haired Finder.

"It's our knack.  We can no more help being Finders than-"

"There's some knacks," said Makepeace, "where it'd be better to die at
birth than grow up and use it." He turned to Alvin.  "I don't want you
using my forge for this."

"Don't make a nuisance of yourself, Makepeace," said Pauley Wiseman.

"Please," said Dr.  Physicker.  "You're doing the boy more harm than
good."

Makepeace backed off, but none too graciously.

"Give me your hands, Arthur Stuart," Alvin said.

Alvin made a show of measuring Arthur's wrists with a string.

Truth was, he could see the measure of him in his mind, every inch of
him, and he'd shape the iron to fit smooth and perfect, with rounded
edges and no more weight than needed.  Arthur wouldn't feel no pain from
these manacles.  Not with his body, anyhow.

They all stood and watched Alvin work.  It was the smoothest, purest job
they'd ever see.  Alvin used his knack this time, but not so it'd show.
He hammered and bent the scrap iron, cutting it exactly right.  The two
halves of each manacle fit snug, so they wouldn't shift and pinch the
skin.  And all the time he was thinking how Arthur used to pump the
bellows for him, or just stand there and talk to him while he worked.
Never again.  Even after they saved him tonight, they'd have to take him
to Canada or hide him somehow-as if you could hide from a Finder.

"Good work," said the white- aired n er.  never saw me a better
blacksmith."

Makepeace piped up from the dark corner of the forge.  "You should be
proud of yourself, Alvin.  Why, let's make those manacles your
journeyman piece, all right?"

Alvin turned and faced him.  "My journeyman piece is that plow setting
on the workbench, Makepeace."

It was the first time Alvin ever called his master by his first name.

It was as clear as Alvin could let him know that the days of Makepeace
talking to him like that were over now.

Makepeace didn't want to understand him.  "Watch how you talk to me,
boy!  Your journeyman piece is what I say it is, and-"

"Come on, boy, let's get these on you." The white-haired Finder wasn't
interested in Makepeace's talk, it seemed.

"Not yet," said Alvin.

"They're ready," said the Finder.

"Too hot," said Alvin.

"Well dip them in that bucket there and cool them off."

"If I do that, they'll change shape just a little, and then they'll cut
the boy's arms so they bleed."

The black-haired Finder rolled his eyes.  What did he care about a
little blood from a mixup boy?

But the white-haired Finder knew that nobody'd stand for it if he didn't
wait.  "No hurry," he said.  "Can't take too long."

They sat around waiting without a word.  Then Pauley started in talking
about nothing, and so did the Finders, and even Dr.  Physicker, just
jawing away like as if the Finders were any old visitors.  Maybe they
thought they were making the Finders feel more kindly so they wouldn't
take it out on the boy once they had him across the river.  Alvin had to
figure that so he wouldn't hate them.

Besides, an idea was growing in his mind.  It wasn't enough to get
Arthur Stuart away tonight-what if Alvin could make it so even the
Finders couldn't find him again?

"What's in that cachet you Finders use?" he asked.

"Don't you wish you knew," said the black-haired Finder.

"It's no secret," said the white-haired Finder.  "Every slaveowner makes
up a box like this for each slave, soon as he's bought or born.

Scrapings from his skin, hair from his head, a drop of blood, things
like that.  Parts of his own flesh."

"You get his scent from that?"

"Oh, it ain't a scent.  We ain't bloodhounds, Mr.  Smith."

Alvin knew that calling him Mr.  Smith was pure flattery.  He smiled a
little, pretending that it pleased him.

"Well then how does it helpp"

"Well, it's our knack, " said the white-haired Finder.  "Who knows how
it works?  We just look at it, and we-it's like we see the shape of the
person we're looking for."

"It ain't like that," said the black-haired Finder.

"Well that's how it is for me.

"I just know where he is.  Like I can see his soul.  If I'm close
enough, anyway.  Glowing like a fire, the soul of the slave I'm
searching for." The black-haired Finder grinned.  "I can see from a long
way off."

"Can you show me?" asked Alvin.

"Nothing to see," said the white-haired Finder.

"I'll show you, boy," said the black-haired Finder.  "I'll turn my back
and y'all move that boy around in the forge.  I'll point to him over my
shoulder, perfect all the time."

"Come on now," said the white-haired Finder.

"We got nothing to do anyway till the iron cools.  Give me the cachet."

The black-haired Finder did what he bragged-pointed at Arthur Stuart the
whole time, But Alvin hardly saw that.  He was busy watching from the
inside of that Finder, trying to understand what he was doing, what he
was seeing, and what it had to do with the cachet.

He couldn't see how seven-year-old dried-up bits of Arthur Stuart's
newborn body could show them where he was now.

Then he remembered that for a moment right at first the Finder hadn't
pointed at all.  His finger had wandered a little, and only after just
that pause had he started pointing right at Arthur Stuart.

Like as if he'd been trying to sort out which of the people behind him
in the smithy was Arthur.  The cachet wasn't for Finding-it was for
recognizing.  The Finders saw everybody, but they couldn't tell who was
who without a cachet.

So what they were seeing wasn't Arthur's mind, or Arthur's soul.

They were just seeing a body, like every other body unless they could
sort it out.  And what they were sorting was plain enough to Alvinhadn't
he healed enough people in his life to know that people were pretty much
the same, except for some its at the center of each living piece of
their flesh?  Those bits were different for every single person, yet the
same in every part of that person's flesh.  Like it was God's way of
naming them right in their flesh.  Or maybe it was the mark of the
beast, like in the book of Revelation.  Didn't matter.

Alvin knew that the only thing in that cachet that was the same as
Arthur Stuart's body was that signature that lived in every part of his
body, even the dead and cast-off parts in the cachet.

I can change those bits, thought Alvin.  Surely I can change them,
change them in every part of his body.  Like turning iron into gold.

Like turning water into wine.  And then their cachet wouldn't work at
all.  Wouldn't help them at all.  They could search for Arthur Stuart
all they liked, but as long as they didn't actually see his face and
recognize him the regular way, they'd never find him.

Best of all, they wouldn't even realize what happened.  They'd still
have the cachet, same as ever, and they'd know it hadn't been changed a
bit because Alvin wouldn't change it.  But they could search the whole
world over and never find a body just like those specks in their cachet,
and they'd never guess why.

I'll do it, thought Alvin.  Somehow I'll figure a way to change him.

Even though there must be millions of those signatures all through his
body, I'll find a way to change every one.  Tonight I'll do it, and
tomorrow he'll be safe forever.

The iron was cool.  Alvin knelt before Arthur Stuart and gently put the
manacles in place.  They fit his flesh so perfectly he might have cast
them in a mold taken from Arthur's own body.  When they were locked into
place, with a length of light chain strung between them, Alvin looked
Arthur Stuart in the eye.  "Don't be afraid," he said.

Arthur Stuart didn't say a thing.

"I won't forget you," said Alvin.

"Sure," said the black-haired Finder.  "But just in case you get ideas
about remembering him while he's on his way home to his rightful master,
I ought to tell you square-we never both of us sleep at the same time.
And part of being a Finder is, we know if anybody's coming.

You can't sneak up on us.  Least of all you, smith boy.  I could see you
ten miles away."

Alvin just looked at him.  Eventually the Finder sneered and turned
away.  They put Arthur Stuart onto the horse in front of the
white-haired Finder.  But Alvin figured that as soon as they got across
the Ohio, they'd have Arthur walking.  Not out of meanness, maybe-but it
wouldn't do no good for Finders to show themselves being kindly to a
runaway. Besides, they had to set an example for the other slaves,
didn't they? Let them see a boy seven years old walking along, feet
bleeding, head bowed, and they'd think twice about trying to run off
with their children.  They'd know that Finders have no mercy.

Pauley and Dr.  Physicker rode away with them.  They were seeing the
Finders to the Ohio River and watching them cross the river, to make
sure they did no hurt to Arthur Stuart while he was in free territory.

It was the best they could do.

Makepeace didn't have much to say, but what he said, he said plain.  "A
real man would never put manacles on his own friend," said Makepeace.
"I'll go up to the house and sign your journeyman papers.

I don't want you in my smithy or my house another night." He left Alvin
alone by the forge.

He'd been gone no more than five minutes when Horace Guester got to the
smithy.

"Let's go," he said.

"No," said Alvin.  "Not yet.  They can see us coming.  They'll tell the
sheriff if they're being followed."

"We got no choice.  Can't lose their trail."

"You know something about what I am and what I can do," said Alvin.
"I've got them even now.  They won't get more than a mile from the Ohio
shore before they fall asleep."

"You can do that?"

"I know what goes on inside people when they're sleepy.  I can make that
stuff start happening inside them the minute they're in Appalachee."

"While you're at it, why don't you kill them?"

"I can't."

"They aren't men!  It wouldn't be murder, killing them!"

"They are men," said Alvin.  "Besides, if I kill them, then it's a
violation of the Fugitive Slave Treaty."

"Are you a lawyer now?"

"Miss Lamer explained it to me.  I mean she explained it to Arthur
Stuart while I was there.  He wanted to know.  Back last fall.

He said, 'Why don't my pa just kill them if some Finders come for me?"
And Miss Lamer, she told him how there'd just be more Finders coming,
only this time they'd hang you and take Arthur Stuart anyway."

Horace's face had turned red.  Alvin didn't understand why for a minute,
not till Horace Guester explained.  "He shouldn't call me his pa.  I
never wanted him in my house." He swallowed.  "But he's right.

I'd kill them Finders if I thought it'd do good."

"No killing," said Alvin.  "I think I can fix it so they'll never find
Arthur again."

"I know.  I'm going to ride him to Canada.  Get to the lake and sail
across."

"No sir," said Alvin.  "I think I can fix it so they'll never find him
anywhere.  We just got to hide him till they go away."

"Where?"

"Springhouse, if Miss Lamer'll let us."

"Why there?"

"I got it hexed up every which way from Tuesday.  I thought I was doing
it for the teacher lady.  But now I reckon I was really doing it for
Arthur Stuart."

Horace grinned.  "You're really something, Alvin.  You know that?"

"Maybe.  Sure wish I knew what."

"I'll go ask Miss Lamer if we can make use of her house."

"If I know Miss Lamer, she'll say yes before you finish asking."

"When do we start, then?"

It took Alvin by surprise, having a grown man ask him when they should
start.  "Soon as it's dark, I reckon.  Soon as those two Finders are
asleep."

"You can really do that?"

"I can if I keep watching them.  I mean sort of watching.  Keeping track
of where they are.  So I don't go putting the wrong people to sleep."

"Well, are you watching them now?"

"I know where they are."

"Keep watching, then." Horace looked a little scared, almost as bad as
he did near seven years ago, when Alvin told him he knew about the girl
buried there.  Scared because he knew Alvin could do something strange,
something beyond any hexings or knacks in Horace's ken.

Don't you know me, Horace?  Don't you know that I'm still Alvin, the boy
you liked and trusted and helped so many times?  Finding out that I'm
stronger than you thought, in ways you didn't think of, that don't mean
I'm a whit more dangerous to you.  No reason to be a-scared.

As if Horace could hear his words, the fear eased away from his face. "I
just meanid Peg and I are counting on you.  Thank God you ended up in
this place, right at this time when we needed you so bad.

The good Lord's looking out for us." Horace smiled, then turned and left
the smithy.

What Horace said, it left Alvin feeling good, feeling sure of himself.

But then, that was Horace's knack, wasn't it-to give folks the view of
theirselves they most needed to see.

Alvin turned his thoughts at once to the Finders, and sent out his bug
to stay with them, to keep track of the way their bodies moved like
small black storms through the greensong around them, with Arthur
Stuart's small song bright and clear between them.  Black and White
don't have nothing to do with bright and dark at heart, I reckon,
thought Alvin.  His hands stayed busy doing work at the forge, but for
the life of him he couldn't pay real attention to it.  He'd never
watched somebody so far off beforxcept for that time he got helped by
powers he didn't understand, inside Eight-Face Mound.

And the worst thing of all would be if he lost them, if they got away
with Arthur Stuart, all because Alvin didn't pay attention close enough
and lost that boy among all the beat-down souls of slaves in Appalachee
and on beyond, in the deep South where all White men were servants to
the other Arthur Stuart, King of England, and so all Blacks were slaves
of slaves.  Ain't going to lose Arthur in a place so bad.

Going to hold on tight to him, like as if he got a thread to connect him
to me.

Almost as soon as he thought of it, almost as soon as he imagined a thin
invisible thread connecting him and that mixup boy, why, there it was.
There was a thread in the air, a thread about as thin as what he
imagined once trying to understand what an atom might be.  A thread that
only had size in one direction-the direction that led toward Arthur
Stuart, connecting them heart to heart.  Stay with him, Alvin told the
thread, like as if it really was alive.  And in answer it seemed to grow
brighter, thicker, till Alvin was sure anybody who come along could see
it.

But when he looked with his eyes, he couldn't see the thread at all; it
only appeared to him again when he looked without eyes.  It plain
astonished him, that such a thing could come to be, created-not out of
nothing-but created without pattern except the pattern found in Alvin's
own mind.  This is a Making.  My ffist, thininvisible Making -but it's
real, and it's going to lead me to Arthur Stuart tonight, so I can set
him free.

In her little house, Peggy watched Alvin and Arthur Stuart both, looking
back and forth from one to the other, trying to find some pathway that
led for Arthur's freedom without costing Alvin's death or capture.  No
matter how closely and carefully she looked, there was no such path. The
Finders were too skilled with their terrible knack; on some paths, Alvin
and Horace might carry Arthur off, but he'd only be found again and
recaptured-at the cost of Alvin's blood or Alvin's freedom.

So she watched despairing as Alvin spun his almost nonexistent thread.
Only then, for the first time, did she see some glimmer of a possibility
of freedom in Arthur Stuart's heartfire.  It came, not from the fact
that the thread would lead Alvin to the boy-on many paths before he spun
the thread, she had seen Alvin finding the Finders and putting them to
sleep.  No, the difference now was that Alvin could make the thread at
all.  The possibility of it had been so small that there had been no
path that showed it.  Or perhaps-something she hadn't thought of
before-the very act of Making was such a violation of the natural order
that her own knack couldn't see paths that relied on it, not until it
was actually accomplished.

Yet even at the moment of Alvin's birth, hadn't she seen his glorious
future?  Hadn't she seen him building a city made of the purest glass or
ice?  Hadn't she seen his city filled with people who spoke with the
tongues of angels and saw with the eyes of God?  The fact that Alvin
would Make, that was always probable, provided he stayed alive.  But any
one particular act of Making, that was never likely, never natural
enough for a torch-even an extraordinary torch like Peggy-to see it.

She saw Alvin put the Finders to sleep almost as soon as it was dark and
they could find a stopping place on the far side of the Ohio.

She saw Alvin and Horace meet in the smithy, preparing to set out
through the woods to the Ohio, avoiding the road so they wouldn't meet
the sheriff and Dr.  Physicker coming back from Hatrack Mouth.  But she
paid little heed to them.  Now that there was new hope, she gave her
full attention to Arthur's future, studying how and where his slender
new paths of freedom were rooted to the present action.  She could not
find the clear moment of choice and change.  To her that fact was proof
that all depended on Alvin becoming a Maker, truly, on this night.

"O God," she whispered, "if thoudidst cause this boy to be born with
such a gift, I pray thee teach him Making now, tonight."

Alvin stood beside Horace, masked by shadows at the riverbank, waiting
for a well-lighted riverboat to pass.  Out on the boat, musicians were
playing, and people danced a fancy quadrille on the decks.

It made Alvin angry, to see them playing like children when a real child
was being carried off to slavery tonight.  Still, he knew they meant no
harm, and knew it wasn't fair to blame others for being happy while
somebody they don't even know might be grieving.  By that measure
there'd be no happiness in all the world, Alvin figured.

Life being how it is, Alvin thought, there's not a moment in the day
when there ain't at least a few hundred people grieving about something.

The ship had no sooner passed around a bend than they heard a crashing
in the woods behind them.  Or rather, Alvin heard the sound, and it only
seemed like crashing to him because of his sense of the right order of
things in the greenwood song.  It took more than a few minutes before
Horace heard it at all.  Whoever it was sneaking up on them, he was
right stealthy for a White man.

"Now I'm wishing for a gun," whispered Horace.

Alvin shook his head.  "Wait and watch," he whispered-so faint his lips
barely moved.

They waited.  After a while, they saw a man step out of the woods and
slither down the bank to the muddy edge of the water, where the boat
rocked on the water.  Seeing nobody there, he looked around, then sighed
and stepped out into the boat, turned around and sat down in the stern,
glumly resting his chin on his hands.

Suddenly Horace started chuckling.  "Play fetch with my bones when I'm
dead, but I do think that's old Po Doggly."

At once the man in the boat leaned back and Alvin could finally see him
clear in the moonlight.  It was Dr.  Physicker's driver, sure enough.
But this didn't seem to bother Horace none.  He was already slipping
down the riverbank, to splash out to the boat, climb aboard, and give Po
Doggly such a violent hug the boat took on water.  In only a second they
both noticed that the boat was rocking out of kilter, and without a word
they both shifted exactly right to balance the load, and then again
without a word Po got the oars into the locks while Horace took a flat
tin baling cup out from under his bench and commenced to dipping it and
pouring it out overboard, again and again.

Alvin marveled for a moment at how smooth the two of them fit together.
He didn't even have to ask-he knew from how they acted that they'd done
this sort of thing a good many times before.  Each knew what the other
was going to do, so they didn't even have to think about it anymore. One
man did his part, and the other his, and neither even had to check to
make sure both parts were getting done.

Like the bits and pieces that made up everything in the world; like the
dance of atoms Alvin had imagined in his mind.  He'd never realized it
before, but people could be like those atoms, too.  Most of the ime
people were all disorganized, nobody knowing who anybody else was,
nobody holding still long enough to trust or be trusted, just like Alvin
imagined atoms might have been before God taught them who they were and
gave them work to do.  But here were two men, men that nobody'd ever
figure even knew each other hardly, except as how everybody in a town
like Hatrack River knows everybody else.  Po Doggly, a one-time farmer
reduced to driving for Dr.  Physicker, and Horace Guester, the first
settler in this place, and still prospering.Who'd've thought they could
fit together so smooth?  But it was because each one knew who the other
was, knew it pure and true, knew it as sure as an atom might know the
name God gave him; each one in his place, doing his work.

All these thoughts rushed through Alvin's mind so fast he hardly noticed
himself thinking them, yet in later years he'd remember right enough
that this was when he first understood: These two men, together, made
something between them that was just as real and solid as the dirt under
his feet, as the tree he was leaning on.  Most folks ouldn't see
it-they'd look at the two of them and see nothing but two men who
happened to be sitting in a boat together.  But then, maybe to other
atoms it wouldn't seem like the atoms making up a bit of iron was
anything more than two atoms as happened to be next to each other.

Maybe you have to be far off, like God, or anyhow bigger by far in order
to see what it is that two atoms make when they fit together in a
certain way.  But just because another atom don't see the connection
don't mean it isn't real, or that the iron isn't as solid as iron can
be.

And if I can teach these atoms how to make a string out of nothing, or
maybe how to make iron out of gold, or even-let it be shanged Arthur's
secret invisible signature all through his body so the Finders wouldn't
know him no more-then why couldn't a Maker also do with people as he
does with atoms, and teach them a new order, and once he finds enough
that he can trust, build them together into something new, something
strong, something as real as iron.

"You coming, Al, or what?"

Like I said, Alvin hardly knew what thought it was he had.  but he
didn't forget it, no, even sliding down the bank into the mud he knew
that he'd never forget what he thought of just then, even though it'd
take him years and miles and tears and blood before he really understood
it all the way.

"Good to see you, Po," said A yin.  "Only I kind of thought we was doing
something a mite secret."

Po rowed the boat closer in, slacking the rope and letting Alvin spider
his way on board without getting his feet wet.  Alvin didn't mind that.
He had an aversion to water, which was natural enough seeing how often
the Unmaker tried to use water to kill him.  But the water seemed to be
just water tonight; the Unmaker was invisible or far away.  Maybe it was
the slender string that still hooked Alvin to Arthur-maybe that was such
a powerful Making that the Ummaker plain hadn't the strength to turn
even this much water against Alvin.

"Oh, it's still secret, Alvin," said Horace.  "You just don't know.

Afore you ever got to Hatrack River-or anyway I mean afore you came
back-me and Po, we used to go out and fetch in runaway slaves and help
them on to Canada whenever we could."

"Didn't the Finders ever get you?" asked Alvin.

"Any slave got this far, that meant the Finders wasn't too close
behind," said Po.  "A good number that reached us stole their own
cachet."

"Besides, that was afore the Fugitive Slave Treaty," said Horace.

"Long as the Finders didn't kill us outright, they couldn't touch us."

"And in those days we had a torch," said Po.

Horace said nothing, just untied the rope from the boat and tossed it
back onto shore.  Po started in rowing the first second the rope was
free-and Horace had already braced himself for the first lurch of the
boat.  It was a miracle, seeing how smooth they knew each other's next
move before the move was even begun.  Alvin almost laughed out loud in
the joy of seeing such a thing, knowing it was possible, dreaming of
what it might mean-thousands of people knowing each other that well,
moving to fit each other just right, working together.  Who could stand
in the way of such people?

"When Horace's girl left, why, we had no way of knowing there was a
runaway coming through here." Po shook his head.  "It was over.  But I
knowed that with Arthur Stuart put in chains and dragged on south, why,
there wasn't no way in hell old Horace wasn't going to cross the river
and fetch him back.  So once I dropped off them Finders and headed back
away from the Ohio a ways, I stopped the carriage and hopped on down."

"I bet Dr.  Physicker noticed," said Alvin.

"Course he did, you fool!" said PoOh, I see you're running me.

Well, he noticed.  He just says to me, 'You be careful, them boys are
dangerous." And I said I'd be careful all right and then he says to me,
"It's that blame sheriff Pauley Wiseman.  He didn't have to let them
take him so fast.  Might be we could've fought exerdiction if we
could've held onto Arthur Stuart till the circuit judge come around.

But Pauley, he did everything legal, but he moved so fast I just knew in
my heart he wanted that boy gone, wanted him clean out of Hatrack River
and never come back." I believe him, Horace.  Pauley Wiseman never did
like that mixup boy, once Old Peg got the wind in her sails about him
going to school."

Horace grunted; he turned the tiller just a little, exactly at the
moment when Po slacked the oar on one side so the boat would turn
slightly upstream to make the right landing on the far shore.  "You know
what I been thinking?" said Horace.  "I been thinking your job just
ain't enough to keep you busy, PoI like my job good enough," said Po
Doggly.

"I been thinking that there's a county election this fall, and the
office of sheriff goes up for grabs.  I think Pauley Wiseman ought to
get turned out."

"And me get made sheriffs You think that's likely, me being a known
drunk?"

"You ain't touched a drop the whole time you been with the doctor.

And if we live through this and get Arthur back safe, why, you're going
to be a hero."

"A hero hell!  You crazy, Horace?  We can't tell a soul about this or
there'll be a reward out for our brains on rye bread from the Ohio to
Camelot."

"We ain't going to print up the story and sell copies, if that's what
you mean.  But you know how word spreads.  Good folks'll know what you
and me done."

"Then you be sheriff, Horace."

"Me?" Horace grinned.  "Can you imagine me putting a man in jail?"

Po laughed softly.  "Reckon not."

When they reached the shore, again their movements were swift and fit
together just right.  It was hard to believe it had been so many years
since they worked together.  It was like their bodies already knew what
to do, so they didn't even have to think about it.  Po jumped into the
water-ankle deep is all, and he leaned on the boat so as not to splash
much.  The boat rocked a bit at that, of course, but without a bit of
wasted motion Horace leaned against the rocking and calmed it down,
hardly even noticing he was doing it.  In a minute they had the bow
dragged up onto the shore-sandy here, not muddy like the other side-and
tied to a tree.  To Alvin the rope looked old and rotten, but when he
sent his bug inside to feel it out, he was sure it was still strong
enough to hold the boat against the rocking of the river against the
stern.

Only when all their familiar jobs was done did Horace present himself
like militia on the town square, shoulders squared and eyes right on
Alvin.  "Well, now, Al, I reckon it's up to you to lead the way.  "

"Ain't we got to track them?" asked Po.

"Alvin knows where they are," said Horace.

"Well ain't that nice," said Po.  "And does he know whether they got
their guns aimed at our heads?"

"Yes," said Alvin.  He said it in such a way as to make it plain that he
didn't want no more questions.

It wasn't plain enough for Po.  "You telling me this boy's a torch, or
what?  Most I heard was he got him a knack for shoeing horses."

Here was the bad part about having somebody else along.  Alvin didn't
have no wish to tell Po Doggly what all he could do, but he couldn't
very well tell the man that he didn't trust him.

It was Horace came to the rescue.  "PoI got to tell you, Alvin ain't
part of the story of this night."

"Looks to me like he's the biggest part."

"I tell you, Po, when this story gets told, it was you and me came along
and happened to find the Finders asleep, you understand?"

Po wrinkled his brow, then nodded.  "Just tell me this, boy.

Whatever knack you got, you a Christian?  I don't even ask that you be a
Methodist."

"Yes sir," said Alvin.  "I'm a Christian, I reckon.  I hold to the
Bible."

"Good then," said PoI just don't want to get myself all mixed up in
devil stuff."

"Not with me," said Alvin.

"all right then.  Best if I don't know what you do, Al.  Just take a
care not to get me killed because I don't know it."

Alvin stuck out his hand.  Po shook it and grinned.  "You blacksmiths
got to be strong as a bear."

"Me?" said Alvin.  "A bear gets in my way, I beat on his head till he's
a wolverine."

"I like your brag, boy."

A moment's pause, and then Alvin led them off, following the thread that
connected him to Arthur Stuart.

It wasn't all that far, but it took them an hour cutting through the
woods in the dark-with all the leaves out, there wasn't much moonlight
got to the ground.  Without Alvin's sense of the forest around them, it
would've taken three times as long and ten times the noise.

They found the Finders asleep in a clearing with a campfire dying down
between them.  The white-haired Finder was curled up on his bedroll. The
black-haired Finder must've been left on watch; he was snoring away
leaning against a tree.  Their horses were asleep not far off.  Alvin
stopped them before they got close enough to disturb the animals.

Arthur Stuart was wide awake, sitting there staring into the fire.

Alvin sat there a minute, trying to figure how to do this.  He wasn't
sure how smart the Finders might be.  Could they find scraps of dried
skin, fallen-off hairs, something like that, and use it for a new
cachet?

Just in case, it wouldn't do no good to change Arthur right where he
was; nor would it be too smart to head on out into the clearing where
they might leave bits of their own selves, as proof of who stole Arthur
away.

So from a distance, Alvin got inside the iron of the manacles and made
cracks in all four parts, so they fell away to the ground at once, with
a clank.  The noise bothered the horses, who nickered a bit, but the
Finders were still sleeping like the dead.  Arthur, though, it didn't
take him a second to figure out what was happening.  He jumped to his
feet all at once and started looking around for Alvin at the clearing's
edge.

Alvin whistled, trying to match the song of a redbird.  It was a pretty
bad imitation, as birdcalls go, but Arthur heard it and knew that it was
Alvin calling him.  Without a moment's waiting or worrying, Arthur
plunged right into the woods and not five minutes later, with a few more
bad birdcalls to guide him, he was face to face with Alvin.

Of course Arthur Stuart made as if to give Alvin a big old hug, but
Alvin held up a hand.  "Don't touch anybody or anything," he whispered.
"I've got to make a change in you, Arthur Stuart, so the Finders can't
catch you again."

"I don't mind," said Arthur.

"I don't dare have a single scrap of the old way you used to be.

You got hairs and skin and such all over in your clothes.  So strip them
off."

Arthur Stuart didn't hesitate.  In a few moments his clothes were in a
pile at his feet.

"Excuse me for not knowing a bit about this," said Po, "but if you leave
those clothes a-lying there, them Finders'll know he come this way, and
that points north to them sure as if we painted a big white arrow on the
ground."

"Reckon you're right," said Alvin.

"So have Arthur Stuart bring them along and float them down the river,"
said Horace.

"Just make sure you don't touch Arthur or nothing," said Alvin.

"Arthur, you just pick up your clothes and follow along slow and
careful.  If you get lost, give me a redbird whistle and I'll whistle
back till you find us."

"I knew you was coming, Alvin," said Arthur Stuart.  "You too, Pa."

"So did them Finders," said Horace, 11 and much as I wish we could
arrange it, they ain't going to sleep forever."

"Wait a minute anyway," said Alvin.  He sent his bug back into the
manacles and drew them back together, fit them tight, joined the iron
again as if it had been cast that way.  Now they lay on the ground
unbroken, fastened tight, giving no sign of how the boy got free, "I
don't suppose you're maybe breaking their legs or something, Alvin,"
said Horace.

"Can he do that from here?" asked PoI 'm doing no such thing," said
Alvin.  "What we want is for the Finders to give up searching for a boy
who as far as they can tell doesn't exist no more."

"Well that makes sense, but I still like thinking of them Finders with
their legs broke," said Horace.

Alvin grinned and plunged off into the forest, deliberately making
enough noise and moving slow enough that the others could follow him in
the near-darkness; if he wanted to, he could've moved like a man t rough
the woods, making not a sound, leaving no whiff of a trail that anyone
could follow.

They got to the river and stopped.  Alvin didn't want Arthur getting
into the boat in his present skin, leaving traces of himself all over.

So if he was going to change him, he had to do it here.

"Toss them clothes, boy," said Horace.  "Far as you can."

Arthur took a step or two into the water.  It made Alvin scared, for
with his inward eye he saw it as if Arthur, made of light and earth and
air, suddenly got part of himself disappeared into the blackness of the
water.  Still, the water hadn't harmed them none on the trip here, and
Alvin saw as how it might even be useful.

Arthur Stuart pitched his wad of clothes out into the river.  The
current wasn't all that strong; they watched the clothes turn lazily and
float downstream, gradually drifting apart.  Arthur stood there, up to
his butt in water, watching the clothes.  No, not watching them -he
didn't turn a speck when they drifted far to the left.  He was just
looking at the north shore, the free side of the river.

"I been here afore," he said.  "I seen this boat."

"Might be," said Horace.  "Though you was a mite young to remember it.
Po and 1, we helped your mama into this very boat.  My daughter Peggy
held you when we got to shore."

"My sister Peggy," said Arthur.  He turned around and looked at Horace,
like as if it was really a question.

"I reckon so," said Horace, and that was the answer.

"Just stand there, Arthur Stuart," said Alvin.  "When I change you, I
got to change you all over, inside and out.  Better to do that in the
water, where all the dead skin with your old self marked in it can wash
away."

"You going to make me White?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"Can you do that?" asked Po Doggly.

"I don't know what all is going to change," said Alvin.  "I hope I don't
make you White, though.  That'd be like stealing away from you the part
of you your mama gave you."

"They don't make White boys be slaves," said Arthur Stuart.

"They ain't going to make this partickler mixup boy a slave anyhow,"
said Alvin.  "Not if I can help it.  Now just stand there, stand right
still, and let me figure this out."

They all stood there, the men and the boy, while Alvin studied inside
Arthur Stuart, finding that tiny signature that marked every living bit
of him.

Alvin knew he couldn't just go changing it willy-nilly, since he didn't
rightly understand what all that signature was for.  He just knew that
it was somehow part of what made Arthur himself, and you don't just
change that.  Maybe changing the wrong thing might strike him blind, or
make his blood turn to rainwater or something.

How could Alvin know?

It was seeing the string still connecting them, heart to heart, that
gave Alvin the idea-that and remembering what the Redbird said, using
Arthur Stuart's own lips to say it.  "The Maker is the one who is part
of what he Makes." Alvin stripped off his own shirt and then stepped out
into the water and knelt down in it, so he was near eye-toeye with
Arthur Stuart, cool water swirling gently around his waist.

Then he put out his hands and pulled Arthur Stuart to him and held him
there, breast to breast, hands on shoulders.

"I thought we wasn't supposed to touch the boy," said Po.

"Hush up you blame fool," said Horace Guester.  "Alvin knows what he's
doing."

I wish that was true, thought Alvin.  But at least he had an idea what
to do, and that was better than nothing.  Now that their living skin was
pressed together, Alvin could look and compare Arthur's secret signature
with his own.  Most of it was the same, exactly the same, and the way
Alvin figured, that's the part that makes us both human instead of cows
or frogs or pigs or chickens.  That's the part I don't dare change, not
a bit of it.

The rest-I can change that.  But not any old how.  What good to save him
if I turn him bright yellow or make him stupid or something?

So Alvin did the only thing as made sense to him.  He changed bits of
Arthur's signature to be just like Alvin's own.  Not all that was
different-not all that much, in fact.  Just a little.  But even a little
meant that Arthur Stuart had stopped being completely himself and
started being partly Alvin.  It seemed to Alvin that what he was doing
was terrible and wonderful at the same time.

How much?  How much did he have to change till the Finders wouldn't know
the boy?  Surely not all.  Surely just this much, just these changes.
There was no way to know.  All that Alvin could do was guess, and so he
took his guess and that was it.

That was only the beginning, of course.  Now he started in changing all
the other signatures to match the new one, each living bit of Arthur,
one by one, as fast as he could.  Dozens of them, hundreds of them; he
found each new signature and changed it to fit the new pattern.

Hundreds of them, and hundreds more, and still he had changed no more
than a tiny patch of skin on Arthur's chest.  How could he hope to
change the boy's whole body, going so slow?

"It hurts," whispered Arthur.

Alvin drew away from him.  "I ain't doing nothing to hurt you, Arthur
Stuart."

Arthur looked down at his chest.  "Right here," he said, touching the
spot where Alvin had been working.

Alvin looked in the moonlight and saw that indeed that spot seemed to be
swollen, changed, darkened.  He looked again, only not with his eyes,
and saw that the rest of Arthur's body was attacking the part that Alvin
changed, killing it bit by bit, fast as it could.

Of course.  What did he expect?  The signature was the way the body
recognized itself-that's why every living bit of a body had to have that
signature in it.  If it wasn't there, the body knew it had to be a
disease or something and killed it.  Wasn't it bad enough that changing
Arthur was taking so lono.  Now Alvin knew that it wouldn't do no good
to change him at all-the more he changed him, the sicker he'd get and
the more Arthur Stuart's own body would try to kill itself until the boy
either died or shed the new changed part.

It was just like Taleswapper's old story, about trying to build a wall
so big that by the time you got halfway through building it, the oldest
parts of it had already crumbled to dust.  How could you build such a
wall if it was getting broke down faster than you could build it up?

"I can't," said Alvin.  "I'm trying to do what can't be done."

"Well if you can't do it," said Po Doggly, "I hope you can fly, cause
that's the only way you can get that boy to Canada before the Finders
catch up with you."

"I can't," said Alvin.

"You're just tired," said Horace.  "We'll all just hush up so you can
think.  "

"Won't do any good," said Alvin.

"My mama could fly," said Arthur Stuart.

Alvin sighed in impatience at this same old story coming back again.

"It's true, you know," said Horace.  "Little Peggy told me.  That little
black slave girl, she diddled with some ash and blackbird feathers and
such, and flew straight up here.  That's what killed her.

I couldn't believe it the first time I realized the boy remembers, and
we always kept our mouths shut about it hoping he'd forget.  But I got
to tell you, Alvin, it'd be a pure shame if that girl died just so you
could give up on us at this same spot in the river seven years later."

Alvin closed his eyes.  "Just shut your mouth and let me think," he
said.

"I said that's what we'd do," said Horace.

"So do it," said Po Doggly.

Alvin-hardly even heard them.  He was looking back inside Arthur's body,
inside that patch that Alvin changed.  The new signature wasn't bad in
itself-only where it bordered on the skin with the old signature, that
was the only place the new skin was getting sick and dying.  Arthur'd be
just fine if Alvin could somehow change him all at once, instead of bit
by bit.

The way that the string came all at once, when Alvin thought of it,
pictured where it started and where it ended and what it was.  All the
atoms of it moving into place at the same time.  Like the way Po Doggly
and Horace Guester fit together all at once, each doing his own task yet
taking into account all that the other man did.

But the string was clean and simple.  This was hard-like he told Miss
Lamer, turning water into wine instead of iron into gold.

No, can't think of it that way.  What I did to make the string was teach
all the atoms what and where to be, because each one of them was alive
and each one could obey me.  But inside Arthur's body I ain't dealing
with atoms, I'm dealing with these living bits, and each one of them is
alive.  Maybe it's even the signature itself that makes them alive,
maybe I can teach them all what they ought to beinstead of moving each
part of them, one at a time, I can just say-Be like this-and they'll do
it.

He no sooner thought of it than he tried it.  In his mind he thought of
speaking to all the signatures in Arthur's skin, all over his chest, all
at once; he showed them the pattern he held in his mind, a pattern so
complex he couldn't even understand it himself, except that he knew it
was the same pattern as the signatures in this patch of skin he had
changed bit by bit.  And as soon as he showed them, as soon as he
commanded them-Be like this!  This is the way!-they changed.  It all
changed, all the skin on Arthur Stuart's chest, all at once.

Arthur gasped, then howled with pain.  What had been a soreness in a
patch of skin was now spread across his whole chest.

"Trust me," Alvin said.  "I'm going to change you sure now, and the pain
will stop.  But I'm doing it under the water, where all the old skin
gets carried off at once.  Plug your nose!  Hold your breath!"

Arthur Stuart was panting from the pain, but he did what Alvin said.  He
pinched his nose with his right hand, then took a breath and closed his
mouth.  At once Alvin gripped Arthur's wrist in his left hand and put
his right hand behind the boy and plunged him under the water.  In that
instant Alvin held Arthur's body whole in his mind, seeing all the
signatures, not one by one, but all of them; he showed them the pattern,
the new signature, and this time thought the words so strong his lips
spoke them.  "This is the way!  Be like this!"

He couldn't feel it with his hands-Arthur's body didn't change- a whit
that he could sense with his natural senses.  But Alvin could still see
the change, all at once, all in an instant, every signature in the boy's
body, in the organs, in the muscles, in the blood, in the brain; even
his hair changed, every part of him that was connected to himself.  And
what wasn't connected, what didn't change, that was washed away and
gone.

Alvin plunged himself under the water, to wash off any part of Arthur's
skin or hair that might have clung to him.  Then he rose up and lifted
Arthur Stuart out of the water, all in one motion.  The boy came up
shedding waterdrops like a spray of cold pearls in the moonlight.  He
stood there gasping for breath and shaking from the cold.

"Tell me it don't hurt no more," said Alvin.

"Any more," said Arthur, correcting him just like Miss Lamer always did.
"I feel fine.  Except cold."

Alvin scooped him up out of the water and carried him back to the bank.
"Wrap him in my shirt and let's get out of here."

So they did.  Not a one of them noticed that when Arthur imitated Miss
Lamer, he didn't use Miss Lamer's voice.

Peggy didn't notice either, not right away.  She was too busy looking
inside Arthur Stuart's heartfire.  How it changed when Alvin transformed
him!  So subtle a change it was that Peggy couldn't even tell what it
was Alvin was changing-, yet in the moment that Arthur Stuart emerged
from the water, not a single path from his past remained-not a single
path leading southward into slavery.  And all the new paths, the new
futures that the transformation had brought to him-they led to such
amazing possibilities.

During all the time it took for Horace, Po, and Alvin to bring Arthur
Stuart back across the Ohio and through the woods to the smithy, Peggy
did nothing more than explore in Arthur Stuart's heartfire, studying
possibilities that had never before existed in the world.

There was a new Maker abroad in the land; Arthur was the first soul
touched by him, and everything was different.  Moreover, most of
Arthur's futures were inextricably tied with Alvin.  Peggy saw
ossibilities of incredible journeys-on one path a trip to Europe where
Arthur Stuart would be at Alvin's side as the new Holy Roman Emperor
Napoleon bowed to him; on another path a voyage into a strange island
nation far to the south where Red men lived their whole lives on mats of
floating seaweed; on another path a triumphant crossing into westward
lands where the Reds hailed Alvin as the great unifier of all the races,
and opened up their last refuge to him, so perfect was their trust.  And
always by his side was Arthur Stuart, the mixup boy-but now trusted, now
himself gifted with some of the Maker's own power.

Most of the paths began with them bringing Arthur Stuart to her
springhouse, so she was not surprised when they knocked at her door.

"Miss Lamer," called Alvin softly.

She was distracted; reality was not half so interesting as the futures
revealed now in Arthur Stuart's heartfire.  She opened the door.  There
they stood, Arthur still wrapped in Alvin's shirt.

"We brought him back," said Horace.

"I can see that," said Peggy.  She was glad of it, but that gladness
didn't show up in her voice.  Instead she sounded busy, interrupted,
annoyed.  As she was.  Get on with it, she wanted to say.

I've seen this conversation as Arthur overheard it, so get on with it,
get it over with, and let me get back to exploring what this boy will
be.  But of course she could say none of this-not if she hoped to remain
disguised as Miss Lamer.

"They won't find him," said Alvin, "not as long as they don't actually
see him with their eyes.  Something-their cachet don't work no more."

"Doesn't work anymore," said Peggy.

"Right," said Alvin.  "What we come forarne for-can we leave him with
you?  Your house, here, Ma'am, I've got it hexed up so tight they won't
even think to come inside, long as you keep the door locked."

"Don't you have more clothes for him than this?  He's been wetdo you
want him to take a chill?"

"It's a warm night," said Horace, "and we don't want to be fetching
clothes from the house.  Not till the Finders come back and give up and
go away again."

"Very well," said Peggy.

"We'd best be about our business," said Po Doggly.  "I got to get back
to Dr.  Physicker's."

"And since I told Old Peg that I'd be in town, I'd better be there,"
said Horace.

Alvin spoke straight to Peggy.  "I'll be in the smithy, Miss Lamer.

If something goes wrong, you give a shout, and I'll be up the hill in
ten seconds.

"Thank you.  Now-please go on about your business."

She closed the door.  She didn't mean to be so abrupt.  But she had a
whole new set of futures.  No one but herself had ever been so important
in Alvin's work as Arthur was going to be.  But perhaps that would
happen with everyone that Alvin actually touched and changed-perhaps as
a Maker he would transform everyone he loved until they all stood with
him in those glorious moments, until they all looked out upon the world
through the lensed walls of the Crystal City and saw all things as God
must surely see them.

A knock on the door.  She opened it.

"In the first place," said Alvin, "don't open the door without knowing
who it is."

"I knew it was you," she said.  Truth was, though, she didn't.

She didn't even think.

"In the second place, I was waiting to hear you lock the door, and you
never did."

"Sorry," she said.  "I forgot."

"We went to a lot of work to save this boy tonight, Miss Lamer.

Now it's all up to you.  Just till the Finders o."

"Yes, I know." She really was sorry, and let her voice reveal her
regret.

"Good night then."

He stood there waiting.  For what?

Oh, yes.  For her to close the door.

She closed it, locked it, then returned to Arthur Stuart and hugged him
until he struggled to get away.  "You're safe," she said.

"Of course I am," said Arthur Stuart.  "We went to a lot of work to save
this boy tonight, Miss Lamer."

She listened to him, and knew there was something wrong.  What was it?
Oh, yes, of course.  Alvin had just said exactly those words.

But what was wrong?  Arthur Stuart was always imitating people.

Always imitating.  But this time Arthur Stuart had repeated Alvin's
words in his own voice, not Alvin's.  She had never heard him do that.

She thought it was his knack, that he was so natural a mimic he didn't
even realize he was doing it.

:'Spell 'cicada,"' she said.

"C-1-C-A-D-A," he answered.  Iq his own voice, not hers.

"Arthur Stuart," she whispered.  "What's wrong?"

"Ain't nothing wrong, Miss Lamer," he said.  "I'm home."

He didn't know.  He didn't realize it.  Never having understood how
perfect a mimic he had been, now he didn't realize when the knack was
gone.  He still had the near-perfect memory of what others saidhe still
had all the words.  But the voices were gone; only his own
seven-year-old voice remained.

She hugged him again, for a moment, more briefly.  She understood now.
As long as Arthur Stuart remained himself, the Finders could have found
him and taken him south into slavery.  The only way to save him was to
make him no longer completely himself.  Alvin hadn't known, of course he
hadn't, that in saving Arthur, he had taken away his knack, or at least
part of it.  The price of Arthur's freedom was making him cease to be
fully Arthur.  Did Alvin understand that?

"I'm tired, Miss Lamer," said Arthur Stuart.

"Yes, of course," she said.  "You can sleep here-in my bed.  Take off
that dirty shirt and climb in under the covers and you'll be warm and
safe all night."

He hesitated.  She looked into his heartfire and saw why; smiling, she
turned her back.  She heard a rustle of fabric and then a squeak of
bedsprings and the swish of a small body sliding along her sheets into
bed.  Then she turned around, bent over him where he lay upon her
pillow, and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

"Good night, Arthur," she said.

"Good night," he murmured.

In moments he was asleep.  She sat at her writing table and pulled up
the wick on her lamp.  She would do some reading while she waited for
the Finders to return.  Something to keep her calm while she waited.

No, she wouldn't.  The words were there on the page, but she made no
sense of them.  Was she reading Descartes or Deuteronomy?  It didn't
matter.  She couldn't stay away from Arthur's new heartfire.  Of course
all the paths of his life changed.  He wasn't the same person anymore.

No, that wasn't quite true.  He was still Arthur.  Mostly Arthur.

Almost Arthur.  Almost what he was.  But not quite.

Was it worth it?  To lose part of who he had been in order to live free?
Perhaps this new self was better than the old; but that old Arthur
Stuart was gone now, gone forever, even more surely than if he had gone
south and lived the rest of his life in bitter slavery, with his time in
Hatrack as a memory, and then a dream, and then a mythic tale he told
the pickaninnies in the years just before he died.

Fool!  she cried to herself in her heart.  No one is the same person
today that he was yesterday.  No one had a body as young as it was, or a
heart so naive, or a head so ignorant as it was.  He would have been far
more terribly transformed-matformed-by life in bondage than by Alvin's
gentle changes.  Arthur Stuart was more surely himself now than he would
have been in Appalachee.  Besides, she had seen all the dark paths that
once dwelt in his heartfire, the taste of the lash, the stupefying sun
beating down on him as he labored in the field, or the hanging rope that
awaited him on the many paths that led to his leading or taking part in
a slave revolt and slaughtering dozens of Whites as they lay in their
beds.  Arthur Stuart was too young to understand what had happened to
him; but if he were old enough, if he could choose which future he'd
prefer, Peggy had no doubt that he would choose the sort of future Alvin
had just made possible.

In a way, he lost some of himself, some of his knack, and therefore some
of the choices he might have had in life.  But in losing those, he
gained so much more freedom, so much more power, that he was clear
winner in the bargain.

Yet as she remembered his bright face when he spelled words to her in
her own voice, she could not keep herself from shedding a few tears of
regret.

The Plow

The Finders woke up not long after Arthur Stuart's rescuers took him
across the river.

"Look at this.  Manacles still fastened tight.  Good hard iron."

"Don't matter.  They got them a good spell for sleeping and a good spell
for slipping out of chains, but don't they know us Finders always find a
runaway, once we got his scent?"

If you could've seen them, you'd think they was glad Arthur Stuart got
loose.  Truth was, these boys loved a good chase, loved showing folks
that Finders just couldn't be shook loose.  And if it so happened they
put a fistful of lead shot through somebody's belly before the hunt was
done, well, ain't that just the way of it?  Like dogs on the trail of a
bleeding deer.

They followed Arthur Stuart's path through the forest till they came to
the water's edge.  Only then did their cheerful looks give way to a kind
of frown.  They lifted up their eyes and looked across the water,
searching for the heartfires of men abroad at this time of night, when
all honest folk was bound to be asleep.  The white-haired one, he just
couldn't see far enough; but the black-haired one, he said, "I see a
few, moving about.  And a few not moving.  We'll pick up the scent again
in Hatrack River."

Alvin held the plow between his hands.  He knew that he could turn it
all to gold-he'd seen gold enough in his life to know the pattern, so he
could show the bits of iron what they ought to be.  But he also knew
that it wasn't no ordinary gold that he wanted.  That would be too soft,
and as cold as any ordinary stone.  No, he wanted something new, not
just iron to gold like any alchemist could dream of, but a living gold,
a gold that could hold its shape and strength better than iron, better
than the finest steel.  Gold that was awake, aware of the world around
it-a plow that knew the earth that it would tear, to lay it open to the
fires of the sun.

A golden plow that would know a man, that a man could trust, the way Po
Doggly knew Horace Guester and each trusted the other.  A plow that
wouldn't need no ox to draw, nor added weight to force it downward into
the soil.  A plow that would know which soil was rich and which was
poor.  A sort of gold that never had been seen in all the world before,
just like the world had never seen such a thin invisible string as Alvin
spun between Arthur Stuart and himself today.

So there he knelt, holding the shape of the gold inside his mind.

"Be like this," he whispered to the iron.

He could feel how atoms came from all around the plow and joined
together with those already in the iron, forming bits much heavier than
what the iron was, and lined up in different ways, until they fit the
pattern that he showed them in his mind.

Between his hands he held a plow of gold.  He rubbed his fingers over
it.  Gold, yes, bright yellow in the firelight from the forge, but still
dead, still cold.  How could he teach it to be alive?  Not by showing it
the pattern of his own flesh-that wasn't the kind of life it needed.  It
was the living atoms that he wanted to waken, to show them what they
were compared to what they could be.  To put the fire of life in them.

The fire of life.  Alvin lifted the golden plow-much heavier nowand
despite the heat of the slacking fire, he set it right amid the glowing
charcoal of the forge.

They were back on their horses now, them Finders, walking them carny up
the road to Hatrack River, looking into every house and hut and cabin,
holding up the cachet to match it with the heartfires that they found
within.  But nary a match did they find, nary a body did they recognize.
They passed the smithy and saw that a heartfire burned inside, but it
wasn't the runaway mixup boy.  It was bound to be the smith what made
the manacles, they knew it.

"I'd like to kill him," whispered the black-haired Finder.  "I know he
put that spell in the manacles, to make them so that boy could slip
right out."

"Time enough for that after we find the pickaninny," said the
white-haired Finder.

They saw two heartfires burning in the old springhouse, but neither one
was like what they had in the cachet, so they Went on, searching for a
child that they might recognize.

The fire was deep within the gold now, but all it was doing was melting
it.  That wouldn't do at all-it was life the plow needed, not the death
of metal in the fire.  He held the plowshape in his mind and showed it
plain as can be to every bit of metal in the plow; cried out silently to
every atom, It ain't enough to be lined up in the little shapes of
gold-you need to hold this larger shape yourselves, no matter the fire,
no matter what other force might press or tear or melt or try to maim
you.

He could sense that he was heard-there was movement in the gold,
movement against the downward slipping of the gold as it turned to
fluid.  But it wasn't strong enough, it wasn't sure enough.

Without thinking, Alvin reached his hands into the fire and clung to the
gold, showing it the plowshape, crying to it in his heart, Like this!

Be like this' This is what you aret Oh, the pain of it burned something
fierce, but he knew that it was right for his hands to be there, for the
Maker is a part of what he makes.  The atoms heard him, and formed
themselves in ways that Alvin never even thought of, but the result of
it all was that the gold now took the heat of the fire into itself
without melting, without losing shape.  It was done; the plow wasn't
alive, exactly, not the way he wanted-but it could stand in the
forgetire without melting.  The gold was more than gold now.  It was
gold that knew it was a plow and meant to stay that way.

Alvin pulled his hands away from the plow and saw flames still dancing
on his skin, which was charred in places, peeling back away from the
bone.  Silent as death, he plunged his hands into the water barrel and
heard the sizzle of the fire on his flesh as it went out.

Then, before the pain could come in full force, he set to healing
himself, sloughing away the dead skin and making new skin grow.

He stood there, weakened from all his body had to do to heal his hands,
looking into the fire at the gold plow.  Just setting there, knowing its
shape and holding to it-but that wasn't enough to make the plow alive.
It had to know what a plow was for.  It had to know why it lived, so it
could act to fulfill that purpose.  That was Making, Alvin knew it now;
that was what Redbird come to say three years ago.

Making wasn't like carpentry or smithy work or any such, cutting and
bending and melting to force things into new shapes.  Making was
something subtler and stronger-making things want to be another way, a
new shape, so they just naturally flowed that way.  It was something
Alvin had done for years without knowing what it was he was doing.

When he thought he was doing no more than finding the natural cracks in
stone, he was really making those cracks; by imagining where he wanted
them to be, and showing it to the atoms within the bits within the
pieces of the rock, he taught them to want to fulfill the shape he
showed them.

Now, with this plow, he had done it, not by accident, but on purpose;
and he'd taught the gold to be something stronger, to hold better to its
shape than anything he'd ever Made before.  But how could he teach it
more, teach it to act, to move in ways that gold was never taught to
move?

In the back of his mind, he knew that this golden plow wasn't the real
problem.  The real problem was the Crystal City, and the building blocks
of that weren't going to be simple atoms in a metal plow.  The atoms of
a city are men and women, and they don't believe the shape they're shown
with the simple faith that atoms have, they don't understand with such
pure clarity, and when they act, their actions are never half so pure.
But if I can teach this gold to be a plow and to be alive, then maybe I
can make a Crystal City out of men and women; maybe I can find people as
pure as the atoms of this gold, who come to understand the shape of the
Crystal City and love it the way I did the moment I saw it when I
climbed the inside of that twister with Tenskwa-Tawa.  Then they'll not
only hold that shape but also make it act, make the Crystal City a
living thing much larger and greater than any one of us who are its
atoms.

The Maker is the one who is part of what he makes.

Alvin ran to the bellows and pumped up the fire till the charcoal was
glowing hot enough to drive any regular smith outside into the night air
to wait till the fire slacked.  But not Alvin.  Instead he walked right
up to the forge and climbed right into the heat and the flame.

He felt the clothes burning right off his body, but he paid no mind.

He curled himself around that plow and then commenced to healing
himself, not piecemeal, not bit by bit, but'healing himself by telling
his whole body, all at once, Stay alive!  Put the fire that burns you
into this plow!

And at the same time, he told the plow, Do as my body does!  Live!

Learn from every living bit of me how each part has its purpose, and
acts on it.  I can't show you the shape you've got to be, or how it's
done, cause I don't know.  But I can show you what it's like to be
alive, by the pain of my body, by the healing of it, by the struggle to
stay alive.  Be like this!  Whatever it takes, however hard it is for
you to learn, this is you, be like me!

It took forever, trembling in the fire as his body struggled with the
heat, finding ways to channel it the way a river channels water, pouring
it out into the plow like it was an ocean of golden fire.  And within
the plow, the atoms struggled to do what Alvin asked, wanting to obey
him, not knowing how.  But his call to them was strong, too strong not
to hear; and it was more than a matter of hearing him, too.

It was like they could tell that what he wanted for them was good.

They trusted him, they wanted to be the living plow he dreamed of, and
so in a million flecks of time so small that a second seemed like
eternity to them, they tried this, they tried that, until somewhere
within the golden plow a new pattern was made that knew itself to be
alive exactly as Alvin wanted it to be; and in a single single moment
the pattern passed throughout the plow and it was alive.

Alive.  Alvin felt it moving within the curve of his body as the plow
nestled down into the coals of the fire, cutting into it, plowing it as
if it were soil.  And because it was a barren soil, one that could bear
no life, the plow rose quickly out of it and slipped outward, away from
the fire toward the lip of the forge.  It moved by deciding to be in a
different place, and then being there; when it reached the brink of the
forge it toppled off and tumbled to the smithy floor.

In agony Alvin rolled from the fire and also fell, also lay pressed
against the cold dirt of the floor.  Now that the fire no longer
surrounded him, his body gained against the death of his skin, healing
him as he had taught it to do, without him having to tell it what to do,
without need of direction at all.  Become yourself, that had been
Alvin's command, and so the signature within each living bit of him
obeyed the pattern it contained, until his body was whole and perfect,
the skin new, uncallused, and unburned.

What he couldn't remove was the memory of pain, or the weakness from all
the strength his body had given up.  But he didn't care.  Weak as he
was, his heart was jubilant, because the plow that lay beside him on the
ground was living gold, not because he made it, but because he taught it
how to make itself.

The Finders found nothing, nowhere in town-yet the black-haired Finder
couldn't see anyone running away, neither, not within the farthest
distance that any natural man or horse could possibly have gone since
the boy got taken back.  Somehow the mixup boy was hiding from them, a
thing they knew full well was pure impossiblebut it must be so.

The place to look was where the boy had lived for all these years.

The roadhouse, the springhouse, the smithy-places where folks were up
unnatural late at night.  They rode to near the roadhouse, then tied up
their horses just off the road.  They loaded their shotguns and pistols
and set off on foot.  Passing by the roadhouse they searched again,
accounting for every heartfire; none of them was like the cachet.

"That cottage, with that teacher lady," said the white-haired Finder.
"That's where the boy was when we found him before."

The black-haired Finder looked over that way.  Couldn't see the
springhouse through the trees, of course, but what he was looking for he
could see, trees or not.  "Two people in there," he said.

"Could be the mixup boy, then," said the white-haired Finder.

"Cachet says not." Then the black-haired Finder grinned nastily.

"Single teacher lady, living alone, got a visitor this time of night?  I
know what kind of company she's keeping, and it ain't no mixup boy."

"Let's go see anyhow," said the white-haired Finder.  "If'n you're
right, she won't be putting out any complaint on how we broke in her
door, or we'll just tell what we saw going on inside when we done it."

They had a good little laugh about that, and set off through the
moonlight toward Miss Lamer's house.  They meant to kick in the door, of
course, and have a good laugh when the teacher lady got all hurry about
it and made her threats.

Funny thing was, when they actually got near the cottage, that plan just
clean went out of their heads.  They forgot all about it.

Just looked again at the heartfires within and compared them to the
cachet.

"What the hell are we doing up here?" asked the white-haired Finder.
"Boy's bound to be at the roadhouse.  We know he ain't here!"

"You know what I'm thinking?" said the black-haired one.  "Maybe they
killed him."

:'That's plain crazy.  Why save him, then?"

"How else do you figure they made it so we can't see him, then?"

"He's in the roadhouse.  They got some hex that hides him up, I'll bet.
Once we open the right door there, we'll see him and that'll be that."

For a fleeting moment the black-haired Finder thought-well, why not look
in this teacher lady's cottage, too, if they got a hex like that?

Why not open this door?

But he no sooner had that thought than it just slipped away so he
couldn't remember it, couldn't even remember having a thought.  He just
trotted away after the white-haired Finder.  Nfixup boy's bound to be in
the roadhouse, that's for sure.

She saw their heartfires, of course, as the Finders came toward her
cottage, but Peggy wasn't afraid.  She had explored Arthur Stuart's
heartfire all this time, and there was no path there which led to
capture by these Finders.  Arthur had dangers enough in the futurePeggy
could see that-but no harm would come to the boy tonight.

So she paid them little heed.  She knew when they decided to leave; knew
when the black-haired Finder thought of coming in; knew when the hexes
blocked him and drove him away.  But it was Arthur Stuart she was
watching, searching out the years to come.

Then, suddenly, she couldn't hold it to herself any longer.  She had to
tell Alvin, both the joy and sorrow of what he had done.  Yet how could
she?  How could she tell him that Miss Lamer was really a torch who
could see the million newborn futures in Arthur Stuart's heartfire?  It
was unbearable to keep all this to herself.  She might have told
Mistress Modesty, years ago, when she lived there and kept no secrets.

It was madness to go down to the smithy, knowing that her desire was to
tell him things she couldn't tell without revealing who she was.

Yet it would surely drive her mad to stay within these walls, alone with
all this knowledge that she couldn't share.

So she got up, unlocked the door, and stepped outside.  No one around.
She closed the door and locked it; then again looked into Arthur's
heartfire and again found no danger for the boy.  He would be safe.  She
would see Alvin.

Only then did she look into Alvin's heartfire; only then did she see the
terrible pain that he had suffered only minutes ago.  Why hadn't she
noticed?  Why hadn't she seen?  Alvin had just passed through the
greatest threshold of his life; he had truly done a great Making,
brought something new into the world, and she hadn't seen.

When he faced the Unmaker while she was in far-off Dekane, she had seen
his struggle-now, when she wasn't three rods off, why hadn't she turned
to him?  Why hadn't she known his pain when he writhed inside the fire?

Maybe it was the springhouse.  Once before, near nineteen years ago, the
day that Alvin was born, the springhouse had damped her gift and lulled
her to sleep till she was almost too late.  But no, it couldn't be
that-the water didn't run through the springhouse anymore, and the
forgefire was stronger than that.

Maybe it was the Umnaker itself, come to block her.  But as she cast
about with her torchy sight, she couldn't see any unusual darkness amid
the colors of the world around her, not close at hand, anyway.

Nothing that could have blinded her.

No, it had to be the nature of what Alvin himself was doing that blinded
her to it.  Just as she hadn't seen how he would extricate himself from
his confrontation with the Unmaker years ago, just as she hadn't seen
how he would change young Arthur at the Ohio shore tonight, it was just
the same way she hadn't seen what he was doing in the forge.  It was
outside the futures that her knack could see, the particular Making he
performed tonight.

Would it always be like that?  Would she always be blinded when his most
important work was being done?  It made her angry, it frightened
her-what good is my knack, if it deserts me just when I need it most!

No.  I didn't need it most just now.  Alvin had no need of me or my
sight when he climbed into the fire.  My knack has never deserted me
when it was needed It's only my desire that's thwarted.

Well, he needs me now, she thought.  She picked her way carefully down
the slope; the moon was low, the shadows deep, so the path was
treacherous.  When she rounded the corner of the smithy, the light from
the forgefire, spilling out onto the grass, was almost blinding; it was
so red that it made the grass look shiny black, not green.

Inside the smithy Alvin lay curled on the ground, facing toward the
forge, away from her.  He was breathing heavily, raggedly.

Asleep?  No.  He was naked; it took a moment to realize that his
clothing must have burned off him in the forge.  He hadn't noticed it in
all his pain, and so had no memory of it; therefore she hadn't seen it
happen when she searched for memories in his heartfire.

His skin was shockingly pale and smooth.  Earlier today she had seen his
skin a deep brown from the sun and the forgefire's heat.

Earlier today he had been callused, with here and there a scar from some
spark or searing burn, the normal accidents of life beside a fire.

Now, though, his skin was as unmarked as a baby's, and she could not
help herself, she stepped into the smithy, knelt beside him, and gently
brushed her hand along his back, from his shoulder down to the narrow
place above the hip.  His skin was so soft it made her own hands feel
coarse to her, as if she marred him just by touching him.

He let out a long breath, a sigh.  She withdrew her hand.

"Alvin," she said.  "Are you all right?"

He moved his arm; he was stroking something that lay within the curl of
his body.  Only now did she see it, a faint yellow in the double shadow
of his body and of the forge.  A golden plow.

"It's alive," he murmured.

As if in answer, she saw it move smoothly under his hand.

Of course they didn't knock.  At this time of night?  They would know at
once it couldn't be some chance traveler-it could only be the Finders.
Knocking at the door would warn them, give them a chance to try to carry
the boy farther off.

But the black-haired Finder didn't so much as try the latch.  He just
let fly with his foot and the door crashed inward, pulling away from the
upper hinge as it did.  Then, shotgun at the ready, he moved quickly
inside and looked around the common room.  The fire there was dying
down, so the light was scant, but they could see that there was no one
there.

"I'll keep watch on the stairs," said the white-haired Finder.

"You go out the back to see if anybody's trying to get out that way."

The black-haired Finder immediately made his way past the kitchen and
the stairs to the back door, which he flung open.  The white-haired
Finder was halfway up the stairs before the back door closed again.

In the kitchen, Old Peg crawled out from under the table.  Neither one
had so much as paused at the kitchen door.  She didn't know who they
were, of course, but she hoped-hoped it was the Finders, sneaking back
here because somehow, by some miracle, Arthur Stuart got away and they
didn't know where he was.  She slipped off her shoes and walked as
quietly as she could from the kitchen to the common room, where Horace
kept a loaded shotgun over the fireplace.  She reached up and took it
down, but in the process she knocked over a tin teakettle that someone
had left warming by the fire earlier in the evening.  The kettle
clattered; hot water spilled over her bare feet; she gasped in spite of
herself.

Immediately she could hear footsteps on the stairs.  She ignored the
pain and ran to the foot of the stairs, just in time to see the
white-haired Finder coming down.  He had a shotgun pointed straight at
her.  Even though she'd never fired a gun at a human being in her life,
she didn't hesitate a moment.  She pulled the trigger; the gun kicked
back against her belly, driving the breath out of her and slamming her
against the wall beside the kitchen door.  She hardly noticed.  All she
saw was how the white-haired Finder stood there, his face suddenly
relaxing till it looked as stupid as a cow's face.  Then red blossoms
appeared all over his shirt, and he toppled over backward.

You'll never steal another child away from his mama, thought Old Peg.
You'll never drag another Black into a life of bowing under the whip.  I
killed you, Finder, and I think the good Lord rejoices.  But even if I
go to hell for it, I'm glad.

She was so intent on watching him that she didn't even notice that the
door out back stood open, held in place by the barrel of the blackhaired
Finder's gun, pointed right at her.

Alvin was so intent on telling Peggy what he had done that he hardly
noticed he was naked.  She handed him the leather apron hanging from a
peg on the wall, and he put it on by habit, without a thought.

She hardly heard his words; all that he was telling her, she already
knew from looking in his heartfire.  Instead she was looking at him,
thinking, Now he's a Maker, in part because of what I taught him.

Maybe I'm finished now, maybe my life will be my own-but maybe not,
maybe now I've just begun, maybe now I can treat him as a man, not as a
pupil or a ward.  He seemed to glow with an inner fire; and every step
he took, the golden plow echoed, not by following him or tangling itself
in his feet, but by slipping along on a line that could have been an
orbit around him, well out of the way but close enough to be of use; as
if it were a part of him, though unattached.

"I know," Peggy told him.  "I understand.  You are a Maker now."

"It's more than that!" he cried.  "It's the Crystal City.  I know how to
build it now, Miss Lamer.  See, the city ain't the crystal towers that I
saw, the city's the people inside it, and if I'm going to build the
place I got to find the kind of folks who ought to be there, folks as
true and loyal as this plow, folks who share the dream enough to want to
build it, and keep on building it even if I'm not there.

You see, Miss Lamer?  The Crystal City isn't a thing that a single Maker

-A

can make.  It's a city of Makers; I got to find all kinds of folks and
somehow make Makers out of them."

She knew as he said it that this was indeed the task that he was born
for-and the labor that would break his heart.  "Yes," she said.

"That's true, I know it is." And in spite of herself, she couldn't sound
like Miss Lamer, calm and cool and distant.  She sounded like herself,
like her true feelings.  She was burning up inside with the fire that
Alvin ]it there.

"Come with me, Miss Lamer," said Alvin.  "You know so much, and you're
such a good teacher-I need your help."

No, Alvin, not those words.  I'll come with you for those words, yes,
but say the other words, the ones I need so much to hear.  "How can I
teach what only you know how to do?" she asked him-trying to sound
quiet, calm.

"But it ain't just for the teaching, either-I can't do this alone.

What I done tonight, it's so hard-I need to have you with me." He took a
step toward her.  The golden plow slipped across the floor toward her,
behind her; if it marked the outer border of Alvin's largest self, then
she was now well within that generous circle.

"What do you need me for?" asked Peggy.  She refused to look within his
heartfire, refused to see whether or not there was any chance that he
might actually-no, she refused even to name to herself what it was she
wanted now, for fear that somehow she'd discover that it couldn't
possibly be so, that it could never happen, that somehow tonight all
such paths had been irrevocably closed.  Indeed, she realized, that was
part of why she had been so caught up in exploring Arthur Stuart's new
futures; he would be so close to Alvin that she could see much of
Alvin's great and terrible future through Arthur's eyes, without ever
having to know what she would know if she looked into Alvin's own
heartfire: Alvin's heartfire would show her whether, in his many
futures, there were any in which he loved her, and married her, and put
that dear and perfect body into her arms to give her and get from her
that gift that only lovers share.

"Come with me," he said.  "I can't even think of going on out there
without you, Miss Lamer.  I-" He laughed at himself.  "I don't even know
your first name, Miss Lamer."

"Margaret," she said.

"Can I call you that?  Margaret-will you come with me?  I know you ain't
what you seem to be, but I don't care what you look like under all that
hexery.  I feel like you're the only living soul who knows me like I
really am, and I-" He just stood there, looking for the word.

And she stood there, waiting to hear it.

"I love you," he said.  "Even though you think I'm just a boy."

Maybe she would've answered him.  Maybe she would've told him that she
knew he was a man, and that she was the only woman who could love him
without worshipping him, the only one who could actually be a helpmeet
for him.  But into the silence after his words and before she could
speak, there came the sound of a gunshot.

At once she thought of Arthur Stuart, but it only took a moment to see
that his heartfire was undisturbed; he lay asleep up in her little
house.  No, the sound came from farther off.  She cast her torchy sight
to the roadhouse, and there found the heartfire of a man in the last
moment before death, and he was looking at a woman standing down at the
foot of the stairs.  It was Mother, holding a shotgun.

His heartfire dimmed, died.  At once Peggy looked into her mother's
heartfire and saw, behind her thoughts and feelings and memories, a
million paths of the future, all jumbling together, all changing before
her eyes, all becoming one single path, which led to one single place. A
flash of searing agony, and then nothing.

"Mother!" she cried.  "Mother!"

And then the future became the present; Old Peg's heartfire was gone
before the sound of the second gunshot reached the smithy.

Alvin could hardly believe what he was saying to Miss Lamer.  He hadn't
known until this moment, when he said it, how he felt about her.

He was so afraid she'd laugh at him, so afraid she'd tell him he was far
too young, that in time he'd get over how he felt.

But instead of answering him, she paused for just a moment, and in that
moment a gunshot rang out.  Alvin knew at once that it came from the
roadhouse; he followed the sound with his bug and found where it came
from, found a dead man already beyond all hearing.

And then a moment later, another gunshot, and then he found someone else
dying, a woman.  He knew that body from the inside out; it wasn't no
stranger.  It had to be Old Peg.

Mother!" cried Miss Lamer.  "Mother!"

"It's Old Peg Guester!" cried Alvin.

He saw Miss Lamer tear open the collar of her dress, reach inside and
pull out the amulets that hung there.  She tore them off her neck,
cutting herself bad on the breaking strings.  Alvin could hardly take in
what he saw-a young woman, scarce older than himself, and beautiful,
even though her face was torn with grief and terror.

"It's my mother!" she cried.  "Alvin, save her!"

He didn't wait a second.  He just tore on out of the smithy, running
barefoot on the grass, in the road, not caring how the rough dirt and
rocks tore into his soft, unaccustomed feet.  The leather apron caught
and tangled between his knees; he tugged it, twisted it to the side, out
of his way.  He could see with his bug how Old Peg was already past
saving, but still he ran, because he had to try, even though he knew
there was no reason in it.  And then she died, and still he ran, because
he couldn't bear not to be running to where that good woman, his good
friend was lying dead.

His good friend and Miss Lamer's mother.  The only way that could be is
if she was the torch girl what run off seven years ago.  But then if she
was such a torch as folks around her said, why didn't she see this
coming?  Why didn't she look into her own mother's heartfire and foresee
her death?  It made no sense.

There was a man in front of him on the road.  A man running down from
the roadhouse toward some horses tied to trees just over yonder.

It was the man who killed Old Peg, Alvin knew that, and cared to know no
more.  He sped up, faster than he'd ever run before without getting
strength from the forest around him.  The man heard him coming maybe
thirty yards off, and turned around.

"You, smith!" cried the black-haired Finder.  "Glad to kill you too!"

He had a pistol in his hand; he fired.

Alvin took the bullet in his belly, but he didn't care about that.

His body started work at once fixing what the bullet tore, but it
wouldn't've mattered a speck if he'd been bleeding to death.  Alvin
didn't even slow down; he flew into the man, knocking him down, landing
on him and skidding with him ten feet across the dirt of the road.  The
man cried out in fear and pain.  That single cry was the last sound he
made; in his rage, Alvin caught the man's head in such a grip that it
took only one sharp jab of his other hand against the man's jaw to snap
his neckbone clean in half.  The man was already dead, but Alvin hit his
head again and again with his fists, until his arms and chest and his
leather apron was all covered with the blackhaired Finder's blood and
the man's skull was broke up inside his head like shards of dropped
pottery.

Then Alvin knelt there, his head stupid with exhaustion and spent anger.
After a minute or so he remembered that Old Peg was still lying there on
the roadhouse floor.  He knowed she was dead, but where else did he have
to go?  Slowly he got to his feet.

He heard horses coming down the road from town.  That time of night in
Hatrack River, gunshots meant only trouble.  Folks'd come.

They'd find the body in the road-they'd come on up to the roadhouse.  No
need for Alvin to stay to greet them.

Inside the roadhouse, Peggy was already kneeling over her mother's body,
sobbing and panting from her run up to the house.  Alvin only knew for
sure it was her from her dress-he'd only seen her face but once before,
for a second there in the smithy.  She turned when she saw Alvin come
inside.  "Where were you!  Why didn't you save her!  You could have
saved her!"

"I never could," said Alvin.  It was wrong of her to say such a thing.
"There wasn't time."

"You should have looked!  You should have seen what was coming.

Alvin didn't understand her.  "I can't see what's coming," he said.

That's your knack."

Then she burst out crying, not the dry sobs like when he first came but
deep, gut-wrenching howls of grief.  Alvin didn't know what to do.

The door opened behind him.

"Peggy," whispered Horace Guester.  "Little Peggy."

Peggy looked up at her father, her face so streaked with tears and
twisted up and reddened with weeping that it was a marvel he could
recognize her.  "I killed her!" she cried.  "I never should have left,
Papa!  I killed her!"

Only then did Horace understand that it was his wife's body lying there.
Alvin watched as he started trembling, groaning, then keening loud and
high like a hurt dog.  Alvin never seen such grieving.  Did my father
cry like that when my brother Vigor died?  Did he make such a sound as
this when he thought that me and Measure was tortured to death by Red
men?

Alvin reached out his arms to Horace, held him tight around the
shoulders, then led him over to Peggy and helped him kneel there beside
his daughter, both of them weeping, neither giving a sign that they saw
each other.  All they saw was Old Peg's body spread out on the floor;
Alvin couldn't even guess how deeply, how agonizingly each one bore the
whole blame for her dying.

After a while the sheriff came in.  He'd already found the blackhaired
Finder's corpse outside, and it didn't take him long to understand
exactly what happened.  He took Alvin aside.  "This is pure selfdefense
if I ever saw it," said Pauley Wiseman, "and I wouldn't make you spend
three seconds in jail for it.  But I can tell you that the law in
Appalachee don't take the death of a Finder all that easy, and the
treaty lets them come up here and get you to take back there for trial.

What I'm saying, boy, is you better get the hell out of here in the next
couple of days or I can't promise you'll be safe."

"I was going anyway," said Alvin.

"I don't know how you done it," said Pauley Wiseman, "but I reckon you
got that half-Black pickaninny away from them Finders tonight and hid
him somewhere around here.  I'm telling you, Alvin, when you go, you
best take that boy with you.  Take him to Canada.

But if I see his face again, I'll ship him south myself.  It's that boy
caused all this-makes me sick, a good White woman dying cause of some
half-Black mixup boy."

"You best never say such a thing in front of me again, Pauley Wiseman."

The sheriff only shook his head and walked away.  "Ain't natural," he
said.  "All you people set on a monkey like it was folks." He turned
around to face Alvin.  "I don't much care what you think of me, Alvin
Smith, but I'm giving you and that mixup boy a chance to stay alive.  I
hope you have brains to take it.  And in the meantime, you might go wash
off that blood and fetch some clothes to wear."

Alvin walked on back to the road.  Other folks was coming by then -he
paid them no heed.  Only Mock Berry seemed to understand what was
happening.  He led Alvin on down to his house, and there Anga washed him
down and Mock gave him some of his own clothes to wear.  It was nigh
onto dawn when Alvin got him back to the smithy.

Makepeace was setting there on a stool in the smithy door, looking at
the golden plow.  It was resting on the ground, still as you please,
right in front of the forge.

"That's one hell of a journeyman piece," said Makepeace.

"I reckon," said Alvin.  He walked over to the plow and reached down. It
fairly leapt into Alvin's hands-not heavy at all now-but if Makepeace
noticed how the plow moved by itself just before Alvin touched it, he
didn't say.

"I got a lot of scrap iron," said Makepeace.  "I don't even ask for you
to go halves with me.  Just let me keep a few pieces when you turn them
into gold."

"I ain't turning no more iron into gold," said Alvin.

It made Makepeace angry.  "That's gold, you fool!  That there plow you
made means never going hungry, never having to work again, living fine
instead of in that rundown house up there!  It means new dresses for
Gertie and maybe a suit of clothes for me!  It means folks in town
saying Good morning to me and tipping their hats like I was a gentleman.
It means riding in a carriage like Dr.  Physicker, and going to Dekane
or Carthage or wherever I please and not even caring what it costs.  And
you're telling me you ain't making no more gold?"

Alvin knew it wouldn't do no good explaining, but still he tried.

"This ain't no common gold, sir.  This is a living plow-I ain't going to
let nobody melt it down to make coins out of it.  Best I can figure,
nobody could melt it even if they wanted to.  So back off and let me go.
:, 6 What you going to do, plow with it?  You blame fool, we could be
kings of the world together!" But when Alvin pushed on by, headed out of
the smithy, Makepeace stopped his pleading and started getting ugly.
"That's my iron you used to make that golden plow!  That gold belongs to
me!  A journeyman piece always belongs to the master, less'n he gives it
to the journeyman and I sure as hell don't!  Thief!

You're stealing from me!"

"You stole five years of my life from me, long after I was good enough
to be a journeyman," Alvin said.  "And this plow-making it was none of
your teaching.  It's alive, Makepeace Smith.  It doesn't belong to you
and it doesn't belong to me.  It belongs to itself.  So let me just set
it down here and we'll see who gets it."

Alvin set down the plow on the grass between them.  Then he stepped back
a few paces.  Makepeace took one step toward the plow.

It sank down into the soil under the grass, then cut its way through the
dirt till it reached Alvin.  When he picked it up, it was warm.  He knew
what that had to mean.  "Good soil," said Alvin.  The plow trembled in
his hands.

Makepeace stood there, his eyes bugged out with fear.  "Good Lord, boy,
that plow moved.

"I know it," said Alvin.

"What are you, boy?  The devil?"

"I don't think so," said Alvin.  "Though I might've met him once or
twice."

"Get on out of here!  Take that thing and go away!  I never want to see
your face around here again!"

"You got my journeyman paper," said Alvin.  "I want it."

Makepeace reached into his pocket, took out a folded paper, and threw it
onto the grass in front of the smithy.  Then he reached out and pulled
the smithy doors shut, something he hardly ever did, even in winter.  He
shut them tight and barred them on the inside.  Poor fool, as if Alvin
couldn't break down them walls in a second if he really wanted to get
inside.  Alvin walked over and picked up the paper.  He opened it and
read it-signed all proper.  It was legal.  Alvin was a journeyman.

The sun was just about to show up when Alvin got to the springhouse
door.  Of course it was locked, but locks and hexes couldn't keep Alvin
out, specially when he made them all himself.  He opened the door and
went inside.  Arthur Stuart stirred in his sleep.

Alvin touched his shoulder, brought the boy awake.  Alvin knelt there by
the bed and told the boy most all that happened in the night. He showed
him the golden plow, showed him how it moved.  Arthur laughed in
delight.  Then Alvin told him that the woman he called Mama all his life
was dead, killed by the Finders, and Arthur cried.

But not for long.  He was too young to cry for long.  "You say she kilt
one herself afore she died?"

"With your pa's own shotgun."

"Good for her!" said Arthur Stuart, his voice so fierce Alvin almost
laughed, him being so small.

"I killed the other one myself.  The one that shot her."

Arthur reached out and took Alvin's right hand and opened it.

"Did you kill him with this hand?"

Alvin nodded.

Arthur kissed his open palm.

"I would've fixed her up if I could," said Alvin.  "But she died too
fast.  Even if I'd been standing right there the second after the shot
hit her, I couldn't've fixed her up."

Arthur Stuart reached out and hung onto Alvin around his neck and cried
some more.

It took a day to put Old Peg into the ground, up on the hill with her
own daughters and Alvin's brother Vigor and Arthur's mama who died so
young.  "A place for people of courage," said Dr.  Physicker, and Alvin
knew that he was right, even though Physicker didn't know about the
runaway Black slave girl.

Alvin washed away the bloodstains from the floor and stairs of the
roadhouse, using his knack to pull out what blood the lye and sand
couldn't remove.  It was the last gift he could give to Horace or to
Peggy.  Margaret.  Miss Lamer.

"I got to leave now," he told them.  They were setting on chairs in the
common room of the inn, where they'd been receiving mourners all day.
"I'm taking Arthur to my folks' place in Vigor Church.  He'll be safe
there.  And then I'm going on."

"Thank you for everything," said Horace.  "You been a good friend to us.
Old Peg loved you." Then he broke down crying again.

Alvin patted him on the shoulder a couple of times, and then moved over
to stand in front of Peggy.  "All that I am, Miss Lamer, I owe to you."

She shook her head.

"I meant all I said to you.  I still mean it."

Again she shook her head.  He wasn't surprised.  With her mama dead,
never even knowing that her own daughter'd come home, why, Alvin didn't
expect she could just up and go.  Somebody had to help Horace Guester
run the roadhouse.  It all made sense.  But still it stabbed him to the
heart, because now more than ever he knew that it was true-he loved her.
But she wasn't for him.  That much was plain.  She never had been.  A
woman like this, so educated and fine and beautiful-she could be his
teacher, but she could never love him like he loved her.

"Well then, I guess I'm saying good-bye," said Alvin.  He stuck out his
hand, even though he knew it was kind of silly to shake hands with
somebody grieving the way she was.  But he wanted so bad to put his arms
around her and hold her tight the way he'd held Arthur Stuart when he
was grieving, and a handshake was as close as he could come to that.

She saw his hand, and reached up and took it.  Not for a handshake, but
just holding his hand, holding it tight.  It took him by surprise.

He'd think about that many times in the months and years to come, how
tight she held to him.  Maybe it meant she loved him.  Or maybe it meant
she only cared for him as a pupil, or thanked him for avenging her
mama's death-how could he know what a thing like that could mean?

But still he held onto that memory, in case it meant she loved him.

And he made her a promise then, with her holding his hand like that;
made her a promise even though he didn't know if she even wanted him to
keep it.  "I'll be back," he said.  "And what I said last night, it'll
always be true." It took all his courage then to call her by the name
she gave him permission last night to use.  "God be with you, Margaret."

"God be with you, Alvin," she whispered.

Then he gathered up Arthur Stuart, who'd been saying his own good-byes,
and led the boy outside.  They walked out back of the roadhouse to the
barn, where Alvin had hidden the golden plow deep in a barrel of beans.
He took off the lid and held out his hand, and the plow rose upward
until it glinted in the light.  Then Alvin took it up, wrapped it double
in burlap and put it inside a burlap bag, then swung the bag over his
shoulder.

Alvin knelt down and held out his hand the way he always did when he
wanted Arthur Stuart to climb up onto his back.  Arthur did, thinking it
was all for play-a boy that age, he can't be grieving for more than an
hour or two at a time.  He swung up onto Alvin's back, laughing and
bouncing.

"This time it's going to be a long ride, Arthur Stuart," said Alvin.

"We're going all the way to my family's house in Vigor Church."

"Walking the whole way?"

"I'll be walking.  You're going to ride."

"Gee-yap!" cried Arthur Stuart.

Alvin set off at a trot, but before long he was running full out.

He never set foot on that road, though.  Instead he took off cross
country, over fields, over fences, and on into the woods, which still
stood in great swatches here and there across the states of Ohio and
Wobbish between him and home.  The greensong was much weaker than it had
been in the days when the Red men had it all to themselves.  But the
song was still strong enough for Alvin Smith to hear.  He let himself
himself fall into the rhythm of the greensong, running as the Red men
did.  And Arthur Stuart-maybe he could hear some of the greensong too,
enough that it could lull him to sleep, there on Alvin's back.  The
world was gone.  Just him, Arthur Stuart, the golden plow-and the whole
world singing around him.  I'm a journeyman now.

And this is my first journey.

Cavil'S Deed

Cavil Planter had business in town.  He mounted his horse early on that
fine spring morning, leaving behind wife and slaves, house and land,
knowing all were well under his control, fully his own.

Along about noon, after many a pleasant visit and much business well
done, he stopped in at the postmaster's store.  There were three letters
there.  Two were from old friends.  One was from Reverend Philadelphia
Thrower in Carthage, the capital of Wobbish.

Old friends could wait.  This would be news about the Finders he hired,
though why the letter should come from Thrower and not from the Finders
themselves, Cavil couldn't guess.  Maybe there was trouble.

Maybe he'd have to go north to testify after all.  Well, if that's what
it takes, I'll do it, thought Cavil.  Gladly I'll leave the ninety and
nine sheep, as Jesus said, in order to reclaim the one that strayed.

It was bitter news.  Both Finders dead, and so also the innkeeper's wife
who claimed to have adopted Cavil's stolen firstborn son.  Good riddance
to her, thought Cavil, and he spared not a second's grief for the
Finders-they were hirelings, and he valued them less than his slaves,
since they weren't his.  No, it was the last news, the worst news, that
set Cavil's hands to trembling and his breath to stop.

The man who killed one of the Finders, a prentice smith named Alvin, he
ran off instead of standing trial-and took with him Cavil's son.

He took my son.  And the worst words from Thrower were these: "I knew
this fellow Alvin when he was a mere child, and already he was an agent
of evil.  He is our mutual Friend's worst enemy in all the world, and
now he has your most valued property in-his possession.  I wish I had
better news.  I pray for you, lest your son be turned into a dangerous
and implacable foe of all our Friend's holy work."

With such news, how could Cavil go about the rest of the day's business?
Without a word to the postmaster or to anybody, Cavil stuffed the
letters into his pocket, went outside, mounted his horse, and headed
home.  All the way his heart was tossed between rage and fear.  How
could those northerner Emancipationist scum have let his slave, his son,
get stole right out from under them, by the worst enemy of the Overseer?
I'll go north, I'll make them pay, I'll find the boy, I'll-and then his
thoughts would turn all of a sudden to what the Overseer would say, if
ever He came again.  What if He despises me now, and never comes again?
Or worse, what if He comes and damns me for a slothful servant?  Or what
if He declares me unworthy and forbids me to take any more Black women
to myself?  How could I live if not in His service-what else is my life
for?

And then rage again, terrible blasphemous rage, in which he cried out
deep within his soul, 0 my Overseer!  Why did You let this happen?

You could have stopped it with a word, if You are truly Lord!

And then terror: Such a thing, to doubt the power of the Overseer!

No, forgive me, I am truly Thy slave, 0 Master!  Forgive me, I've lost
everything, forgive me!

Poor Cavil.  He'd find out soon enough what losing everything could
mean.

He got himself home and turned the horse up that long drive leading to
the house, only the sun being hot he stayed under the shade of the oaks
along the south side of the road.  Maybe if he'd rode out in the middle
of the lane he would've been seen sooner.  Maybe then he wouldn't have
heard a woman cry out inside the house just as he was coming out from
under the trees.

"Dolores!" he called.  "Is something wrong?"

No answer.

Now, that scared him.  It conjured up pictures in his mind of marauders
or thieves or such, breaking into his house while he was gone.

Maybe they already killed Lashman, and even now were killing his wife.
He spurred his horse and raced around the house to the back.

Just in time to see a big old Black running from the back door of the
house down toward the slave quarters.  He couldn't see the Black man's
face, on account of his trousers, which he didn't have on, nor any other
clothing either-no, he was holding those trousers like a banner,
flapping away in front of his face as he ran down toward the sheds.

A Black, no pants on, running out of my house, in which a woman was
crying out.  For a moment Cavil was torn between the desire to chase
down the Black man and kill him with his bare hands and the need to go
up and see to Dolores, make sure she was all right.  Had he come in
time?  Was she undeffied?

Cavil bounded up the stairs and flung open the door to his wife's room.
There lay Dolores in bed, her covers tight up under her chin, looking at
him through wide-open, frightened eyes.

"What happened!" cried Cavil.  "Are you all right?"

"Of course I am!" she answered sharply.  "What are you doing home?"

That wasn't the answer you get from a woman who's just cried out in
fear.  "I heard you call out," said Cavil.  "Didn't you hear me answer?"

"I hear everything up here," said Dolores.  "I got nothing to do in my
life but lie here and listen.  I hear everything that's said in this
house and everything that's done.  Yes, I heard you call.  But you
weren't answering me.  " Cavil was astonished.  She sounded angry.

He'd never heard her sound angry before.  Lately he'd hardly heard a
word from her at all -she was always asleep when he took breakfast, and
their dinners together passed in silence.  Now this anger-why?  Why now?

"I saw a Black man running away from the house," said Cavil.  "I thought
maybe he-"

"Maybe he what?" She said the words like a taunt, a challenge.

:,Maybe he hurt you."

"No, he didn't hurt me."

Now a thought began to creep into Cavil's mind, a thought so terrible he
couldn't even admit he was thinking it.  "What did he do, then?"

"Why, the same holy work that you've been doing, Cavil."

Cavil couldn't say a thing to that.  She knew.  She knew it all.

"Last summer, when your friend Reverend Thrower came, I lay here in my
bed as you talked, the two of you."

"You were asleep.  Your door was-"

"I heard everything.  Every word, every, whisper.  I heard you go
outside.  I heard you talk at breakfast.  Do you know I wanted to kill
you?  For years I thought you were the loving husband, a Christlike man,
and all this time you were rutting with these Black women.  And then
sold all your own babies as slaves.  You're a monster, I thought.

So evil that for you to live another minute was an abomination.

But my hands couldn't hold a knife or pull the trigger on a gun. So I
lay here and thought.  And you know what I thought?"

Cavil said nothing.  The way she told it, it made him sound so bad.

"It wasn't like that, it was holy."

"It was adultery!"

"I had a vision!"

"Yes, your vision.  Well, fine and dandy, Mr.  Cavil Planter, you had a
vision that making half-White babies was a good thing.  Here's some news
for you.  I can make half-White babies, too!"

It was all making sense now.  "He raped you!"

"He didn't rape me, Cavil.  I invited him up here.  I told him what to
do.  I made him call me his vixen and say prayers with me before and
after so it would be as holy as what you did.  We prayed to your damned
Overseer, but for some reason he never showed up."

"It never happened."

"Again and again, every time you left the plantation, all winter, all
spring."

"I don't believe it.  You're lying to hurt me.  You can't do that-the
doctor said-it hurts you too bad."

"Cavil, before I found out what you done with those Black women, I
thought I knew what pain was, but all that suffering was nothing, do you
hear me?  I could live through that pain every day forever and call it a
holiday.  I'm pregnant, Cavil."

"He raped you.  That's what we'll tell everybody, and we'll hang him as
an example, and-"

"Hang him?  There's only one rapist on this plantation, Cavil, and don't
think for a moment that I won't tell.  If you lay a hand on my baby's
father, I'll tell the whole county what you've been doing.  I'll get up
on Sunday and tell the church."

"I did it in the service of the-"

"Do you think they'll believe that?  No more than I do.  The word for
what you done isn't holiness.

It's concupiscence.  Adultery.  Lust.

And when word gets out, when my baby is born Black, they'll turn against
you, all of them.  They'll run you out."

Cavil knew she was right.  Nobody would believe him.  He was ruined.
Unless he did one simple thing.

He walked out of her room.  She lay there laughing at him, taunting him.
He went to his bedroom, took the shotgun down from the wall, poured in
the powder, wadded it, then dumped in a double load of shot and rammed
it tight with a second wad.

She wasn't laughing when he came back in.  Instead she had her face
toward the wall, and she was crying.  Too late for tears, he thought.
She didn't turn to face him as he strode to the bed and tore down the
covers.  She was naked as a plucked chicken.

"Cover me!" she whimpered.  "He ran out so fast, he didn't dress me.
It's cold!  Cover me, Cavil-" Then she saw the gun.

Her twisted hands flailed in the air.  Her body writhed.  She cried out
in the pain of trying to move so quickly.  Then he pulled the trigger
and her body just flopped right down on the bed, a last sigh of air
leaking out of the top of her neck.

Cavil went back to his room and reloaded the gun.

He found Fat Fox fully dressed, polishing the carriage.  He was such a
bar, he thought he could fool Cavil Planter.  But Cavil didn't even
bother listening to his lies.  "Your vixen wants to see you upstairs,"
he said.

Fat Fox kept denying it all the way until he got into the room and saw
Dolores on the bed.  Then he changed his tune.  "She made me!

What could I do, Master!  It was like you and the women, Master!

What choice a Black slave got?  I got to obey, don't I?  Like the women
and you!"

Cavil knew devil talk when he heard it, and he paid no mind.

"Strip off your clothes and do it again," he said.  Fat Fox howled and
Fat Fox whined, but when Cavil jammed him in the ribs with the barrel,
he did what he was told.  He closed his eyes so he didn't have to see
what Cavil's shotgun done to Dolores, and he did what he was told.  Then
Cavil fired the gun again.

In a little while Lashman came in from the far field, all a-lather with
running and fearing when he heard the gunshots.  Cavil met him
downstairs.  "Lock down the slaves, Lashman, and then go fetch me the
sheriff."

When the sheriff came, Cavil led him upstairs and showed him.

The sheriff went pale.  "Good Lord," he whispered.

"Is it murder, Sheriff?  I did it.  Are you taking me to jail?"

"No sir," said the sheriff.  "Ain't nobody going to call this murder."

Then he looked at Cavil with this twisted kind of expression on his
face.  "What kind of man are you, Cavil?"

For a moment Cavil didn't understand the question.

"Letting me see your wife like that.  I'd rather die before I let
somebody see my wife like that."

The sheriff left.  Lashman had the slaves clean up the room.

There was no funeral for either one.  They both'got buried out where
Salamandy lay.  Cavil was pretty sure a few chickens died over the
graves, but by then he didn't care.  He was on his tenth bottle of
bourbon and his ten-thousandth muttered prayer to the Overseer, who
seemed powerful standoffish at a time like this.

Along about a week later, or maybe longer, here comes the sheriff again,
with the priest and the Baptist preacher both.  The three of them woke
Cavil up from his drunken sleep and showed him a draught for twenty-five
thousand dollars.  "All your neighbors took up a collection," the priest
explained.

"I don't need money," Cavil said.

"They're buying you out," said the preacher.

"Plantation ain't for sale."

The sheriff shook his head.  "You got it wrong, Cavil.  What happened
here, that was bad.  But you letting folks see your wife like that-"

"I only let you see."

"You ain't no gentleman, Cavil."

"Also, there's the matter of the slave children," said the Baptist
preacher.  "They seem remarkably light-skinned, considering you have no
breeding stock but what's black as night."

"It's a miracle from God," said Cavil.  "The Lord is lightening the
Black race."

The sheriff slid a paper over to Cavil.  "This is the transfer of title
of all your property-slaves, buildings, and land-to a holding company
consisting of your former neighbors."

Cavil read it.  "This deed says all the slaves here on the land," he
said.  "I got rights in a runaway slave boy up north."

"We don't care about that.  He's yours if you can find him.  I hope you
noticed this deed also includes a stipulation that you will never return
to this county or any adjoining county for the rest of your natural
life."

"I saw that part," said Cavil.

"I can assure you that if you break that agreement, it will be the end
of your natural life.  Even a conscientious, hardworking sheriff like me
couldn't protect you from what would happen."

"You said no threats," murmured the priest.

"Cavil needs to know the consequences," said the sheriff.

"I won't be back," said Cavil.

"Pray to God for forgiveness," said the preacher.

"That I will." Cavil signed the paper.

That very night he rode out on his horse with a
twenty-five-thousand-dollar draught in his pocket and a change of
clothes and a week's provisions on a pack horse behind him.  Nobody bid
him farewell.  The slaves were singing jubilation songs in the sheds
behind him.  His horse manured the end of the drive.  And in Cavil's
mind there was only one thought.  The Overseer hates me, or this all
wouldn't have happened.  There's only one way to win back His love.

That's to find that Alvin Smith, kill him, and get back my boy, my last
slave who still belongs to me.

Then, 0 my Overseer, will You forgive me, and heal the terrible stripes
Thy lash has torn upon my soul?

Alvin Journeyman

Alvin stayed home in Vigor Church all summer, getting to know his family
again.  Folks had changed, more than a little-Cally was mansize now, and
Measure had him a wife and children, and the twins Wastenot and Wantnot
had married them a pair of French sisters from Detroit, and Ma and Pa
was both grey-haired mostly, and moving slower than Alvin liked to see.
But some things didn't changethere was playfulness in them all, the
whole family, and the darkness that had fallen over Vigor Church after
the massacre at Tippy-Canoe, it was-well, not gone-more like it had
changed into a kind of shadow that was behind everything, so the bright
spots in life seemed all the brighter by contrast.

They all took to Arthur Stuart right off.  He was so young he could hear
all the men of the town tell him the tale of Tippy-Canoe, and all that
he thought of it was to tell them his own story-which was really
amish-mash of his real mama's story, and Alvin's story, and the story of
the Finders and how his White mama killed one afore she died.

Alvin pretty much let Arthur Stuart's account of things stand
uncorrected.  Partly it was because why should he make Arthur Stuart out
to be wrong, when he loved telling the tale so?  Partly it was out of
sorrow, realizing bit by bit that Arthur Stuart never spoke in nobody
else's voice but his own.  Folks here would never know what it was like
to hear Arthur Stuart speak their own voice right back at them.

Even so, they loved to hear the boy talk, because he still remembered
all the words people said, never forgetting a scrap it seemed like.  Why
should Alvin mar what was left of Arthur Stuart's knack?

Alvin also figured that what he never told, nobody could ever repeat.
For instance, there was a certain burlap parcel that nobody ever saw
unwrapped.  It wouldn't do no good for word to get around that a certain
golden object had been seen in the town of Vigor Church-the town, which
hadn't had many visitors since the dark day of the massacre at
Tippy-Canoe, would soon have more company than they wanted, and all the
wrong sort, looking for gold and not caring who got harmed along the
way.  So he never told a soul about the golden plow, and the only person
who even knew he was keeping a secret was his close-mouthed sister
Eleanor.

Alvin went to call on her at the store she and Armor-of-God kept right
there on the town square, ever since before there was a town square.
Once it had been a place where visitors, Red and White, came from far
away to get maps and news, back when the land was still mostly forest
from the Mizzipy to Dekane.  Now it was still busy, but it was all local
folks, come to buy or hear gossip and news of the outside world.  Since
Armor-of-God was the only grown-up man in Vigor Church who wasn't cursed
with Tenskwa-Tawa's curse, he was also the only one who could easily go
outside to buy goods and hear news, bringing it all back in to the
farmers and tradesmen of Vigor Church.  It happened that today
Armor-of-God was away, heading up to the town of Mishy-Waka to pick up
some orders of glass goods and fine china.  So Alvin found only Eleanor
and her oldest boy, Hector, there, tending the store.

Things had changed a bit since the old days.  Eleanor, who was near as
good a hexmaker as Alvin, didn't have to conceal her hexes in the
patterns of hanging flower baskets and arrangements of herbs in the
kitchen.  Now some of the hexes were right out in the open, which meant
they could be much clearer and stronger.  Armor-of-God must've let up a
little on his hatred of knackery and hidden powers.

That was a good thing-it was a painful thing, in the old days, to know
how Eleanor had to pretend not to be what she was or know what she knew.

:,I got something with me," said Alvin.

"So I see," said Eleanor.  "All wrapped in a burlap bag, as still as
stone, and yet it seems to me there's something living inside."

"Never you mind about that," said Alvin.  "What's here is for no other
soul but me to see."

Eleanor didn't ask any questions.  She knew from those words exactly why
he brought his mysterious parcel by.  She told Hector to wait on any
customers as came by, and then led Alvin out into the new ware-room,
where they kept such things as a dozen kinds of beans in barrels, salt
meat in kegs, sugar in paper cones, powder salt in waterproof pots, and
spices all in different kinds of jars.  She went straight to the fullest
of the bean barrels, filled with a kind of greenspeckle bean that Alvin
hadn't seen before.

"Not much call for these beans," she said.  "I reckon we'll never see
the bottom of this barrel."

Alvin set the plow, all wrapped in burlap, on top of the beans.

And then he made the beans slide out of the way, flowing around the plow
smooth as molasses, until it sank right down to the bottom. He didn't so
much as ask Eleanor to turn away, since she knew Alvin had power to do
that much since he was just a little boy.

"Whatever's living in there," said Eleanor, "it ain't going to die,
being dry down at the bottom of the barrel, is it?"

"It won't ever die," said Alvin, "at least not the way folks grow old
and die."

Eleanor gave in to curiosity just enough to say, "I wish you could
promise me that if anybody ever knows what's in there, so will I."

Alvin nodded to her.  That was a promise he could keep.  At the time, he
didn't know how or when he'd ever show that plow to anybody, but if
anybody could keep a secret, silent Eleanor could.

So anyway he lived in Vigor Church, sleeping in his old bedroom in his
parents' house, lived there a good many weeks, well on toward July, and
all the while he kept most of what happened in his seven-year
prenticeship to himself.  In fact he talked hardly more than he had to.

He went here and there, a-calling on folks with his Pa or Ma, and
without much fuss healing such toothaches and broken bones and festering
wounds and sickness as he found.  He helped at the mill; he hired out to
work in other farmers' fields and barns; he built him a small forge and
did simple repairs and solders, the kind a smith can do without a proper
anvil.  And all that time, he pretty much spoke when people spoke to
him, and said little more than what was needed to do business or get the
food he wanted at table.

He wasn't glum-he laughed at a joke, and even told a few.  He wasn't
solemn, neither, and spent more than a few afternoons down in the
square, proving to the strongest farmers in Vigor Church that they
weren't no match for a blacksmith's arms and shoulders in a rassling
match.  He just didn't have any gossip or small talk, and he never told
a story on himself.  And if you didn't keep a conversation going, Alvin
was content to let it fall into silence, keeping at his work or staring
off into the distance like as if he didn't even remember you were there.

Some folks noticed how little Alvin talked, but he'd been gone a

long time, and you don't expect a nineteen-year-old to act the same as
an eleven-year-old.  They just figured he'd grown up to be a quiet man.

But a few knew better.  Alvin's mother and father had some words between
the two of them, more than once.  "The boy's had some bad things happen
to him," said his mother; but his father took a different view.  "I
reckon maybe he's had bad and good mixed in together, like most folks-he
just doesn't know us well enough yet, after being gone seven years.  Let
him get used to being a man in this town, and not a boy anymore, and
pretty soon he'll talk his leg off."

Eleanor, she also noticed Alvin wasn't talking, but since she also knew
he had a marvelous secret living thing hidden in her bean barrel, she
didn't fuss for a minute about something being wrong with Alvin.

It was like she said to her husband, Armor-of-God, when he mentioned
about how Alvin just didn't seem to have five words altogether for
nobody.  "He's thinking deep thoughts," said Eleanor.

"He's working out problems none of us knows enough to help him with.
You'll see-he'll talk plenty when he figures it all out."

And there was Measure, Alvin's brother who got captured by Reds when
Alvin was; the brother who had come to know Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa
near as well as Alvin himself.  Of course Measure noticed how little
Alvin bad told them about his prentice years, and in due time he'd
surely be one Alvin could talk to-that was natural, seeing how long
Alvin had trusted Measure and all they'd been through together.  But at
first Alvin felt shy even around Measure, seeing how he had his wife,
Delphi, and any fool could see how they hardly could stand to be more
than three feet apart from each other; he was so gentle and careful with
her, always looking out for her, turning to talk to her if she was near,
looking for her to come back if she was gone.  How could Alvin know
whether there was room for him anymore in Measure's heart?  No, not even
to Measure could Alvin tell his tale, not at first.

One day in high summer, Alvin was out in a field building fences with
his younger brother Cally, who was man-size now, as tall as Alvin though
not as massive in the back and shoulders.  The two of them had hired on
for a week with Martin Hill.  Alvin was doing the rail splitting-hardly
using his knack at all, either, though truth to tell he could've split
all the rails just by asking them to split themselves.  No, he set the
wedge and hammered it down, and his knack only got used to keep the logs
from splitting at bad angles that wouldn't give full-length rails.

They must have fenced about a quarter mile before Alvin realized that it
was peculiar how Cally never fell behind.  Alvin split, and Cally got
the posts and rails laid in place, never needing a speck of help to set
a post into soil too hard or soft or rocky or muddy.

So Alvin kept his eye on the boy-or, more exactly, used his knack to
keep watch on Cally's work-and sure enough, Alvin could see that Cally
had something of Alvin's knack, the way it was long ago when he didn't
half understand what he was doing with it.  Cally would find just the
right spot to set a post, then make the ground soft till he needed it to
be firm.  Alvin figured Cally wasn't exactly planning it.

He probably thought he was finding spots that were naturally good for
setting a post.

Here it is, thought Alvin.  Here's what I know I've got to do: teach
somebody else to be a Maker.  If ever there was someone I should teach,
it's Cally, seeing how he's got something of the same knack.

After all, he's seventh son of a seventh son same as me, since Vigor was
still alive when I was born, but long dead when Cally came along.

So Alvin just up and started talking as they worked, telling Cally all
about atoms and how you could teach them how to be, and they'd be like
that.  It was the first time Alvin tried to explain it to anybody since
the last time he talked to Miss Lamer-Margaret-and the words tasted
delicious in his mouth.  This is the work I was born for, thought Alvin.
Telling my brother how the world works, so he can understand it and get
some control over it.

You can bet Alvin was surprised, then, when Cally all of a sudden lifted
a post high above his head and threw it on the ground at his brother's
feet.  It had so much fore r Cally had so ravaged it with his knack-that
it shivered into kindling right there where it hit.

Alvin couldn't hardly even guess why, but Cally was plain filled with
rage.

"What did I say?" asked Alvin.

"My name's Cal," said Cally.  "I ain't been Cally since I was ten years
old."

"I didn't know," said Alvin.  "I'm sorry, and from now on you're Cal to
me."

"I'm nothing to you," said Cal.  "I just wish you'd go away!"

It was only right at this minute that Alvin realized that Cal hadn't
exactly invited him to go along on this job-it was Martin Hill what
asked for Alvin to come, and before that, the job had been Cal's alone.

"I didn't mean to butt into your work here," said Alvin.  "It just never
entered my head you wouldn't want my help.  I know I wanted your
company."

Seemed like everything Alvin said only made Cal seethe inside till now
his face was red and his fists were clenched tight enough to strangle a
snake.  "I had a place here," said Cal.  "Then you come back.  All fancy
school taught like you are, using all them big words.

And healing people without so much as touching them, just walking into
their house and talking a spell, and when you leave everybody's all
healed up from whatever ailed them-" Alvin didn't even know folks had
noticed he was doing it.  Since nobody said a thing about it, he figured
they all thought it was natural healing.  "I can't think how that makes
you mad, Cal.  It's a good thing to make folks better."

All of a sudden there were tears running down Cal's cheeks.  "Even
laying hands on them, I can't always fix things up," said Cal.  "Nobody
even asks me no more."

It never occurred to Alvin that maybe Cal was doing his own hearings.
But it made good sense.  Ever since Alvin left, Cal had pretty much been
what Alvin used to be in Vigor Church, doing all his works.  Seeing how
their knacks were so much alike, he'd come close to taking Alvin's
place.  And then he'd done things Alvin never did when he was small,
like going about healing people as best he could.

Now Alvin was back, not only taking back his old place, but also besting
Cal at things that only Cal had ever done.  Now who was there for Cal to
be?

"I'm sorry," said Al.  "But I can teach you.  That's what I was starting
to do."

"I never seen them bits and what-not you're talking about," said Cal. "I
didn't understand a thing you talked about.  Maybe I just ain't got a
knack as good as yours, or maybe I'm too dumb, don't you see?

All I can be is the best I figure out for myself And I don't need you
proving to me that I can't never measure up.  Martin Hill asking for you
on this job, cause he knows you can make a better fence.  And there you
are, not even using your knack to split the rails, though I know you
can, just to show me that without your knack you're a match for me."

"That's not what I meant," said Alvin.  "I just don't use my knack
around-"

"Around people as dumb as me, " said Cal.

"I was doing a bad job explaining," said Alvin, "but if you'll let me,
Cal, I can teach you how to change iron into-"

"Gold," said Cal, his voice thick with scorn.  "What do you think I am?
Trying to fool me with an alchemist's tales!  If you knew how to do
that, you wouldn't've come home poor.  You know I once used to think you
were the beginning and end of the world.  I thought, when Al comes home,
it'll be like old times, the two of us playing and working together,
talking all the time, me tagging on, doing everything together.  Only it
turns out you still think I'm just a little boy, you don't say nothing
to me except 'here's another rail' and 'pass the beans, please." You
took over all the jobs folks used to look to me to do, even one as
simple as making a stout rail fence."

"Job's yours," said Alvin, shouldering his hammer.  There was no point
in trying to teach Cal anythingyen if he could learn it, he could never
learn it from Alvin.  "I got other work to do, and I won't detain you
any longer."

"Detain me," said Cal.  "Is that a word you learned in a book, or from
that ugly old teacher lady in Hatrack River that your ugly little mixup
boy talks about?"

Hearing Miss Lamer and Arthur Stuart so scornfully spoken of, that made
Alvin burn inside, especially since he had in fact learned to use
phrases like "detain you any longer" from Miss Lamer.  But Alvin didn't
say anything to show his anger.  He just turned his back and walked off,
back down the line of the finished fence.  Cal could use his own knack
and finish the fence himself-, Alvin didn't even care about collecting
the wages he'd earned in most of a day's work.  He had other things on
his mind-memories of Miss Lamer, partly, but mostly he was upset about
how Cal hadn't wanted Alvin to teach him.  Here he was the person in the
whole world who had the best chance to learn it all as easy as a baby
learning to suck, since it was his natural knack-only he didn't want to
learn it, not from Alvin.  It was something Alvin never would have
thought possible, to turn down the chance to learn something, just
because the teacher was somebody you didn't like.

Come to think of it, though, hadn't Alvin hated going to school with
Reverend Thrower, cause of how Thrower always made him feel like he was
somehow bad or evil or stupid or something?  Could it be that Cal hated
Alvin the way Alvin had hated Reverend Thrower?  He just couldn't
understand why Cal was so angry.  Of all people in the wor , Ca ad no
reason to be jealous of Alvin, because he could come closest to doing
all that Alvin did; yet for that very reason, Cal was so jealous he'd
never learn it, not without going through every step of figuring it out
for himself.

At this rate, I'll never build the Crystal City, cause I'll never be
able to teach Making to another soul.

It was a few weeks after that when Alvin finally tried again to talk to
somebody, to see if he really could teach Making.  It was on a Sunday,
in Measure's house, where Alvin and Arthur Stuart had gone to take their
dinner.  It was a hot day, so Delphi laid a cold tablebread and cheese
and salt ham and smoked turkey-and they all went outside to take the
afternoon in the shade of Measure's north-facing kitchen porch.

"Alvin, I invited you and Arthur Stuart here today for a reason," said
Measure.  "Delphi and me, we already talked it over, and said a few
things to Pa and Ma, too."

"Sounds like it must be pretty terrible, if it took that much talking. "

"Reckon not," said Measure.  "It's just-well, Arthur Stuart, here, he's
a fine boy, and a good hard worker, and good company to boot."

Arthur Stuart grinned.  "I sleep solid, too," he said.

"Fine sleeper," said Measure.  "But Ma and Pa ain't exactly young no
more.  I think Ma's used to doing things in the kitchen all her own
way."

"That she is," sighed Delphi, as if she had more than a little reason
for knowing exactly how set in her ways Goody Miller was.

"And Pa, well, he's tiring out.  When he gets home from the mill, he
needs to lie down, have plenty of quiet around him."

Alvin thought he knew where the conversation was heading.

Maybe his folks just weren't the quality of Old Peg Guester or Gertie
Smith.  Maybe they couldn't take a mixup boy into their home or their
heart.  It made him sad to think of such a thing about his own folks,
but he knew right off that he wouldn't even complain about it.

He and Arthur Stuart would just pack up and set out on a road
leadingnowhere in particular.  Canada, maybe.  Somewhere that a mixup
boy'd be full welcome.

"Mind you, they didn't say a thing like that to me, " said Measure, "In
fact, I sort of said it all to them.  You see, me and Delphi, we got a
house somewhat bigger than we need, and with three small ones Delphi'd
be glad of a boy Arthur Stuart's age to help with kitchen chores like he
does."

"I can make bread all myself," said Arthur Stuart.  "I know Mama's
recipe by heart.  She's dead."

"You see?" said Delphi.  "If he can make bread himself sometimes, or
even just help me with the kneading, I wouldn't end up so worn out at
the end of the week."

"And it won't be long before Arthur Stuart could help out in my work in
the fields," said Measure.

"But we don't want you to think we're looking to hire him on like a
servant," said Delphi.

"No, no!" said Measure.  "No, we're thinking of him like another son,
only growed up more than my oldest Jeremiah, who's only three and a
half, which makes him still pretty much useless as a human being, though
at least he isn't always trying to throw himself into the creek to drown
like his sister Shiphrahr like you when you were little, I might add."

Arthur Stuart laughed at that.  "Alvin like to drowned me one time,"
said Arthur Stuart.  "Stuck me right in the Ohio."

Alvin felt pure ashamed.  Ashamed of lots of things: The fact that he
never told Measure the whole story of how he rescued Arthur Stuart from
the Finders; the fact that he even thought for a minute that Measure and
Ma and Pa might be trying to get rid of a mixup boy, when the truth was
they were squabbling over who got to have him in their home.

"It's Arthur Stuart's choice where to live, once he's invited," said
Alvin.  "He came home along with me, but I don't make such choices for
him."

"Can I live here?" asked Arthur Stuart.  "Cal doesn't much like me."

"Cal's got troubles of his own," said Measure, "but he likes you fine."

"Why didn't Alvin bring home something useful, like a horse?"

said Arthur Stuart.  "You eat like one, but I bet you can't even pull a
two-wheel shay."

Measure and Delphi laughed.  They knew Arthur Stuart was repeating
something Cal had said, word for word.  Arthur Stuart did it so often,
folks came to expect it, and took delight in his perfect memory .  But
it made Alvin sad to hear it, because he knew that only a few months
ago, Arthur Stuart would have said it in Cal's own voice, so even Ma
couldn't've known without looking that it wasn't Cal himself.

"Is Alvin going to live down here too?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"Well, see, that's what we're thinking," said Measure.  "Why don't you
come on down here, too, Alvin?  We can put you up in the main room here,
for a while.  And when the summer work's done, we can set to fixing up
our old cabin-it's still pretty solid, since we ain't moved out of it
but two years now.  You can be pretty much on your own then.

I reckon you're too old now to be living in your pa's house and eating
at your ma's table."

Why, Alvin never would've reckoned it, but all of a sudden he found his
eyes full of tears.  Maybe it was the pure joy of having somebody notice
he wasn't the same old Alvin Miller Junior anymore.  Or maybe it was the
fact that it was Measure, looking out for him like in the old days.
Anyway, it was at that moment that Alvin first felt like he'd really
come home.

"Sure I'll come down here, if you want me," Alvin said.

"Well there's no reason to cry about it," said Delphi.  "I already got
three babies crying every time they think of it.  I don't want to have
to come along and dab your eyes and wipe your nose like I do with
Keturah."

"Well at least he don't wear diapers," said Measure, and he and Delphi
both laughed like that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

But actually they were laughing with pleasure at how Alvin had gotten so
sentimental over the idea of living with them.

So Alvin and Arthur Stuart moved on down to Measure's house, and Alvin
got to know his best-loved brother all over again.  All the old things
that Alvin once loved were still in Measure as a man, but there were new
things, too.  The tender way Measure had with his children, even after a
spanking or a stiff talking to.  The way Measure looked after his land
and buildings, seeing all that needed doing, and then doing it, so there
was never a door that squeaked for a second day, never an animal that
was off its feed for a whole day without Measure trying to account for
what was wrong.

Above all, though, Alvin saw how Measure was with Delphi.  She wasn't a
noticeably pretty girl, though not particular ugly either; she was
strong and stout and laughed loud as a donkey.  But Alvin saw how
Measure had a way of looking at her like the most beautiful sight he
ever could see.  She'd look up and there he'd be, watching her with a
kind of dreamy smile on his face, and she'd laugh or blush or look away,
but for a minute or two she'd move more graceful, walking partly on her
toes maybe, like she was dancing, or getting set to fly.

Alvin wondered then if he could ever give such a look to Miss Lamer as
won make her so full of joy that she couldn't hardly stay connected to
the earth.

Then Alvin would lie there in the night, feeling all the subtle
movements of the house, knowing without even using his doodlebug what
the slow and gentle creaking came from; and at such times he remembered
the face of the woman named Margaret who had been hiding inside Miss
Lamer all those months, and imagined her face close to his, her lips
parted, and from her throat those soft cries of pleasure Delphi made in
the silence of the night.  Then he would see her face again, only this
time twisted with grief and weeping.  At such times his heart ached
inside him, and he yearned to go back to her, to take her in his arms
and find some place inside her where he could heal her, take her grief
away, make her whole.

And because Alvin was in Measure's house, his wariness slipped away from
him, so that his face again began to show his feelings.  It happened,
then, that once when Measure and Delphi exchanged such a look as they
had between them, Measure happened to look at Alvin's face.

Delphi was gone out of the room by then, and the children were long
since in bed, so Measure was free to reach out a hand and touch Alvin's
knee.

"Who is she?" Measure asked.

"Who?" asked Alvin, confused.

"The one you love till it takes your breath away just remembering-ll For
a moment Alvin hesitated, by long habit.  But then the gateway opened,
and all his story spilled out.  He started with Miss Lamer, and how she
was really Margaret, who was the same girl who once was the torch in
Taleswapper's stories, the one that looked out for Alvin from afar.  But
telling the story of his love for her led to the story of all she taught
him, and by the time the tale was done, it was near dawn.  Delphi was
asleep on Measure's shoulderhe'd come back in sometime during the tale,
but didn't last long awake, which was just as well, with her three
children and Arthur Stuart sure to want breakfast on time no matter how
late she stayed up in the night.

But Measure was still awake, his eyes sparkling with the knowledge of
what the Redbird said, of the living golden plow, of Alvin in the
forgefire, of Arthur Stuart in the Mo.  And also a deep sadness behind
that light in Measure's eyes, for the murder Alvin had done with his own
hands, however much it might have been deserved; and for the death of
Old Peg Guester, and even for the death of a certain runaway Black slave
girl Arthur Stuart's whole lifetime ago.

"Somehow I got to go out and find people I can teach to be Makers," said
Alvin.  "But I don't even know if somebody without a knack like mine can
learn it, or how much they ought to know, or if they'd even want to know
it."

"I think," said Measure, "that they ought to love the dream of your
Crystal City before they ever know that they might learn to help in the
making of it.  If word gets out that there's a Maker who can teach
Making, you'll get the sort of folks as wants to rule people with such
power.  But the Crystal City-ah, Alvin, think of it!  Like living inside
that twister that caught you and the Prophet all those years ago., "Will
you learn it, Measure?" asked Alvin.

"I'll do all I can to learn it," said Measure.  "But first I make you a
solemn promise, that I'll only use what you teach me to build up the
Crystal City.  And if it turns out I just can't learn enough to be a
Maker, I'll help you any other way I can.  Whatever you ask me to do,
Alvin, that I'll do-I'll take my family to the ends of the Earth, I'll
give up everything I own, I'll die if need be-anything to make the
vision Tenskwa-Tawa showed you come true."

Alvin held him by both hands, held him for the longest time.  Then
Measure leaned forward and kissed him, brother to brother, friend to
friend.  The movement woke Delphi.  She hadn't heard most of it, but she
knew that something solemn was happening, and she smiled sleepily before
she got up and let Measure take her off to bed for the last few hours
till dawn.

That was the beginning of Alvin's true work.  All the rest of that
summer, Measure was his pupil and his teacher.  While Alvin taught
Making to Measure, Measure taught fatherhood, husbanding, manliness to
Alvin.  The difference was that Alvin didn't half realize what he was
learning, while Measure won each new understanding, each tiny shred of
the power of Makery, only after terrible struggle.  Y et he did
understand, bit by bit, and he did learn more than a little bit of
Making; and Alvin began to understand, after many failed efforts, how to
go about teaching someone else to "see" without eyes, to "touch" without
hands.

And now, when he lay awake at night, he did not yearn so often for the
past, but rather tried to imagine the future.  Somewhere out there was
the place where he should build the Crystal City; and out there, too,
were the folks he had to find and teach them to love that dream and show
them how to make it real.  Somewhere there was the perfect soil that his
living plow was meant to delve.  Somewhere there was a woman he could
love and live with till he died.

Back in Hatrack River, that fall there was an election, and it happened
that because of certain stories floating around about who was a hero and
who was a snake, Pauley Wiseman lost his job and Po Doggly got him a new
one.  Along about that time, too, Makepeace Smith come in to file a
complaint about how back last spring his prentice run off with a certain
item that belonged to his master.

"That's a long time waiting to file such a charge," said Sheriff Doggly.

"He threatened me," said Makepeace Smith.  "I feared for my family."

"Well, now, you just tell me what it was he stole."

"It was a plow," said Makepeace Smith.

"A common plow?  I'm supposed to find a common plow?  And why in
tarnation would he steal such a thing?"

Makepeace lowered his voice and said it all secret-like.  "The plow was
made of gold."

Oh, Po Doggly just laughed his head off, hearing that.

"Well, it's true, I tell you," said Makepeace.

"Is it, now?  Why, I think that I believe you, my friend.  But if there
was a gold plow in your smithy, I'll lay ten to one that it was Al's,
not yours.  "

"What a prentice makes belongs to the master!"

Well, that's about when Po started getting a little stern.  "You start
telling tales like that around Hatrack Piver, Makepeace Smith, and I
reckon other folks'll tell how you kept that boy when he long since was
a better smith than you.  I reckon word'Il get around about how you
wasn't a fair master, and if you start to charging Alvin Smith with
stealing what only he in all this world could possibly make, I think
you'd find yourself laughed to scorn."

Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't.  It was sure that Makepeace didn't
try no legal tricks to try to get that plow back from Alvin -wherever he
was.  But he told his tale, making it bigger every time he told it-how
Alvin was always stealing from him, and how that golden plow was
Makepeace Smith's inheritance, made plowshape and painted black, and how
Alvin uncovered it by devil powers and carried it off.

As long as Gertie Smith was alive she scoffed at all such tales, but she
died not too long after Alvin left, from a blood vein popping when she
was a-screaming at her husband for being such a fool.  From then on,
Makepeace had the story his own way, even allowing as how Alvin killed
Gertie herself with a curse that made her veins pop open and bleed to
death inside her head.  It was a terrible lie, but there's always folks
as like to hear such tales, and the story spread from one end of the
state of Ohio to the other, and then beyond.  Pauley Wiseman heard it.
Reverend Thrower heard it.  Cavil Planter heard it.  So did a lot of
other folks.

Which is why when Alvin finally ventured forth from Vigor Church, there
was plenty of folks with an eye for strangers carrying bundles about the
size of a plowshare, looking for a glint of gold under burlap, measuring
strangers to see if they might be a certain run-off prentice smith who
stole his master's inheritance.  Some of those folks even meant to take
it back to Makepeace Smith in Hatrack River, if it happened they ever
laid their hands upon the golden plow.  On the other hand, with some of
those folks such a thought never crossed their minds.