Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (2 page)

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I thought I was done writing about Alvin Smith. People kept telling me I wasn’t, but I knew why. It’s because they’d all heard Taleswapper and the way he tells stories. When he’s done, it’s all tied up neat in a package and you pretty much know what things meant and why they happened. Not that he spells it all out, mind you. But you just have this feeling that it all makes sense.

Well I ain’t Taleswapper, which some of you might already have guessed, seeing how we don’t look much alike, and I don’t plan on becoming Taleswapper anytime soon, or anything much like him, not cause I don’t reckon him to be a fine fellow, worthy of folks emulating him, but mainly because I don’t see things the way he sees them. Things don’t all make sense to me. They just happen, and sometimes you can extract a bit of sense from some calamity and sometimes the happiest day is just pure nonsense. There’s no predicting it and there’s
sure
no making it happen. Worst messes I ever saw folks get into was when they was trying to make things go in a sensible way.

So I set down what I knew of the earliest beginnings of Alvin’s life right up till he made him the golden plow as his journeyman project, and I told how he went back to Vigor and set to teaching folks how to be Makers and how things already wasn’t right with his brother Calvin and I thought I was done, because anybody who cares was there from then on to see for themselves or you know somebody who was. I told you the truth of how Alvin came to kill a man, so as to put to rest all the vicious rumors told about it. I told you how he came to break the runaway slave laws and I told you how Peggy Larner’s mama came to die and believe me, that was pretty much the end of the story as far as I could see it.

But the ending didn’t make sense of it, I reckon, and folks have been pestering me more and more about the early days and didn’t I know more I could tell? Well sure I know. And I got nothing against telling it. But I hope you don’t think that when I’m done telling all I know it’ll finally be clear to everybody what everything that’s happened was all about, because I don’t know myself. Truth is, the story ain’t over yet, and I hope it never will be, so the most I can hope to do is set down the way it looks to this one fellow at this exact moment, and I can’t even promise you that tomorrow I won’t come to understand it much better than anything I’m writing now.

My knack ain’t storytelling. Truth is, Taleswapper’s knack ain’t storytelling either, and he’d be the first to tell you that. He collects stories, all right, and the ones he gathers are important so you listen because the tale itself matters. But you know he don’t do nothing much with his voice, and he don’t roll his eyes and use them big gestures like the real orators use. His voice ain’t strong enough to fill a good-size cabin, let alone a tent. No, the telling ain’t his knack. He’s a painter if anything, or maybe a woodcarver or a printer or whatever he can use to tell or show the story but he’s no genius at any of them.

Fact is if you ask Taleswapper what his knack is, he’ll tell you he don’t have none. He ain’t lying—nobody can ever lay
that charge at Taleswapper’s door. No, he just set his heart on one knack when he was a boy, and all his life that seemed to him the only knack worth having and since he never got it (he thinks) why then he must not have no knack at all. And don’t pretend you don’t know what knack it was he wanted, because he practically slaps you in the face with it whenever he talks for long. He wanted the knack of prophecy. That’s why he’s always been so powerful jealous of Peggy Larner, because she’s a torch and from childhood on she saw all the possible futures of people’s lives, and while that’s not the same thing as knowing
the
future—the way things will actually happen instead of how they might happen—it’s pretty close. Close enough that I think Taleswapper would have been happy for five minutes of being a torch. Probably would have grinned himself to death within a week if such a thing happened.

When Taleswapper says he’s got no knack, though, I’ll tell you, he’s wrong. Like a lot of folks, he has a knack and doesn’t even know it because that’s the way knacks work—it just feels as natural as can be to the person who’s got it, as easy as breathing, so you don’t think
that
could possibly be your unusual power because heck, that’s
easy.
You don’t know it’s a knack till other people around you get all astonished about it or upset or excited or whatever feelings your knack seems to provoke in folks. Then you go, “Boy howdy, other folks can’t
do
this! I got me a knack!” and from then on there’s no putting up with you till you finally settle down and get back to normal life and stop bragging about how you can do this fool thing that you used to never be excited about back when you still had sense.

Some folks never know they got them a knack, though, because nobody else ever notices it either, and Taleswapper’s that way. I didn’t notice it till I started trying to collect all my memories and everything anybody ever told me about Alvin Maker’s life. Pictures of him working that hammer in the forge every chance he got in case we ever forgot that he had an honest trade, hard come by with his own sweat, and didn’t just
dance through life like a quadrille with Dame Fortune as his loving partner—as if we ever thought Dame Fortune did anything more than flirt with him, and likely as not if he ever got close to her he’d find out she had the pox anyway; Fortune has a way of being on the side of the Unmaker, when folks start relying on her to save them. But I’m getting off the subject, which I had to read back to the beginning of this paragraph to see what in hell I was talking about (and I can hear you prickle-hearted prudes saying, What’s he doing putting down curses on paper, hasn’t he no sense of decent language? to which I say, When I curse it don’t harm nobody and it makes my language more colorful and heaven knows I can use the color, and I can assure you I’ve studied cussing from the best and I know how to make my language a whole
lot
more colorful than it is right now, but I already tone myself down so you don’t have apoplexy reading my words. I wouldn’t want to spend half my life just going to the funerals of people who had a stroke from reading my book, so instead of criticizing me for the nasty words that creep into my writing why don’t you praise me for the really ugly stuff that I virtuously chose to leave out? It’s all how you choose to look at it, I think, and if you have time to rail on about my language, then you don’t have enough to do and I’ll be glad to put you in touch with folks who need more hands to help with
productive
labor), so anyway I looked back to the beginning of this paragraph
again
to see what the hell I was talking about and my point is that when I gathered all these stories together, I noticed that Taleswapper seems to keep showing up in the oddest places at
exactly
the moment when something important was about to happen, so that he ended up being a witness or even a participant in a remarkable number of events.

Now, let me ask you plain, my friends. If a man seems to know, down in his bones, when something importants about to happen, and where, and enough in advance that he can get his body over there to be a witness of it before it even starts, now ain’t that prophecy? I mean why was it William Blake
ever left England and came to America if it wasn’t because he
knew
that the world was about to be torn open to give birth to a Maker again after all these generations? Just cause he didn’t know it out in the open didn’t mean that he wasn’t a prophet. He thought he had to be a prophet with his mouth, but I say he’s a prophet in his bones. Which is why he just happened to be wandering back to the town of Vigor Church, to Alvin’s father’s mill, for no reason he was aware of, at exactly the day and hour that Alvin’s little brother Calvin Miller decided to run off and go study trouble in faraway places. Taleswapper had no idea what was going to happen, but folks, I tell you, he was
there,
and anybody who tells you Taleswapper’s got no knack, including Taleswapper himself, is a blame fool. Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way, as Horace Guester would tell you.

So as I pick up my tale again that’s the day I choose to start with, mostly because I can tell you from experience that
nothing
interesting happened during those long months when Alvin was still trying to teach a bunch of plain folks how to be a Maker like him instead of . . . well, all in time. Let’s just say that while some of you are bound to criticize me for
not
telling all of Alvin’s lessons about Makering and every single boring moment of every class he held trying to teach fish to hop, I can promise you that leaving out those days from my tale is an act of charity.

There’s a lot of people and a lot of confusion in the story, too, and I can’t help that, because if I made it all clear and simple that would be a lie. It was a mess and there was a lot of different people involved and also, to tell you the truth, there’s a lot of things that happened that I didn’t know about then and still don’t know much about now. I’d like to say that I’m telling you all the important parts of the story, telling about all the important people, but I know perfectly well that there might be important parts that I just don’t know about, and important people that I didn’t realize were important. There’s stuff that
nobody
knows, and stuff that them as knows ain’t
telling, or them as knows don’t know they know. And even as I try to explain things as I understand them I’m still going to leave things out without meaning to, or tell you things twice that you already know, or contradict something that you know to be a fact, and all I can say is, I ain’t no Taleswapper, and if you want to know the deepest truth, get him to unseal that back two-thirds of his little book and read you what he’s got in
there
and I bet, for all he claims to be no prophet, I bet you’ll hear things as will curl your hair, or uncurl it, depending.

There’s one mystery, though, that I plain don’t know the answer to, even though everything depends on it. Maybe if I tell you enough you’ll figure it out for yourself. But what I don’t understand is why Calvin went the way he did. He was a sweet boy, they all say it. He and Alvin were close as boys can be, I mean they fought but there was never malice in it and Cally grew up knowing Al would die for him. So what was it made jealousy start to gnaw at Calvin’s heart and turn him away from his own brother and want to undo all his work? I heard a lot of the tale I’m about to tell you from Cally’s own mouth, but you can be sure he never sat down and explained to me or anybody why he changed. Oh, he told plenty of folks why he hated Alvin, but there’s no ring of truth in what he says about that, since he always accuses his brother of doing whatever his audience hates the most. To Puritans he says he came to hate Alvin because he saw him trucking with the devil. To Kingsmen he says he hated Alvin because he saw how his brother went so far as to murder a man just to keep him from recovering his own property, a runaway slave baby named Arthur Stuart (and don’t
that
set them Royalists’ teeth on edge, to think of a half-Black boy having the same name as the King!). Calvin always has a tale that justifies himself in the eyes of strangers, but never a word of explanation does he ever have to those of us who know the truth about Alvin Maker.

I just know this: When I first set eyes on Calvin, in Vigor Church during that year when Alvin tried to teach Makering, that year before he left, I’ll tell you, folks, Calvin was already
gone. In his heart every word that Alvin said was like poison. If Alvin paid no attention to him, Calvin felt neglected and said so. Then if Alvin
did
pay attention to him, Calvin got surly and sullen and claimed Alvin wouldn’t leave him alone. There was no pleasing him.

But to say he was “contrary” don’t explain a thing. It’s just a name for the way he was acting, not an answer to the question of why he acted that way. I have my own guesses, but they’re just guesses and no more, not even what they call “educated guesses” because there’s no such thing as education so good it makes one man’s guess any better than another’s. Either you know or you don’t, and I don’t know.