Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (53 page)

“None,” said Honoré. “I live in the constant certainty of failure, and the constant certainty of genius. It is a species of madness, but greatness is not possible without it. Your problem, Calvin, is that you never really question yourself about anything. However you feel, that’s the right way to feel, and so
you feel that way and everything else better get out of your way. Whereas I endeavor to change my feelings because my feelings are always wrong. For instance, when approaching a woman you lust after, the foolish man acts out his feelings and clutches at an inviting breast or makes some fell invitation that gets him slapped and keeps him from the best parties for the rest of the year. But the wise man looks the woman in the eye and serenades her about her astonishing beauty and her great wisdom and his own inadequacy to explain to her how much she deserves her place in the exact center of the universe. No woman can resist this, Calvin, or if she can, she’s not worth having.”

The carriage came to a stop.

Honoré flung open the door. “Smell the air!”

“Rotting fish,” said Calvin.

“The coast! I wonder if I shall throw up, and if I do, whether the sea air will have affected the color and consistency of my vomitus.”

Calvin ignored his deliberately crude banter as he reached up for their bags. He well know that Honoré was only crude when he didn’t much respect his company; when with aristocrats, Honoré never uttered anything but bon mots and epigrams. For the young novelist to speak that way to Calvin was a sign, not so much of intimacy, but of disrespect.

When they found an appropriate ship bound for Canada, Calvin showed the captain the letter Napoleon had given him. Contrary to his worst fears, after seeing a production of a newly revised and prettied-up script of
Hamlet
in London, the letter did not instruct the captain to kill Calvin and Honoré at once—though there was no guarantee that the fellow didn’t have orders to strangle them and pitch them into the sea when they were out of sight of land.

Why am I so afraid?

“So the Emperor’s treasurer will reimburse me for all expenses out of the treasury when I come back?”

“That’s the plan,” said Honoré. “But here, my friend, I know how ungenerous these imperial officials can be. Take this.”

He handed the captain a sheaf of franc notes. Calvin was astonished. “All these weeks you’ve pretended to be poor and up to your ears in debt.”

“I
am
poor! I
am
in debt. If I didn’t owe money, why would I ever steel myself to write? No, I simply borrowed the price of my passage from my mother
and
my father—they never talk, so they’ll never find out—and from two of my publishers, promising each of them a completely exclusive book about my travels in America.”

“You borrowed to pay our passage, knowing all along that the Emperor would pay it?”

“A man has to have spending money, or he’s not a man,” said Honoré. “I have a wad of it, with which I have every intention of being generous with you, so I hope you won’t condemn my methods.”

“You’re not terribly honest, are you?” said Calvin, half appalled, half admiring.

“You shock me, you hurt me, you offend me, I challenge you to a duel and then take sick with pneumonia so that I can’t meet you, but I urge you to go ahead without me. Keep in mind that
because
I had that money, the captain will now invite us into his cabin for dinner every night of the voyage. And in answer to your question, I am perfectly honest when I am creating something, but otherwise words are mere tools designed to extract what I need from the pockets or bank accounts of those who currently but temporarily possess it. Calvin, you’ve been too long among the Puritans. And I have been too long among the Hypocrites.”

It was Peggy who found the turnoff to Chapman Valley, found it easily though there was no sign and she was coming this time from the other direction. She and Alvin left the others, with the carriage under the now-leafless oak out in front of the weavers’ house. For Peggy, coming to this place now was both
thrilling and embarrassing. What would they think of the way things had turned out since they set her on this present road?

Then, just as she raised her hand to knock on the door, she remembered something.

“Alvin,” she said. “It slipped my mind, but something Becca said when I was here a few months ago—”

“If it slipped your mind, then it was supposed to slip your mind.”

“You and Calvin. You need to reclaim Calvin, find him and reclaim him before he turns completely against the work you’re doing.”

Alvin shook his head. “Becca doesn’t know everything.”

“And what does that mean?”

“What makes you think Calvin wasn’t already the enemy of our work before he was born?”

“That’s not possible,” said Peggy. “Babies are born innocent and pure.”

“Or steeped in original sin? Those are the choices? I can’t believe that you of all people believe either idea, you who put your hands on the womb and see the futures in the baby’s heartfire. The child is already himself then, the good and bad, ready to step into the world and make of himself whatever he wants most to be.”

She squinted at him. “Why is it that when we’re alone, talking of something serious, you don’t sound so much the country bumpkin?”

“Because maybe I learned everything you taught me, only I also learned that I don’t want to lose touch with the common people,” said Alvin. “They’re the ones who are going to build the city with me. Their language is my native language—why should I forget it, just because I learned another? How many educated folks do you think are going to come away from their fine homes and educated friends and roll up their sleeves to make something with their own hands?”

“I don’t want to knock on this door,” said Peggy. “My life changes when I come into this place.”

“You don’t have to knock,” said Alvin. He reached out and turned the knob. The door opened.

When he made as if to step inside, Peggy took his arm. “Alvin, you can’t just walk in here!”

“If the door wasn’t locked, then I can walk in,” said Alvin. “Don’t you understand what this place is? This is the place where things are as they must be. Not like the world out there, the world you see in the heartfires, the world of things that can be. And not like the world inside my head, the world as it might be. And not like the world as it was first conceived in the mind of God, which is the world as it should be.”

She watched him step over the threshold. There was no alarum in the house, nor even a sound of life. She followed him. Young as he was, this man she had watched over from his infancy, this man whose heart she knew more intimately than her own, he could still surprise her by what he did of a sudden without thought, because he simply knew it was right and had to be this way.

The endless cloth still lay folded in piles, linked each to each, winding over furniture, through halls, up and down stairs. They stepped over the spans and reaches of it. “No dust,” said Peggy. “I didn’t notice that the first time. There’s no dust on the cloth.”

“Good housekeepers here?” asked Alvin.

“They dust all this cloth?”

“Or maybe there’s simply no passage of time within the cloth. Always and forever it exists in that one present moment in which the shuttlecock flew from side to side.”

As he said these words, they began to hear the shuttlecock. Someone must have opened a door.

“Becca?” called Peggy.

They followed the sound through the house to the ancient cabin at the house’s heart, where an open door led into the room with the loom. But to Peggy’s surprise, it wasn’t Becca seated there. It was the boy. Her nephew, the one who had
dreamed of this. With practiced skill he drove the shuttlecock back and forth.

“Is Becca . . .” Peggy couldn’t bring herself to ask about the weaver’s death.

“Naw,” said the boy. “We changed the rules a little here. No more pointless sacrifice. You done that, you know. Came here as a judge—well, your judgment was heeded. I take my shift for a while, and she can go out a little.”

“So is it you we talk to now?” asked Alvin.

“Depends on what you want. I don’t know nothing about nothing, so if you want answers, I don’t think I’m it.”

“I want to use the door that leads to Ta-Kumsaw.”

“Who?” the boy asked.

“Your uncle Isaac,” said Peggy.

“Oh, sure.” He nodded with his head. “It’s that one.”

Alvin strode toward it.

“You ever used one of these doors before?” asked the boy.

“No,” said Alvin.

“Well then ain’t you the stupid one, heading right for it like it was some ordinary door.”

“What’s different? I know it leads to the Red lands. I know it leads to the house where Ta-Kumsaw’s daughter weaves the lives of the Reds of the west.”

“Here’s the tricky part. When you pass through the door, you can’t have no part of yourself touching anything here but air. You can’t brush up against the doorjamb. You can’t let a foot linger on the floor. It’s not a step through the door, it’s a leap.”

“And what happens if some part of me
does
touch?”

“Then that part of this place drags you down just a little, slows you, lowers you, and so instead of you passing through the door in one smooth motion, you go through in a couple of pieces. Ain’t nobody can put you together after that, Mr. Maker.”

Peggy was appalled. “I never realized it was so dangerous.”

“Breathing’s dangerous too,” said the boy, “if’n you breathe
in something to make you sick.” He grinned. “I saw you two get all twined up together here. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” said Alvin.

“So what do they call you now, judge woman?” the boy asked Peggy. “Goody Smith?”

“Most still call me Peggy Larner. Only they say Miz Larner now, and not Miss.”

“I call her Margaret,” said Alvin.

“I reckon you’ll really be married when she starts to think of herself by the name you call her, instead of the name her parents called her by.” He winked at Peggy. “Thanks for getting me my job. My sisters are glad, too, they had nightmares, I’ll tell you. There ain’t no love of the loom in them.” He turned back to Alvin. “So are you going or what?”

At that moment the door flew open and a tied-up bundle flew through it.

“Uh-oh,” said the boy. “Best turn your back. Becca’s coming through, and she travels stark nekkid, seeing as how women’s clothing can’t fit through that door without touching.”

Alvin turned his back, and so did Peggy, though unlike Alvin she cheated and allowed herself to watch anyway. It was not Becca who came through the door first, however. It was Ta-Kumsaw, a man Peggy had never met, though she had seen him often enough in Alvin’s heartfire. He was not naked, but rather clothed in buckskins that clung tightly to his body. He saw them standing there and grunted. “Boy Renegado comes back to see the most dangerous Red man who ever lived.”

“Howdy, Ta-Kumsaw,” said Alvin.

“Hi, Isaac,” said the boy. “I warned him about the door like you said.”

“Good boy,” said Ta-Kumsaw. He turned his back on them then, just in time for Becca to leap through the door wearing only thin and clinging underwear. He gathered her at once into his arms. Then together they untied the bundle and unfolded it into a dress, which she drew down over her head. “All right,”
said Ta-Kumsaw. “She’s dressed enough for a White woman now.”

Alvin turned around and greeted her. There were handshakes, and even a hug between women. They talked about what had happened in Hatrack River over the past few months, and then Alvin explained his errand.

Ta-Kumsaw showed no emotion. “I don’t know what my brother will say. He keeps his own counsel.”

“Does he rule there in the west?” asked Alvin.

“Rule? That’s not how we do things. There are many tribes, and in each tribe many wise men. My brother is one of the greatest of them, everyone agrees to that. But he doesn’t make law just by deciding what it should be. We don’t do anything as foolish as you do, electing one president and concentrating too much power in his hands. It was good enough when good men held the office, but always when you create an office that a man can lay hands on, an evil man will someday lay hands on it.”

“Which is going to happen on New Year’s day when Harrison—”

Ta-Kumsaw glowered. “Never say that name, that unbearable name.”

“Not saying it won’t make him go away.”

“It will keep his evil out of this house,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Away from the people I love.”

In the meantime, Becca had finished dressing. She came to the boy and bumped him with her hip. “Move over, stubby-fingers. That’s my loom you’re tangling.”

“Tightest weave ever,” the boy retorted. “People will always know which spots I wove.”

Becca settled onto the chair and then began to make the shuttlecock dance. The whole music of the loom changed, the rhythm of it, the song. “You came for a purpose, Maker? The door’s still open for you. Do what you came to do.”

For the first time Peggy really looked at the door, trying to see what lay beyond it; and what lay beyond was nothing. Not
blackness, but not daylight either. Just . . . nothing. Her eyes couldn’t look at it; her gaze kept shifting away.

“Alvin,” she said. “Are you sure you want to—”

He kissed her. “I love it when you worry about me.”

She smiled and kissed him back. As he took off his cap and his boots, and his long coat that might flap against the doorjamb, he couldn’t see how she reached into the small box she kept in a pocket of her skirt; how she held the last scrap of his birth caul between her fingers and then watched his heartfire, ready to spring into action the moment he needed her, to use his power to heal him even if he, in some dire extremity, could not or dared not or would not use it himself.

He ran for the door, leapt toward it left-foot-first, his right foot leaving the ground before any part of him broke the plane of the door. He sailed through with his head ducked down; he missed the top of the door by an inch.

“I don’t like it when people leap through all spread out like that,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Better to spring from both feet at once, and curl up into a ball as you go.”