Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (24 page)

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 folks 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.

9

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 man Ta-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 nothing. He looked taut, his arms wiry rather than muscled, his legs 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. “Tornadoes!” 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 the boy, though, the Reds had him, pulled him back; he screamed at Alvin to come back, don’t go, don’t go onto the water—

Alvin 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 upward—

Until 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 it 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 breathing—

He 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.