Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I (4 page)

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 Eleanor carried 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 tongue-lashing. 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 baby, 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 life. She 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 wings.”

“I hate
roast
chicken, too.”

“Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?”

“Nope.”

“Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner that’ll 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.

A
XES 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 Lolla-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 Lolla-Wossiky 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 ill?” 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. “All” 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. “Mistress 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, I—”

“About hexes and doodles and charms and beseechings and suchlike.”

“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—”

“Well looky there, that’s my point,” she said triumphantly. “They’re not likely to teach you about that in university, now, are 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 bumps?”

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 cursed—it 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 slave 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 imply 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 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 church-raising.

“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 ensorcelment. 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 beam 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 simpleminded as most children—Thrower 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.