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Alvin Journeyman
Chapter One I Thought I Was Done
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 important's 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.
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don't just
go ahead and be happy. I don't know why lonely people keep shoving away
everybody as tries to befriend them. I don't know why people blame weak and
harmless folks for their troubles while they leave their real enemy alone to get
away with all his harm. And I sure don't know why I bother to go to the
trouble to write all this down when I know you still won't be satisfied.
Let me tell you one little thing about Calvin. I saw him one day taking
class with Alvin, and for once he was paying attention, real close attention,
heeding every word that came from his brother's lips. And I thought: He's
finally come around. He finally realized that if he really wants to be a seventh
son of a seventh son, if he really wants to be a maker, he has to learn from
Alvin how it's done.
And then the class ended, and I sat there watching Calvin as everybody
else went on out to get back to their chores, until only me and Calvin was left
in the room, and Calvin actually talks to me -- mostly he ignored me like I
wasn't there -- he talks to me and in a few seconds I realize what he's doing.
He's imitating Alvin. Not Alvin's regular voice, but Alvin's schoolteachery voice.
You all remember when he got that way -- I remember he learned that flowery
fancy talk when he was studying with Miss Larner, before she came out of
disguise and he realized she was the same Peggy Guester who kept his birth
caul and protected him through his growing-up years. The big five-dollar
words she learned in Dekane or from them books she read. Alvin wanted to
sound refined like her, or sometimes he wanted to, anyway, and so he'd learn
them words and use them and talk so fine you'd have thought he learned
English from an expert instead of just growing up with it like the rest of us.
But he couldn't keep it up. He'd hear himself talking so high-toned and he'd
just suddenly laugh or make some joke and then he'd go back to talking like
folks. And there was Calvin talking that same high-toned way, only he didn't
laugh. He just did all his imitating and when he was done, he looked at me
and said, "Was that right?"
As if I'd know!
And I says back to him, "Calvin, sounding like an educated man don't
make you educated," and he says back to me, "I'd rather be ignorant and
sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant," and I said, "Why?" and
he says to me, "Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to
find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop."
Here's my point. Well, maybe it's not the point I started out to make, but
I long since lost track of that. So here's the point I want to make now: I know
more about what happened during Alvin's year of wandering than anybody else
on God's green Earth. But I also am aware of how many questions I still can't
answer. So I reckon I'm the one as knows but seems ignorant. Which kind are
you?
If you already figure you know this story, for heaven's sake stop reading
now and save yourself some trouble. And if you're going to criticize me for not
finishing the whole thing and tying it up in a bow for you, why, do us both a
favor and write your own damn book, only have the decency to call it a
romance instead of a history, because history's got no bows on it, only frayed
ends of ribbons and knots that can't be untied. It ain't a pretty package but
then it's not your birthday that I know of, so I'm under no obligation to give you
a gift.
Copyright © 1995 Orson Scott Card
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