Seventh Son

Maybe, though, he didn't have to understand. Maybe he just had to act. So he lifted his hand, reached out as careful as he could, and touched Lolla-Wossiky's cheek, under the broken eye. No, that wasn't right. He raised his finger until it touched the slack eyelid where the Red man's other eye was supposed to be. Yes, he thought. Be whole.

The air crackled. Light sparked. Al gasped and pulled his hand away.

All the light was gone from the room. Just the moonlight now coming in the window. Not even a glimmer of the brightness was left. Like as if he just woke up from a dream, the strongest dream he ever had in his life.

It took a minute for Alvin's eyes to change so he could see. It wasn't no dream, that was sure. Cause there was the Red man, who had once been the Shining Man. You ain't dreaming when you got a Red man kneeling by your bed, tears coming out of his one good eye, and the other eye, where you just touched him–

That eyelid was still loose, hanging over nothing. The eye wasn't healed. “It didn't work,” whispered Alvin. “I'm sorry.”

It was a shameful thing, that the Shining Man had saved him from awful wickedness, and he hadn't done a thing for him in return. But the Red man said nary a word of reproach. Instead he reached out and took Alvin's naked shoulders in both his large strong hands and pulled him close, kissed him on the forehead, hard and strong, like a father to a son, like brothers, like true friends the day before they die. That kiss and all it held– hope, forgiveness, love– let me never forget that, Alvin said silently.

Lolla-Wossiky sprang to his feet. Lithe as a boy he was, not staggering drunk at all. Changed, he was changed, and it occurred to Alvin that maybe he had healed something, set something right, something deeper than his eyes. Cured him of the whisky-lust, maybe.

But if that was so, Al knew it wasn't himself that done it, it was the light that was in him for a time. The fire that had warmed him without burning.

The Red man rushed to the window, swung over the sill, hung for a moment by his hands, then disappeared. Alvin didn't even hear his feet touch the ground outside, he was that quiet. Like the cats in the barn.

How long had it been? Hours and hours? Would it be daylight soon? Or had it taken only a few seconds since A

Didn't matter much. Alvin couldn't sleep, not now, not with all that had just happened. Why had this Red man come to him? What did it all mean, the light that filled Lolla-Wossiky and then came to fill him? He couldn't just lie here in bed, all full of wonder. So he got up, slithered into his nightgown as fast as he could, and slipped out of his door.

Now that he was in the hall, he heard talking from downstairs. Mama and Papa were still up. At first he wanted to rush down and tell them what all happened to him. But then he heard the tone of their voices. Anger, fear, all upset. Not a good time to come to them with a tale of a dream. Even if Alvin knew it wasn't a dream at all, that it was real, they'd treat it like a dream. And now that he was thinking straight, he couldn't tell them at all. What, that he sent the roaches into his sisters' room? The pins, the pokes, the threats? All of that would come out too, even though it felt like months, years ago to Alvin. None of it mattered now, compared to the vow he had taken and the future he thought might be in store for him– but it would matter to Mama and Papa.

So he tiptoed down the hall and down the stairs, just close enough to hear, just far enough to be around the comer and out of sight.

After just a few minutes, he forgot about being out of sight, too. He crept farther down, until he could see into the big room. Papa sat on the floor, surrounded with wood. It surprised Al Junior that Papa was still doing that, even after coming upstairs to kill roaches, even after so much time had passed. He was bent over now, his face buried in his hands. Mama knelt in front of him, the biggest hunks of wood between them.

“He's alive, Alvin,” said Mama. “All the rest ain't worth never mind.”

Papa lifted his head and looked at her. “It was water that seeped into the tree and froze and thawed, long before we even cut it down. And we happened to cut it in just such a way that the flaw never showed on the surface. But it was split three ways inside, just waiting for the weight of the ridgebeam. It was water done it.”

“Water,” said Mama, and there was derision in her voice.

“This is fourteen times the water's tried to kill him.”

“Children always get in scrapes.”

“The time you slipped on a wet floor when you were holding him. The time David knocked down the boiling cauldron. Three times when he was lost and we found him on the bank of the river. Last winter when the ice broke on the Tippy-Canoe River–”

“You think he's the first child to fall into the water?”

“The poison water that made him throw up blood. The mud-covered buffalo that charged him in that meadow–”

“Mud-covered. Everybody knows that buffaloes wallow like pigs. It had nothing to do with water.”

Papa slapped his hand down hard on the floor. The sound rang like a gunshot through the house. It startled Mama, and of course she started to look toward the stairs to where the children would be sleeping. Alvin Junior scampered right back up the stairs and waited out of sight for her to order him back to bed. But she must not have seen him, cause she didn't shout anything and nobody came up after him.

When he tiptoed back down, they were still going at it, only a little quieter.

Papa whispered, but there was fire in his eyes. “If you think this doesn't have to do with water, then you're the one that's a lunatic.”

Mama was icy now. Alvin Junior knew that look– it was the maddest Mama knew how to get. No slaps then, no tongue-lashings. Just coldness and silence, and any child who got that treatment ftom her began to long for death and the tortures of hell, because at least it would be warmer.

With Papa she wasn't silent, but her voice was terrible cold. “The Savior himself drank water from the Samaritan well.”

“I don't recollect that Jesus fell down that well, neither,” said Papa.

Alvin Junior thought of hanging onto the well bucket, falling down into the darkness, until the rope bound up on the windlass and the bucket stopped just above the water, where he would have drowned for certain. They told him he wasn't yet two years old when that happened, but he still dreamed sometimes about the stones that lined the inside of the well, getting darker and darker as he went down. In his dreams the well was ten miles deep and he fell forever before waking up.

“Then think of this, Alvin Miller, since you think you know scripture.”

Papa started to protest that he didn't think nothing of the kind.

“The devil hisself said to the Lord in the desert that the angels would bear Jesus up lest he dash his foot against a stone.”

“I don't know what that has to do with water–”

“It's plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated.”

Papa's face turned red. “Don't you call me no simpleton, Faith. I know what I know and–”

“He has a guardian angel, Alvin Miller. He has someone watching out for him.”

“You and your scriptures. You and your angels.”

“You tell me why else he had those fourteen accidents and not one of them so much as gave him a scrape on his arm. How many other boys get to six years old without no injury?”

Papa's face looked strange then, twisted up a little, as if it was hard for him to speak at all. “I tell you that there's something wants him dead. I know it.”

“You don't know any such thing.”

Papa spoke even slower, biting out the words as if each one caused him pain. "I know. "

He had such a hard time talking that Mama just went on and talked right over him. “If there's some devil plot to kill him– which I ain't saying, Alvin– then there's an even stronger heavenly plan to preserve him.”