Seventh Son

“By saying you know it ain't so.”

“I don't know it is and I don't know it ain't. I said maybe, and if a man can't say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead.”

“I reckon that's about true,” she said. “And if you don't take that back you'll wish you was dead!” And she started coming after him with two chunks of apple, one in each hand.

Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad, if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up laughing. But not this time. She mushed one apple in his hair and threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs bedroom, crying her eyes out.

She wasn't one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.

“I take it back, Elly,” he said. “He's a good boy, I know that.”

“Oh, I don't care what you think,” she said. “You don't know a thing about it anyway.”

There weren't many husbands who'd let their wife say such a thing without slapping her upside the head. Armor wished sometimes that Elly'd appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.

“I know a thing or two,” he said.

“They're going to send him off,” she said. “Once spring comes, they're going to prentice him out. He's none too happy about it, I can tell, but he don't argue none, he just lies there in his bed, talking real quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying good-bye all the time.”

“What are they wanting to send him off for?”

“I told you, to prentice him.”

“The way they baby that boy, I can't hardly believe they'd let him out of their sight.”

“They ain't talking about nothing close by, neither. Clear back at the east end of Hio Territory, near Fort Dekane. Why, that's halfway to the ocean.”

“You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it.”

“It does?”

“With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone. The others can all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior.”

She looked at him with withering contempt. “Sometimes you're so suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God.”

“It ain't suspicion to say what's really happening.”

“You can't tell real from a rutabaga.”

“You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you lick it out?”

“I expect I'll have to do something, or you'll rub it all over the bed linen.”

Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he left. Two pair of thick stockings. A new blanket. An elkhide cloak. Jerky and cheese. A good whetstone.

And things they couldn't even know they gave him. A rested body, free of aches and bruises. A jaunty step. Kind faces fresh in his mind. And stories. Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones he wrote down himself. And true stories painfully inscribed by their own hands.

Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to. Roofs patched for winter, other jobs here and there. More important, they'd seen a book with Ben Franklin's own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamilton– even Aaron Burr, from before the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after. Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the Wobbish country, and that's all. Now they belonged to much larger stories. The War of Appalachee Independence. The American Compact. They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many, and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads. Not a tapestry, really. A rug. A good, thick, solid rug that generations of Americans after them could tread on. There was a poem in that; he'd work that into a poem sometime.

He left them a few other things, too. A beloved son he pulled from under a falling millstone. A father who now had the strength to send away his son before he killed him. A name for a young man's nightmare, so he could understand that his enemy was real. A whispered encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.

And a single drawing, burnt into a fine slab of oakwood with the tip of a hot knife. He'd rather have worked with wax and acid on metal, but there was neither to be had in this place. So he burnt lines into the wood, making of it what he could. A picture of a young man caught in a strong river, bound up in the roots of a floating tree, gasping for breath, his eyes facing death fearlessly. It would have earned nothing but scorn at the Lord Protector's Academy of Art, being so plain. But Goody Faith cried out when she saw it, and hugged it to her, dropping her tears over it like the last drips from the eaves after a rainstorm. And Father Alvin, when he saw it, nodded and said, “That's your vision, Taleswapper. You got his face perfect, and you never even saw him. That's Vigor. That's my boy.” Then he cried, too.

They set it right up on the mantel. It might not be great art, thought Taleswapper, but it was true, and it meant more to these folks than any portrait could mean to some fat old lord or parliamentarian in London or Camelot or Paris or Vie

“It's fair morning now,” said Goody Faith. “You've got long to go before dark.”

“You can't blame me for being reluctant to leave. Though I'm glad you trusted me with this errand, and I won't fail you.” He patted his pocket, wherein lay the letter to the blacksmith of Hatrack River.

“You can't go without you say good-bye to the boy,” said Miller.

He'd put it off as long as it could be delayed. He nodded once, then eased himself from the comfortable chair by the fire and went on into the room where he'd slept the best nights of his life. It was good to see Alvin Junior's eyes wide open, his face lively, no longer slack the way it was for a while, or winced up with pain. But the pain was still there, Taleswapper knew.

“You going?” asked the boy.

“I'm gone, except for saying good-bye to you.”

Alvin looked a little angry. “So you ain't even going to let me write in your book?”

“Not everybody does, you know.”

“Pa did. And Mama.”

“And Cally, too.”

“I bet that looks good,” said Alvin. “He writes like a, like a–”

“Like a seven-year-old.” It was a rebuke, but Alvin had no intention of squirming.

“Why not me, then? Why Cally and not me?”

“Because I only let people write the most important thing they ever did or ever saw with their own eyes. What would you write?”

“I don't know. Maybe about the millstone.”

Taleswapper made a face.

“Then maybe my vision. That's important, you said so yourself.”

“And that got written up somewhere else, Alvin.”

“I want to write in the book,” he said. “I want my sentence in there along with Maker Ben's.”

“Not yet,” said Taleswapper.

“When!”

“When you've whipped that old Unmaker, lad. That's when I'll let you write in this book.”

“What if I don't ever whip him?”

“Then this book won't amount to much, anyway.”

Tears sprang to Alvin's eyes. “What if I die?”

Taleswapper felt a thrill of fear. “How's the leg?”

The boy shrugged. He blinked back the tears. They were gone.

“That's no answer, lad.”

“It won't stop hurting.”

“It'll be that way till the bone knits.”

Alvin Junior smiled wanly. “Bone's all knit.”

“Then why don't you walk?”

“It pains me, Taleswapper. It never goes away. It's got a bad place on the bone, and I ain't figured out yet how to make it right.”

“You'll find a way.”

“I ain't found it yet.”

“An old trapper once said to me, 'It don't matter if you start at the bung or the breastbone, any old way you get the skin off a panther is a good way.'”

“Is that a proverb?”

“It's close. You'll find a way, even if it isn't what you expect.”

“Nothing's what I expect,” said Alvin. “Nothing turns out like anything I figured.”