She watched as the big man leaped with surprising agility from the wagon, and went around to the back to untie the sorrel saddle horse that had followed them. The horse was big, too; it had to be, to carry him. There was a rifle scabbard with a rifle in it, tied to his saddle, and a bedroll and canteen, but not much else. Whoever he was, the big man traveled light. Saddlebags were his only luggage.
Lena’s astonishment grew as her husband ushered the stranger toward their sod hut. Joseph acted as if the man was royalty, all but bowing to him. Lena had never seen her husband so impressed; at least, not since the first time he had dinner in a Crafter house.
“This is my friend Jim,” Joseph said by way of introduction. “We met in the town. He was coming this way on his way further south, and I offered him hospitality for as long as he cared to stay with us. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
You knew no such thing, Lena thought irritably, but she smiled at the stranger anyway. Now that he was up close she could see him better. He had a blunt, rugged face, with a powerful jaw and a sensuous mouth—and the most remarkable eyes she had ever seen. He looked out of those eyes as an eagle might, Lena thought.
“You’re very welcome to what we have,” she said, stepping back to allow him to enter. His shoulders filled the door frame, temporarily blocking the light. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your
name ... .
“Bowie, ma’am,” was the reply, soft-spoken for such a big man. “James Bowie.”
“He’s famous,” Joseph threw in. “What I mean is, lots of folks in the town know of him. He was in the Government at one time, an ...
“I was born in Kentucky and now I’ve come to Texas,” Bowie said gently. “That’s all there is to know about me, all that’s important.”
“You invented that knife,” said Joseph.
Bowie’s lips turned up very slightly. “Oh yes. That. That’s what they’ll put on my tombstone, I suppose. No matter what else I do, people remember the knife.”
So you have a small Talent too, Lena thought. Glancing at his body without seeming to, she took careful notice of the wide leather belt around his waist, and the sheath that held a massive throwing knife. She wondered if he had made it the way she made eyeglasses. Probably not. He did not have a Crafter look about him.
Still, she liked the man and he made a pleasant change from Joseph’s company. He was courteous and considerate, with Kentucky manners that put Joseph’s dour Yankee ways to shame in Lena’s eyes. She silently hoped Bowie would stay for a long time, but he had other plans.
“I’m on my way south to help fight for Texas,” he told them over supper that night—a supper to which he had contributed a tiny bit of real ground coffee from the leather poke in his saddlebag. “There’s a big battle brewing, I hear, and I like a good fight, especially when brave men are defending something they believe in. Texas has a right to be free, even if the Mexicans don’t think so. The Republic of Texas. I like the sound of that.”
“We’ve been calling it a republic for a while,” Joseph said as if he were taking actual part in the struggle for the region’s independence.
“A thing is what you think it is,” Lena murmured, and Bowie shot her a searching look.
“It is that, ma’am,” he agreed. “You keep on calling Texas a republic and I’ll help make it one, if I can.”
That night, as Lena and Joseph lay in their bed, he whispered to her, “Ain’t he a cracker?”
“Bowie? I suppose he is. I’ve never met anyone like him.”
“A genuine hero, he is. Like one of the old Green Mountain Boys. It’s a privilege to know him. Why, if I didn’t have you to look after, I’d throw a saddle on the mule and ride off with him.”
No you wouldn’t, Lena thought. That’s just a dream, the way I dream about trees and grass. But it was somehow comforting to learn that Joseph did still dream. Once there had been something in him that drew her ... was it still there? Inside that leathery, dried-out man, was there still a young lad who dreamed bold dreams of taming the frontier and taking her with him?
Bowie was up before dawn, even before Lena, and went out hunting. She heard no gunshot, but he soon returned with a good-sized buck deer. He carried it out behind the sod hut and skinned it, swiftly and expertly, with the famous knife.
“Thought I’d contribute my share to the dinner,” he told Lena. He was only going to stay long enough to rest his horse, a day or two at the most, but while he was with them he made himself more than useful. While he was out helping Joseph dig a new well Lena had a chance to finish her eyeglasses. She carefully poked the old lenses out of their wire frames, warmed the frames just enough to make them malleable, and fitted the new lenses into them. As she worked she thought about dreams, and magic. And maple shade.
When the glasses were ready she slipped the wire curves over her ears and looked around the cabin. Everything seemed blurred. She went to the door and opened it, looking out. It took a moment for her eyes to refocus and adjust to the light, and then she saw ...
Maple shade.
Lena almost fainted. She tore the glasses from her eyes and looked again. In front of her was nothing but baked prairie, with heat mirages shimmering like lakes in the far distance.
She put her eyeglasses back on. Maple shade. Emerald grass, sparkling streams. No doubt about it, they were perfectly clear and perfectly real.
She took the eyeglasses off again and rubbed them, very slowly and carefully, with her apron.
A thing is what you think it is.
Had there been some other saying in her childhood, a corollary to that bit of Crafter wisdom that she had forgotten until now? She searched her mind. Then it came to her. She could almost hear her father saying, as he had once learned by rote, “You see what you think you see.”
Lena put the eyeglasses back on. Maple shade.
She walked out of the sod hut and stood under the trees.
The lush green trees. Their coolness enveloped her. The dappled light soothed her. The color nourished her hungry soul.
I made these while I was needing, she thought.
Was it possible she had a gift for magic after all? For magic suffused with science, or science with magic, a true blending of Crafter skills? How could such a thing be without her knowing?
Born silver, and with a caul. Born with obviously great gifts that had gone undiscovered. Her Talent for making lenses had been a small part of the whole, she saw now. The few tools she had brought with her, the small cache of equipment hidden away in her wooden chest, was only the lesser part of the ability to give vision.
To give vision. She mouthed the words almost reverently. Jim and Joseph did not return until sundown. Both men were grimy and weary, and as they sat at table they talked of well-digging. Lena took no part in the conversation. She fed them venison—too fresh, but a blessed change from salt pork and jack rabbit—and busied herself beside the fire, thinking her own thoughts. Hugging her discovery to her as a child hugs a treasure.
Joseph went to bed, but Jim Bowie could not sleep. He had told them he planned to leave in the morning, and now he was pacing the cabin restlessly, like a tiger in a cage much too small for him. Lena sat close to the fire, with her glasses perched on her nose once she was sure Joseph was asleep. She was hunched over, mending the rips and tears in Bowie’s coat before he rode away. Sewing buttons back on.
He paused to look down at her. “I didn’t know you wore spectacles.”
“I have weak eyes,” she said, not looking up. “I’m ...”
“I know, it goes with albinism,” he replied easily.
“You know about such things?”
“I know a bit of this and that,” he said with disarming modesty. “But where do you get spectacles way out here? Or did you bring them with you?”
“I brought some, but they had to be replaced. So I made these.”
<
br /> “You put the old lenses into new frames?”
“Oh no, the frames are fine. I made new lenses.”
Bowie took a step back and stared at her. “How in the world ... ?”
Consumed with shyness, Lena huddled in upon herself. “My little white rabbit,” her father had called her, long ago.
“I have ... I have this ability ... well, I mean to say ... all my family are talented, you see. Very talented. I was the one who wasn’t, though they thought I should be. And I was almost blind into the bargain. My father finally took me into Boston and bought me spectacles, and that made things better. I spent a lot of time holding them, touching them. And then one day I just sort of ... knew. How they were made. I did some experimenting, and I found out what to do. Sort of. The knowledge seemed to come from my fingers, you see?”
He wrinkled his forehead, obviously not seeing at all.
Lena shrugged. This was something you could never explain to anyone who wasn’t a Crafter. “It’s a talent, that’s all. When my family discovered I was trying to make and polish glass, they got me the thing I needed and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s nothing, really; anyone could do it.”
“Anyone could make a knife,” James Bowie said softly, staring past her now looking into the fire on the hearth.
Lena nodded. “I suppose.”
His laughter startled her. “You underestimate yourself, little lady. And you impress me.”
Lena began sewing very hard. “You mustn’t say that,” she murmured. “My husband used to say that once. But ...”
“But it’s been a long time, is that it?”
She nodded, wordless.
Bowie locked his thumbs and stretched his arms at full length in front of him. Lena could hear the joints crack in his mighty arms and shoulders. “At least you still have a husband,” he said. “My wife died. I miss her. Very much.”
“Is that why you want to go fight somebody?”
“You do impress me,” he said again. “And I suppose you’re right.”
“Were you happy together?”
Bowie considered the question. “Almost, I guess you’d say. That’s as good as anyone gets.”
Lena smiled then, a smile so sweet her plain face was nearly pretty in the firelight. “We were almost happy too, now that I think on it.”
“Then you should hold on to that, ma’am. It’s something to envy, like your talent.”
Lena felt her face flame. “My talent’s nothing special.” But even as she spoke she remembered seeing the trees and the grass through her new spectacles, and knew she wasn’t telling the exact truth.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Bowie said. “My eyes aren’t as young as they used to be, so how about giving me a look through those eyeglasses of yours?”
She stiffened. “I ... I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
She must choose her words carefully. “You can’t tell what you might see, that’s all. I said my family expected me to have a talent, but I didn’t tell you what sort. Where I come from, there are those who say, well, who say we are witches.”
“Witches! This is 1836, little lady, not the Dark Ages!”
“I know, and it is absurd. That doesn’t begin to describe the, ah, gifts my family have. But ... I’m just trying to tell you these aren’t the ordinary sort of eyeglasses, and I wouldn’t want you to draw the wrong conclusions.”
“I make my own judgments,” Bowie said briskly. Before she could stop him, he plucked the glasses from her nose.
“Please don’t!” Lena cried out as firmly as she could without waking Joseph.
“Tell me why not.” The big man folded his arms, with the eyeglasses firmly held in one hand, and looked down at her with a manner so strong, so compelling, she could not resist. It was like Joseph all over again.
“I’m just afraid you might see something that isn’t real,” Lena said. “Not real as folk think of real, anyway. Those glasses show you what you want to see.”
Bowie smiled. “I’d say that would be something pretty special. What do they show you, that you want to see?”
She was embarrassed again. “Trees,” she said in a low voice.
Jim Bowie told her, “I’ve seen trees. Where I come from there’s nothing but trees, it seems. What I need to see is the future.”
Lena drew in a sharp breath. “My great-grandfather ... I mean, I’ve always been told it’s not a good idea to try to see the future.”
“Maybe for me it is,” said Bowie. “My wife’s dead, the only life I cared about is behind me. Maybe I’d like to know what’s ahead. If I don’t like it, I could ride away from it.”
Lena shook her head vehemently. “That’s not right; you should never try to change the future.”
“Maybe,” said Bowie. Then he put on her eyeglasses. Helpless to interfere, she sat staring up at him, wondering what he saw. Perhaps the glasses only showed green trees and grass. But she didn’t think so, not from the way his expression changed. Even in the firelight she could see he had gone pale beneath his sunburn.
Without thinking, Lena jumped to her feet and snatched the glasses away. She would never know what instinct prompted her to look through them herself, but for just one moment she saw what he had seen before it faded.
A Spanish mission made of sunbaked adobe, with a bell set above the door. Men on the walls, firing long rifles; men in military uniforms, a few of them, but most of them in buckskins or rough frontier clothing. Some were already dead, lying tumbled half-over the wall with their blood running down to the parched earth below.
What seemed to be thousands of other men, all dressed in red coats, shouting in some foreign language—Mexican?—were charging the mission, obviously intent on killing the last defenders. It was a scene of carnage and horror, yet also of great heroism. Those few brave men on the wall ... with the flag of Texas, bullet-tattered, still flying ...
The image faded. Jim Bowie was looking at her. “What was that?” she asked breathlessly.
“Where I’m going,” he said. “A place called the Alamo.”
“But you’ll ... you’ll die! They were all being killed!”
“Will all be killed,” he corrected her calmly. He was no longer pale.
“Is that what you need’?”
Jim Bowie smiled, the sweetest, saddest, yet most hopeful smile Lena had ever seen. He reached out and touched her cheek with two fingers, then glanced toward the sleeping figure of Joseph on the bed.
“I think I’ll leave now,” he said. “I’m kind of anxious to get on down there.”
“But ...”
“It’ll be all right, little lady. And I thank you. Until now I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, but you’ve given me the vision I needed.” His smile widened as if he was enjoying the play on words.
“But you mustn’t go now!” Lena protested. “What about us? What will I tell Joseph?”
Bowie was already gathering his things, with the silent grace of the giant and, the strong. “Tell him you love him, when he wakes up,” Jim Bowie advised.
At the door he turned for one look back before he disappeared.
“Remember the almost,” he said.
Appomattox
Anno Domini 1865
The American Civil War was a great trauma to most Crafters. While the universally despised slavery, it pained them to watch so many brothers and cousins die fighting one another. Even to those who served in the armies of either side, the slaughter sickened them, for they could actually put themselves inside the opposition’s mind. A few of Amer’s descendants could not accept this and deserted, others still served with distinction. Many of those Crafters who lived on the frontier or deep in the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky chose not to fight for either side. This is not to say that they didn’t play a major role in t
he conflict or what followed.
Drake, Wellman, and Wagner weren’t brothers. That was obvious to the weakest of sight in the countryside. Drake was tall, lanky, and lean, and had not yet seen his thirtieth summer; Wellman was short and weathered and nigh unto sixty with a scalp as white as snow; and Wagner was a burly, bearish fellow, more akin to a Viking warship than the Appalachia countryside, of an indefinable age of masculine prime. The blood bond of brethren, however, could not be stronger than the bond of the road that these three shared. They had traveled together for the last four years, looting war’s plundered, selling their ill-gotten gain, and avoiding conscription by the armies of the North and South. They lived a dream existence; but of recent, those dreams were replaced by nightmares.
“No! No! Stay away, you red devils! Stay away!” cried Drake, obviously still in a deep sleep, despite his position on night watch.
“Wake up, ya durn fool ! You’ll wake up the whole countryside. Don’t you know there’s a war going on. We don’t need no damn Yankee or Johnny Reb on our backs,” said Wellman, shaking the young man back to consciousness.
“It was horrible! I was surrounded by Indians, and they were coming at me from all directions,” said Drake, now awake but still quite shaken.
“You were supposed to be on watch,” the older man admonished. “Where would we be if some no-good scalawag snook his way in here and helped himself to our loot? We couldn’t rightly call in the sheriff, you know.”
“The loot! Oh no! Let me check,” said the now fully awake younger man, who then scurried to undo the tarp from the buckboard.
“Calm down, young’un,” said the older man. “You’ll wake Wagner.”
“He already has,” said the bear like man, wiping the dust of sleep from his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Drake fell asleep on watch and had a nightmare,” said Wellman, realizing that they were all up for the duration.
The Crafters Book Two Page 32