“Did she do something shameful, sir, not to have no marker?” asked Alvin.
“Not shame,” said Horace. “As God is my witness, boy, this girl was noble in life and died a virtuous death. She stays unmarked so this house can be a shelter to others like her. But oh, lad, say you’ll never tell what you found buried here. You’d cause pain to dozens and hundreds of lost souls along the road from slavery to freedom. Can you believe me that much, trust me and be my friend in this? It’d be too much grief, to lose my daughter and have this secret out, all in the same day. Since I can’t keep the secret from you, you have to keep it with me, Alvin, lad. Say you will.”
“I’ll keep a secret if it’s honorable, sir,” said Alvin, “but what honorable secret leads a man to bury his own daughter without a stone?”
Horace’s eyes went wide, and then he laughed like he was calling loony birds. When he got control of hisself, he clapped Alvin on the shoulder. “That ain’t my daughter in the ground there, boy, what made you think it was? It’s a Black girl, a runaway slave, who died last night on her way north.”
Now Alvin realized for the first time that the body was way too small to be no sixteen-year-old, anyhow. It was a child-size body. “That baby in your kitchen, it’s her brother?”
“Her son,” said Horace.
“But she’s so small,” said Alvin.
“That didn’t stop her White owner from getting her with child, boy. I don’t know how you stand on the question of slavery, or if you even thought about it, but I beg you do some thinking now. Think about how slavery lets a White man steal a girl’s virtue and still go to church on Sunday while she groans in shame and bears his bastard child.”
“You’re a Mancipationist, ain’t you?” said Alvin.
“Reckon I am,” said the innkeeper, “but I reckon all good Christian folk are Mancipationists in their hearts.”
“I reckon so,” said Alvin.
“I hope you are, cause if word gets out that I was helping a slavegirl run off to Canada, there’ll be finders and cotchers from Appalachee and the Crown Colonies a-spying on me so I can’t help no others get away.”
Alvin looked back at the grave and thought about the babe in the kitchen. “You going to tell that baby where his mama’s grave is?”
“When he’s old enough to know, and not to tell it,” said the man.
“Then I’ll keep your secret, if you keep mine.”
The man raised his eyebrows and studied Alvin. “What secret you got, Alvin, a boy as young as you?”
“I don’t have no partickler wish to have it known I’m a seventh son. I’m here to prentice with Makepeace Smith, which I reckon is the man I hear a-hammering at the forge down yonder.”
“And you don’t want folks knowing you can see a body lying in an unmarked grave.”
“You caught my drift right enough,” said Alvin. “I won’t tell your secret, and you won’t tell mine.”
“You have my word on it,” said the man. Then he held out his hand.
Took that hand and shook it, gladly. Most grownup folk wouldn’t think of making a bargain like that with a mere child like him. But this man even offered his hand, like they were equals. “You’ll see I know how to keep my word, sir,” said Alvin.
“And anyone around here can tell you Horace Guester keeps a promise, too.” Then Horace told him the story that they were letting out about the baby, how it was the Berrys’ youngest, and they gave it up for Old Peg Guester to raise, cause they didn’t need another child and she’d always hankered to have her a son. “And that part is true enough,” said Horace Guester. “All the more, with Peggy running off.”
“Your daughter.” said Alvin.
Suddenly Horace Guester’s eyes filled up with tears and he shuddered with a sob like Alvin never heard from a growed man in his life. “Just ran off this morning,” said Horace Guester.
“Maybe she’s just a-calling on somebody in town or something,” said Alvin.
Horace shook his head. “I beg your pardon, crying like that, I just beg your pardon, I’m awful tired, truth to tell, up all night last night, and then this morning, her gone like that. She left us a note. She’s gone all right.”
“Don’t you know the man she run off with?” asked Alvin. “Maybe they’ll get married, that happened once to a Swede girl out in the Noisy River country—”
Horace turned a bit red with anger. “I reckon you’re just a boy so you don’t know better than to say such a thing. So I’ll tell you now, she didn’t run off with no man. She’s a woman of pure virtue, and no one ever said otherwise. No, she run off alone, boy.”
Alvin thought he’d seen all kinds of strange things in his iife—a tornado turned into a crystal tower, a bolt of cloth with all the souls of men and women woven in it, murders and tortures, tales and miracles, Alvin knew more of life than most boys at eleven years of age. But this was the strangest thing of all, to think of a girl of sixteen just up and leaving her father’s house, without no husband or nothing. In all his life he never saw a woman go nowhere by herself beyond her own dooryard.
“Is she—is she safe?”
Horace laughed bitterly. “Safe? Of course she’s safe. She’s a torch, Alvin, the best torch I ever heard of. She can see folks miles off, she knows their hearts, ain’t a man born can come near her with evil on his mind without she knows exactly what he’s planning and just how to get away. No, I ain’t worried about her. She can take care of herself better than any man. I just—”
“Miss her,” said Alvin.
“I guess it don’t take no torch to guess that, am I right, lad? I miss her. And it hurt my feelings somewhat that she up and left with no warning. I could’ve given her God bless to send her on her way. Her mama could’ve worked up some good hex, not that Little Peggy’d need it, or anyhow just pack her a cold dinner for on the road. But none of that, no fare-thee-well nor God-be-with-you. It was like as if she was running from some awful boogly monster and had no time to take but one spare dress in a cloth bag and rush on out the door.”
Running from some monster—those words stung right to Alvin’s soul. She was such a torch that it might well be she saw Alvin coming. Up and ran away the morning he arrived. If she wasn’t no torch then maybe it was just chance that took her off the same day he come. But she was a torch. She saw him coming. She knew he came all this way a-hoping to meet her and beg her to help him find his way into becoming whatever it was that he was born to be. She saw all that, and ran away.
“I’m right sorry that she’s gone,” said Alvin.
“I thank you for your pity, friend, it’s good of you. I just hope it won’t be for long. I just hope she’ll do whatever she left to do and come on back in a few days or maybe a couple of weeks.” He laughed again, or maybe sobbed, it was about the same sound. “I can’t even go ask the Hatrack torch to tell a fortune about her, cause the Hatrack River torch is gone.”
Horace cried outright again, for just a minute. Then he took Alvin by the shoulders and looked him in the eye, not even hiding the tears on his cheeks. “Alvin, you just remember how you seen me crying all unmanlike, and you remember that’s how fathers feel about their children when they’re gone. That’s how your own pa feels right now, having you so far away.”
“I know he does,” said Alvin.
“Now if you don’t mind,” said Horace Guester, “I need to be alone here.”
Alvin touched his arm just a moment and then he went away. Not down to the house to have his noon meal like Old Peg Guester offered. He was too upset to sit and eat with them. How could he explain that he was nigh on to being as heartbroke as them, to have that torch girl gone? No, he’d have to keep silence. The answers he was looking for in Hatrack, they were gone off with a sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t want to meet him when he came.
Maybe she seen my future and she hates me. Maybe I’m as bad a boogly monster as anybody ever dreamed of on an evil night.
He followed the sound of the blacksmith’
s hammer. It led him along a faint path to a springhouse straddling a brook that came straight out of a hillside. And down the stream, along a clear meadow slope, he walked until he came to the smithy. Hot smoke rose from the forge. Around front he walked, and saw the blacksmith inside the big sliding door, hammering a hot iron bar into a curving shape across the throat of his anvil.
Alvin stood and watched him work. He could feel the heat from the forge clear outside; inside must be like the fires of hell. His muscles were like fifty different ropes holding his arm on under the skin. They shifted and rolled across each other as the hammer rose into the air, then bunched all at once as the hammer came down. Close as he was now, Alvin could hardly bear the bell-like crash of iron on iron, with the anvil like a sounding fork to make the sound ring on and on. Sweat dripped off the blacksmith’s body, and he was naked to the waist, his white skin ruddy from the heat, streaked with soot from the forge and sweat from his pores. I’ve been sent here to be prentice to the devil, thought Alvin.
But he knew that was a silly idea even as he thought it. This was a hardworking man, that’s all, earning his living with a skill that every town needed if it hoped to thrive. Judging from the size of the corrals for horses waiting to be shod, and the heaps of iron bars waiting to be made into plows and sickles, axes and cleavers, he did a good business, too. If I learn this trade, I’ll never be hungry, thought Alvin, and folks will always be glad to have me.
And something more. Something about the hot fire and the ruddy iron. What happened in this place was akin somehow to making. Alvin knew from the way he’d worked with stone in the granite quarry, when he carved the millstone for his father’s mill, he knew that with his knack he could probably reach inside the iron and make it go the way he wanted it to go. But he had something to learn from the forge and the hammer, the bellows and the fire and the water in the cooling tubs, something that would help him become what he was born to become.
So now he looked at the blacksmith, not as a powerful stranger, but as Alvin’s future self. He saw how the muscles grew on the smith’s shoulders and back. Alvin’s body was strong from chopping wood and splitting rails and all the hoisting and lifting that he did earning pennies and nickels on neighbors’ farms. But in that kind of work, your whole body went into every movement. You rared back with the axe and when it swung it was like your whole body was part of the axhandle, so that legs and hips and back all moved into the chop. But the smith, he held the hot iron in the tongs, held it so smooth and exact against the anvil that while his right arm swung the hammer, the rest of his body couldn’t move a twitch, that left arm stayed as smooth and steady as a rock. It shaped the smith’s body differently, forced the arms to be much stronger by themselves, muscles rooted to the neck and breastbone standing out in a way they never did on a farmboy’s body.
Alvin felt inside himself, the way his own muscles grew, and knew already where the changes would have to come. It was part of his knack, to find his way within living flesh most as easily as he could chart the inner shapes of living stone. So even now he was hunkering down inside, teaching his body to change itself to make way for the new work.
“Boy,” said the smith.
“Sir,” said Alvin.
“Have you got business for me? I don’t know you, do I?”
Alvin stepped forward, held out the note his father writ.
“Read it to me, boy, my eyes are none too good.”
Alvin unfolded the paper. “From Alvin Miller of Vigor Church. To Makepeace, Blacksmith of Hatrack River. Here is my boy Alvin what you said could be your prentice till he be seventeen. He’ll work hard and do what all you say, and you teach him what all a man needs to be a good smith, like in the articles I signed. He is a good boy.”
The smith reached for the paper, held it close to his eyes. His lips moved as he repeated a few phrases. Then he slapped the paper down on the anvil. “This is a fine turn,” said the smith. “Don’t you know you’re about a year late, boy? You was supposed to come last spring. I turned away three offers for prentice cause I had your pa’s word you was coming, and here I’ve been without help this whole year cause he didn’t keep his word. Now I’m supposed to take you in with a year less on your contract, and not even a by-your-leave or beg-your-pardon.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Alvin. “But we had the war last year. I was on my way here but I got captured by Choc-Taw.”
“Captured by—oh, come now, boy, don’t tell me tales like that. If the Choc-Taw caught you, you wouldn’t have such a dandy head of hair now, would you! And like as not you’d be missing a few fingers.”
“Ta-Kumsaw rescued me,” said Alvin.
“Oh, and no doubt you met the Prophet hisself and walked on water with him.”
As a matter of fact, Alvin done just that. But from the smith’s tone of voice, he reckoned that it wouldn’t be wise to say so. So Alvin said nothing.
“Where’s your horse?” asked the smith.
“Don’t have one,” said Alvin.
“Your father wrote the date on this letter boy, two days ago! You must’ve rode a horse.”
“I ran.” As soon as Alvin said it, he knew it was a mistake.
“Ran?” said the smith. “With bare feet? It must be nigh four hundred mile or more to the Wobbish from here! Your feet ought to be ripped to rags clear up to your knees! Don’t tell me tales, boy! I won’t have no liars around me!”
Alvin had a choice, and he knew it. He could explain about how he could run like a Red man. Makepeace Smith wouldn’t believe him, and so Alvin would have to show him some of what he could do. It would be easy enough. Bend a bar of iron just by stroking it. Make two stones mash together to form one. But Alvin already made up his mind he didn’t want to show his knacks here. How could he be a proper prentice, if folks kept coming around for him to cut them hearthstones or fix a broken wheel or all the other fixing things he had a knack for? Besides, he never done such a thing, showing off just for the sake of proving what he could do. Back home he only used his knack when there was need.
So he stuck with his decision to keep his knack to himself, pretty much. Not tell what he could do. Just learn like any normal boy, working the iron the way the smith himself did, letting the muscles grow slowly on his arms and shoulders, chest and back.
“I was joking,” Alvin said. “A man gave me a ride on his spare mount.”
“I don’t like that kind of joke,” said the smith. “I don’t like it that you lied to me so easy like that.”
What could Alvin say? He couldn’t even claim that he hadn’t lied—he had, when he told about a man letting him ride. So he was as much a liar as the smith thought. The only confusion was about which statement was a lie.
“I’m sorry,” said Alvin.
“I’m not taking you, boy. I don’t have to take you anyway, a year late. And here you come lying to me the first thing. I won’t have it.”
“Sir, I’m sorry,” said Alvin. “It won’t happen again. I’m not known for a liar back home, and you’ll see I’ll be known for square dealing here, if you give me a chance. Catch me lying or not giving fair work all the time, and you can chuck me, no questions asked. Just give me a chance to prove it, sir.”
“You don’t look like you’re eleven, neither, boy.”
“But I am, sir. You know I am. You yourself with your own arms pulled my brother Vigor’s body from the river on the night that I was born, or so my pa told me.”
The smith’s face went distant, as if he was remembering. “Yes. he told you true, I was the one who pulled him out. Clinging to the roots of that tree even in death, so I thought I’d have to cut him free. Come here, boy.”
Alvin walked closer. The smith poked and pushed the muscles of his arms.
“Well, I can see you’re not a lazy boy. Lazy boys get soft, but you’re strong like a hardworking farmer. Can’t lie about that, I reckon. Still, you haven’t seen what real work is.”
“I’m ready to learn.”
&
nbsp; “Oh, I’m sure of that. Many a boy would be glad to learn from me. Other work might come and go, but there’s always a need for a blacksmith. That’ll never change. Well, you’re strong enough in body, I reckon. Let’s see about your brain. Look at this anvil. This here’s the bick, on the point, you see. Say that.”
“Bick.”
“And then the throat here. And this is the table—it ain’t faced with blister steel, so when you ram a cold chisel into it the chisel don’t blunt. Then up a notch onto the steel face, where you work the hot metal. And this is the hardie hole, where I rest the butt of the fuller and the flatter and the swage. And this here’s the pricking hole, for when I punch holes in strap iron---the hot punch shoots right through into this space. You got all that?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Then name me the parts of the anvil.”
Alvin named them as best he could. Couldn’t remember the job each one did, not all of them, anyways, but what he did was good enough, cause the blacksmith nodded and grinned. “Reckon you ain’t a half-wit, anyhow, you’ll learn quick enough. And big for your age is good. I won’t have to keep you on a broom and the bellows for the first four years, the way I do with smaller boys. But your age, that’s a sticking point. A term of prentice work is seven year, but my written-up articles with your pa, they only say till you’re seventeen.”
“I’m almost twelve now, sir.”
“So what I’m saying is, I want to be able to hold you the full seven years, if need be. I don’t want you whining off just when I finally get you trained enough to be useful.”
“Seven years, sir. The spring when I’m nigh on nineteen, then my time is up.”
“Seven years is a long time, boy, and I mean to hold you to it. Most boys start when they’re nine or ten, or even seven years old, so they can make a living, start looking for a wife at sixteen or seventeen years old. I won’t have none of that. I expect you to live like a Christian, and no fooling with any of the girls in town, you understand me?”
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 8