There had been no malice in it, though, just the love of the contest. No sooner was Taleswapper down than Miller was helping him up, asking him if anything was broken.
“I'm just glad your millstone wasn't in place yet,” said Taleswapper, “or you'd be stuffing brains back into my head.”
“What? You're in Wobbish country, man! There ain't no need for brains out here.”
“Well, you threw me,” said Taleswapper. “Does that mean you won't let me earn a bed and a meal?”
“Earn it? No sir. I won't allow such a thing.” But the grin on his face denied the harshness of his words. “No, no, you can work if you like, because a man likes to feel that he pays his way in the world. But truth is I'd let you stay even if you had two legs broke and couldn't help a lick. We've got a bed all ready for you, just off the kitchen, and I'll bet a hog against a huckleberry that them boys already told Faith to set another bowl for supper.”
“That's kind of you, sir.”
“Not at all,” said Alvin Miller. “You sure nothing got broke? You hit them stones awful hard.”
“Then I imagine you ought to check to make sure none of those stones got split, sir.”
Alvin laughed again, slapped him on the back, and led him up to the house.
Such a house it was. There couldn't be more screeching and shouting in hell. Miller tried to sort out all the children for him. The four older girls were his daughters, busy as could be at half a dozen jobs, each one carrying on separate arguments with each of her sisters, at the top of her voice, passing from quarrel to quarrel as her work took her from room to room. The screaming baby was a grandchild, as were the five toddlers playing Roundheads and Cavaliers on and under the dining table. The mother, Faith, seemed oblivious to it all as she labored in the kitchen. Occasionally she'd reach out to cuff a nearby child, but otherwise she didn't let them interrupt her work– or her steady stream of orders, rebukes, threats, and complaints.
“How do you keep your wits together, in all this?” Taleswapper asked her.
“Wits?” she asked him sharply. “Do you think anyone with wits would put up with this?”
Miller showed him to his room. That's what he called it, “your room, as long as you care to stay.” It had a large bed and a feather pillow, and blankets, too, and half of one wall was the back of the chimney, so it was warm. Taleswapper hadn't been offered a bed like this in all his wandering. “Promise me that your name isn't really Procrustes,” he said.
Miller didn't understand the allusion, but it didn't matter, he knew the look on Taleswapper's face. No doubt he'd seen it before. “We don't put our guests in the worst room, Taleswapper, we put them in the best. And no more talk about that.”
“You have to let me work for you tomorrow, then.”
“Oh, there's jobs to do, if you're good with your hands. And if you ain't ashamed of women's work, my wife could use a help or two. We'll see what happens.” At that, Miller left the room and closed the door behind him.
The noise of the house was only partly dampened by the closed door, but it was a music that Taleswapper didn't mind hearing. It was only afternoon, but he couldn't help himself. He swung off his pack and pried off his boots and eased himself down on the mattress. It rustled like a straw tick, but there was a feather mattress on top of that, so it was deep and soft. And the straw was fresh, and dried herbs hung by the hearthstones to give it the smell of thyme and rosemary. Did I ever lie upon so soft a bed in Philadelphia? Or before that, in England? Not since I left my mother's womb, he thought.
There was nothing shy about the use of powers in this house; the hex was right in the open, painted above the door. But he recognized the pattern. It wasn't a peacemaker, designed to quell any violence in the soul that slept here. It wasn't a warning, and it wasn't a fending. Not a bit of it was designed to protect the house from the guest, or the guest from the house. It was for comfort, pure and simple. And it was perfectly, exquisitely drawn, exactly the right proportions. An exact hex wasn't easy to draw, being made of threes. Taleswapper couldn't remember seeing a more perfect one.
So it didn't surprise him, as he lay on the bed, to feel the muscles of his body unknotting, as if this bed and this room were undoing the weariness of twenty-five years of wandering. It occurred to him that when he died, he hoped the grave was as comfortable as this bed.
When Alvin Junior rocked him awake, the whole house smelled of sage and pepper and simmered beef. “You've just got time to use the privy, wash up, and come eat,” said the boy.
“I must have fallen asleep,” said Taleswapper.
“That's what I made that hex to do,” said the boy. “Works good, don't it?” Then he charged out of the room.
Almost immediately Taleswapper heard one of the girls yelling the most alarming series of threats at the boy. The quarrel continued at top volume as Taleswapper went out to the privy, and when he came back inside, the yelling was still going on– though Taleswapper thought perhaps now it was a different sister yelling.
“I swear tonight in your sleep Al Junior I'll sew a skunk to the soles of your feet!” Al's answer was muffled by distance, but it caused another bout of screaming. Taleswapper had heard yelling before. Sometimes it was love and sometimes it was hate. When it was hate, he got out as quickly as he could. In this house, he could stay.
Hands and face washed, he was clean enough that Goody Faith allowed him to carry the loaves of bread to ihe table– “as long as you don't let the bread touch that gamy shirt of yours.” Then Taleswapper took his place in line, bowl in hand, as the whole family trooped into the kitchen and emerged with the majority of a hog parceled out among them.
It was Faith, not Miller himself, who called on one of the girls to pray, and Taleswapper took note that Miller didn't so much as close his eyes, though all the children had bowed heads and clasped hands. It was as if prayer was a thing he tolerated, but didn't encourage. Without having to ask, Taleswapper knew that Alvin Miller and the preacher down in that fine white church did not get along at all. Taleswapper decided Miller might even appreciate a proverb from his book: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”
The meal was not a time of chaos, to Taleswapper's surprise. Each child in turn reported what he did that day, and all listened, sometimes giving advice or praise. Finally, when the stew was gone and Taleswapper was dabbing at the last traces in his bowl with a sop of bread, Miller turned to him, just like he had to everyone else in the family.
“And your day, Taleswapper. Was it well spent?”
“I walked some miles before noon, and climbed a tree,” said Taleswapper. “There I saw a steeple, which led me to a town. There a Christian man feared my hidden powers, though he saw none of them, and so did a preacher, though he said he didn't believe I had any. Still, I was looking for a meal and a bed, and a chance to work to earn them, and a woman said that the folks at the end of a particular wagon track would take me in.”
“That would be our daughter Eleanor,” said Faith.
“Yes,” said Taleswapper. “I see now that she has her mother's eyes, which are always calm no matter what is happening.”
“No, friend,” said Faith. “It's just that these eyes have seen, such times that since then it hasn't been easy to alarm me.”
“I hope before I leave to hear the story of such times,” Taleswapper said.
Faith looked away as she put another slab of cheese on a grandchild's bread.
Taleswapper went right on with his account of the day, however, not wishing to show that she might have embarrassed him by not answering. “That wagon track was most peculiar,” he said. “There were covered bridges over brooks that a child could wade in, and a man could step over. I hope to hear the story of those bridges before I go.”
Again, no one would meet his gaze.
“And when I came out of the woods, I found a mill with no millstone, and two boys wrestling on a wagon, and a mi
ller who gave me the worst throw of my life, and a family that took me in and gave me the best room in the house even though I was a stranger, and they didn't know me to be good or evil.”
“Of course you're good,” said Al Junior.
“Do you mind my asking. I've met many hospitable people in my time, and stayed in many a happy home, but not one happier than this, and no one quite so glad to see me.”
All were still around the table. Finally, Faith raised her head and smiled at him. “I'm glad you found us to be happy,” she said. “But we all remember other times as well, and perhaps our present happiness is sweeter, from the memory of grief.”
“But why do you take in a man like me?”
Miller himself answered. “Because once we were strangers, and good folk took us in.”
“I lived in Philadelphia for a time, and it strikes me to ask you, are you of the Society of Friends?”
Faith shook her head. “I'm Presbyterian. So are many of the children.”
Taleswapper looked at Miller.
“I'm nothing,” he said.
“A Christian isn't nothing,” said Taleswapper.
“I'm no Christian, either.”
“Ah,” said Taleswapper. “A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson.” The children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.
“Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a millstone.” Then the man stood up from the table and walked away. They heard a door close. He was gone away outside.
Taleswapper turned to Faith. "Oh, milady, I'm afraid you must regret my coming to your house.
“You ask a powerful lot of questions,” she said.
“I told you my name, and my name is what I do. Whenever I sense that there's a story, one that matters, one that's true, I hunger for it. And if I hear it, and believe it, then I remember it forever, and tell it again wherever I go.”
“That's how you earn your way?” asked one of the girls.
“I earn my way by helping mend wagons and dig ditches and spin thread and anything else that needs doing. But my life work is tales, and I swap them one for one. You may think right now that you don't want to tell me any of your stories, and that's fine with me, because I never took a story that wasn't willingly told. I'm no thief. But you see, I've already got a story– the things that happened to me today. The kindest people and the softest bed between the Mizzipy and the Alph.”
“Where's the Alph? Is that a river?” asked Cally.
“What, you want a story?” asked Taleswapper.
Yes, clamored the children.
“But not about the river Alph,” said Al Junior. “That's not a real place.”
Taleswapper looked at him in genuine surprise. “How did you know? Have you read Lord Byron's collection of Coleridge's poetry?”
Al Junior looked around in bafflement.
“We don't get much bookstuff here,” said Faith. “The preacher gives them Bible lessons, so they can learn to read.”
“Then how did you know the river Alph isn't real?”
Al Junior scrunched his face, as if to say, Don't ask me questions when I don't even know the answer myself. “The story I want is about Jefferson. You said his name like you met him.”
“Oh, I did. And Tom Paine, and Patrick Henry before they hanged him, and I saw the sword that cut off George Washington's head. I even saw King Robert the Second, before the French sank his ship back in naught one and took him to the bottom of the sea.”
“Where he belonged,” murmured Faith.
“If not deeper,” said one of the older girls.
“I'll say amen to that. They say in Appalachee that he had so much blood on his hands that even his bones are stained brown with it, and even the most indiscriminate fish won't gnaw at them.”
The children laughed.
“Even more than Tom Jefferson,” said Al Junior, “I want a tale of the greatest American wizard. I bet you knew Ben Franklin.”
Again, the child had startled him. How did he guess that of all tales, those about Ben Franklin were the ones he best loved to tell? “Know him? Oh, a little,” said Taleswapper, knowing that the way he said it promised them all the stories they could hope for. “I lived with him only half a dozen years, and there were eight hours every night that I wasn't with him– so I can't say I know much.”
Al Junior leaned over the table, his eyes bright and unblinking. “Was he truly a maker?”
“All those stories, each in its own time,” said Taleswapper. “As long as your father and mother are willing to have me around, and as long as I believe I'm being useful, I'll stay and tell stories night and day.”
“Starting with Ben Franklin,” insisted Alvin Junior. “Did he really pull lightning out of the sky?”
Chapter Ten – Visions
Alvin Junior woke up sweating from the nightmare. It was so real, and he was panting just as if he had been trying to run away. But there was no running away, he knew that. He lay there with his eyes closed, afraid to open them for a while, knowing that when he did, it would still be there. A long time ago, when he was still little, he used to cry out when this nightmare came. But when he tried to explain it to Pa and Mama, they always said the same thing. “Why, that's just nothing, son. You're telling me you're so a-scared of nothing?” So he learned himself to stifle and never cry when the dream came.
He opened his eyes, and it fled away to the corners of the room, where he didn't have to look right at it. That was good enough. Stay there and let me be, he said silently.
Then he realized that it was full daylight, and Mama had laid out his black broadcloth pants and jacket and a clean shirt. His Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. He'd almost rather go back to the nightmare than wake up to this.
Alvin Junior hated Sunday mornings. He hated getting all dressed up, so he couldn't set on the ground or kneel in the grass or even bend over without something getting messed up and Mama telling him to have some respect for the Lord's day. He hated having to tiptoe around the house all morning because it was the Sabbath and there wasn't to be no playing or making noise on the Sabbath. Worst of all he hated the thought of sitting on a hard bench down front, with Reverend Thrower looking him in the eye while he preached about the fires of hell that were waiting for the ungodly who despised the true religion and put their faith in the feeble understanding of man. Every Sunday, it seemed like.
And it wasn't that Alvin really despised religion. He just despised Reverend Thrower. It was all those hours in school, now that harvest was over. Alvin Junior was a good reader, and he got right answers most of the time in his ciphering. But that wasn't enough for old Thrower. He also had to teach religion right along with it. The other children– the Swedes and Knickerbockers from upriver, the Scotch and English from down– only got a licking when they sassed or got three wrong answers in a row. But Thrower took his cane to Alvin Junior every chance he got, it seemed like, and it wasn't over book-learning, it was always about religion.
Of course it didn't help much that the Bible kept striking Alvin funny at all the wrong times. That's what Measure said, the time that Alvin ran away from school and hid in David's house till Measure found him nigh onto suppertime. “If you just didn't laugh when he reads from the Bible, you wouldn't get whupped so much.”
But it was funny. When Jonathan shot all those arrows in the sky and they missed. When Jeroboam didn't shoot enough arrows out his window. When Pharaoh kept finding tricky ways to keep the Israelites from leaving. When Samson was so dumb he told his secret to Delilah after she already betrayed him twice. “How can I keep from laughing?”
“Just think about getting blisters on your butt,” said Measure. “That ought to take the smile off your face.”
“But I never remember till after I already laughed.”
“Then you'll probably never need a chair till you're fifteen years old,” said Measure. “Cause Mama won't ever let you out of that school, a
nd Thrower won't ever let up on you, and you can't hide in David's house forever.”
“Why not?”
“Because hiding from your enemy is the same as letting him win.”
So Measure wouldn't keep him safe, and he had to go back– and take a licking from Pa, too, for scaring everybody by running away and hiding so long. Still, Measure had helped him. It was a comfort to know that somebody else was willing to say that Thrower was his enemy. All the others were so full of how wonderful and godly and educated Thrower was, and how kind he was to teach the children from his fount of wisdom, that it like to made Alvin puke.
Even though Alvin mostly kept his face under control during school, and so got less lickings, Sunday was the most terrible struggle of all, because he sat there on that hard bench listening to Thrower, half the time wanting to bust out laughing till he fell on the floor, and half the time wanting to stand up and shout, “That's just about the stupidest thing I ever heard a growed man say!” He even had a feeling Pa wouldn't lick him very hard for saying that to Thrower, since Pa never had much of an opinion of the man. But Mama– she'd never forgive him for doing blasphemy in the house of the Lord.
Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell.
Probably Mama wouldn't even let Taleswapper tell so much as the tiniest story today, lessen it came from the Bible. And since Taleswapper never seemed to tell stories from the Bible, Alvin Junior guessed that nothing good would come today.
Mama's voice blasted up the stairs. “Alvin Junior, I'm so sick and tired of you taking three hours to get dressed on Sunday morning that I'm about to take you to church naked!”
“I ain't naked!” Alvin shouted down. But since what he was wearing was his nightgown, it was probably worse than being naked. He shucked off the flannel nightgown, hung it on a peg, and started dressing as fast as he could.
It was funny. On any other day, he only had to reach out for his clothes without even thinking, and they'd be there, just the piece he wanted. Shirt, trousers, stockings, shoes. Always there in his hand when he reached. But on Sunday morning, it was like the clothes ran away from his hand. He'd go for his shirt and come back with his pants. He'd reach for a sock and come up with a shoe, time after time. It was like as if the clothes didn't want to get put on his body any more than he wanted them there.
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