Seventh Son

by Orson Scott Card

  Waiting a long time. This construction was at least five years old, from the vines and the mosses on the building. It had been a lot of work to build this millhouse, and yet it was being used as a common haybarn.

  Just inside the large door, a wagon was rocking back and forth as two boys grappled together atop a half-load of hay. It was a friendly bout; the boys were obviously brothers, the one about twelve years old, the other perhaps nine, and the only reason the young one wasn’t thrown off the wagon and out the door was because the older boy couldn’t keep himself from laughing. They didn’t notice Taleswapper, of course.

  They also didn’t notice the man standing at the edge of the loft, pitchfork in hand, looking down at them. Taleswapper thought at first that the man was watching in pride, like a father. Then he came close enough to see how he held the fork. Like a javelin, ready to cast. For a single moment, Taleswapper saw in his mind’s eye just what would happen—the fork thrown, burying itself in the flesh of one of the boys, surely killing him, if not immediately, then soon enough, with gangrene or belly bleeding. It was murder that Taleswapper saw.

  “No!” he shouted. He ran through the doorway, fetching up alongside the wagon, looking up at the man in the loft.

  The man plunged the pitchfork into the hay beside him and heaved the hay over the edge onto the wagon, half-burying the two boys. “I brought you here to work, you two bearcubs, not to tie each other in knots.” The man was smiling, teasing. He winked at Taleswapper. Just as if there hadn’t been death in his eyes a moment before.

  “Howdy, young feller,” said the man.

  “Not so young,” said Taleswapper. He doffed his hat, letting his bare pate give away his age.

  The boys dug themselves out of the hay. “What were you shouting at, Mister?” asked the younger one.

  “I was afraid someone might come to harm,” said Taleswapper.

  “Oh, we wrassle like that all the time,” said the older boy. “Put her there, friend. My name’s Alvin, same as my pa.” The boy’s grin was contagious. Scared as he’d been, with so much dark dealing going on today, Taleswapper had no choice but to smile back and take the proffered hand. Alvin Junior had a handshake like a grown man, he was that strong. Taleswapper commented on it.

  “Oh, he gave you his fish hand. When he gets to wringing and wrenching on you, he like to pops your palm like a razzleberry.” The younger boy shook hands, too.

  “I’m seven years old, and Al Junior, he’s ten.” Younger than they looked. They both had that nasty bitter body stench that young boys get when they’ve been playing hard. But Taleswapper never minded that. It was the father who puzzled him. Was it just a fancy in his own mind, that Taleswapper thought he meant to kill the boys? What man could take a murderous hand to boys as sweet and fine as these?

  The man had left the pitchfork in the loft, clambered down the ladder, and now strode toward Taleswapper with his arms out as if to hug him. “Welcome here, stranger,” said the man. “I’m Alvin Miller, and these are my two youngest sons, Alvin Junior and Calvin.”

  “Cally,” corrected the younger boy.

  “He doesn’t like the way our names rhyme,” said Alvin Junior. “Alvin and Calvin. See, they named him like me hoping he’d grow up to be as fine a specimen of manhood as I am. Too bad it ain’t working.”

  Calvin gave him a shove of mock anger. “Near as I can tell, he was the first try, and when I came along they finally got it right!”

  “Mostly we call thern Al and Cally,” said the father.

  “Mostly you call us ‘shutup’ and ‘get over here,’ ” said Cally.

  Al Junior gave him a whack on the shoulder and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Whereupon his father placed a boot on his backside and sent him head over heels out the door. All in fun. Nobody was hurt. How could I have thought there was murder going on here?

  “You come with a message? A letter?” asked Alvin Miller. Now, that the boys were outside, yelling at each other across the meadow, the grown men could get a word in.

  “Sorry,” said Taleswapper. “Just a traveler. A young lady in town said I might find a place to sleep up here. In exchange for whatever good hard work you might have for my arms.”

  Alvin Miller grinned. “Let me see how much work those arms can do.” He thrust out an arm, but it wasn’t to shake hands. He gripped Taleswapper by the forearm and braced his right foot against Taleswapper’s right foot. “Think you can throw me?” asked Alvin Miller.

  “Just tell me before we start,” said Taleswapper, “whether I’ll get a better supper if I throw you, or if I don’t throw you.”

  Alvin Miller leaned back his head and whooped like a Red. “What’s your name, stranger?”

  “Taleswapper.”

  “Well, Mr. Taleswapper, I hope you like the taste of dirt, cause that’s what you’ll eat before you eat anything else here!”

  Taleswapper felt the grip on his forearm tighten. His own arms were strong, but not like this man’s grip. Still, a game of throws wasn’t all strength. It was also wit, and Taleswapper had a bit of that. He let himself slowly flinch under Alvin Miller’s pressure, long before he had forced the man to use his full strength. Then, suddenly, he pulled with all his might in the direction Miller was pushing. Usually that was enough to topple the bigger man, using his own weight against him—but Alvin Miller was ready, pulled the other way, and flung Taleswapper so far that he landed right among the stones that formed the foundation for the missing millstone.

  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 the 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 miller 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 happene
d 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.”