ALVIN JOURNEYMAN

by Orson Scott Card

  And later in the same day, he’d be on about someone else. “I was out looking for Alfreda Matthews, Sophie’s cousin, she’s the one lives in that shack down by the river, only the river’s a long windy thing and I couldn’t find her and in fact it was getting on toward dark and I couldn’t rightly find myself, and then here I am face to face with this Captain Alexander, he’s a ship’s captain only who knows what he’s doing so far from the sea? But he lives around here doing tinkering and odd fixing, and Vilate Franker says he must have done some terrible crime to have to hide from the sea, or maybe there was some great sea beast that swallowed up his ship and left only him alive and now he daresn’t go back to sea for fear the beast—she calls it La Vaya Than, which Goody Trader says is Spanish for ‘Ain’t this a damn lie,’ do you know Goody Trader?”

  “Met her,” says Alvin. “She brung me some horehound drops. Nastiest candy I ever ate, but I reckon for them as loves horebound they were good enough. Strange lady. Squatted right outside the door here pondering for the longest time until she finally gets up and says ‘Humf, you’re the first man I ever met what didn’t need nothing and here you are in jail.”

  “They say that’s her knack, knowing what a body needs even when he don’t know himself,” said Arthur. “Though I will say that Vilate Franker says that Goody Trader is a humbug just like the alligator boy in the freak show in Dekane, which you wouldn’t take me to see cause you said if he was real, it was cruel to gawk at him, and—“

  “I remember what I said, Arthur Stuart. You don’t have to gossip to me about me.”

  “Anyway, what was I talking about?”

  “Lost in the woods looking for old drunken Freda.”

  “And I bumped into that sea captain, anyway, and he looks me in the eye and he says, ‘Follow me,’ and I go after him about ten paces and he sets me right in the middle of a deer track and he says, ‘You just go along this way and when you reach the river again, you go upstream about three rods.’ And you know what? I did what he said and you know what?”

  “You found Freda.”

  “Alfreda Matthews, and she was stone drunk of course but I splashed her face with some water and I done what you said folks ought to do, I emptied her jug out and boy howdy, she was spitting mad, I like to had to out-dance the devil just to keep from getting hit by them rocks she threw!”

  “Poor lady,” said Alvin. “But it won’t do no good as long as there’s folks to give her another jug.

  “Can’t you do like, you did with that Red Prophet?”

  Alvin looked at him sharp. “What do you think you know about that?”

  “Just what your own mama told me back in Vigor Church, about how you took a drunken one-eyed Red and made a prophet out of him.”

  Alvin shook his head. “No sir, she got it wrong. He was a prophet all along. And he wasn’t a drunk the way Freda’s a drunk. He took the likker into him to drown out the terrible black noise of death. That’s what I fixed, and then he didn’t need that likker no more. But Freda—there’s something else in her that hungers for it, and I don’t understand it yet.”

  “I told her to come to you though, so I reckon you oughta know and that’s why I told you, she’s a-coming to get healed.”

  Alvin shook his head.

  “Did I do wrong?”

  “No, you done right,” said Alvin. “But there’s nothing I can do for her beyond what she oughta do for herself. She knows the likker’s eating her up, stealing her life away from her. But I’ll talk to her and help her if I can.”

  “They say she can tell you when rain’s coming. If she’s sober.”

  “Then how would anybody know she has such a knack?” asked Alvin.

  Arthur just laughed and laughed. “I reckon she must have been sober once, anyway. And it was raining!”

  When Arthur Stuart left, Alvin pondered the tales he told. Some of Arthur’s chat was just gossip. There was some powerful gossips in Hatrack River these days, and the way Alvin figured it, the two biggest gossips was Vilate Franker, who Alvin had met and knew she was living inside a bunch of lying hexes, and Goody Trader, who he didn’t really know yet except for what he gleaned from her visit. Her real name was either Chastity or Charity—Vilate said it was Chastity, but other folks said the other. She went by Goody, short for Goodwife, seeing how she’d been married three times and kept all them husbands happy till they croaked, accidental every time, though again Vilate managed to give Arthur the impression that they wasn’t truly accidental. Them two women was at war all the time, that much was plain—hardly a word one said as wasn’t contradicted flat out by the other. Now, neither one of these ladies invented gossip, nor was it so that Hatrack River didn’t have rumors and tales before the two of them moved here. But it was plain that Arthur was visiting both of them every day, and both of them was filling him full of tales until Alvin could hardly make sense of it, and it was a sure thing that Arthur didn’t really understand the half of what he’d been told.

  Alvin knew for himself that Vilate was deceptive and spiteful. But Goody might be just the same or worse, only she was better at it so Alvin couldn’t see it so plain. Hard to tell. And that business with Goody Trader saying Alvin didn’t need nothing—well, what was that?

  But behind all the gossip and quarreling, there was something else that struck Alvin as pretty strange. Mighty knacks was thick underfoot in Hatrack River. Most towns might have somebody with something of a knack that you might notice. Most knacks, though, was pretty plain. A knack for soup. A knack for noticing animal tracks. Useful, but nothing to write a letter to your daddy about. A lot of folks had no idea what their own knack was, because it was so easy for them and not all that remarkable in the eyes of other folks. But here in Hatrack River, the knacks was downright astonishing. This sea captain who could help you find your way even when you didn’t know you was lost. And Freda—Alvin pooh-poohed it to Arthur Stuart, but there was folks in town as swore she didn’t just predict rain, if you sobered her up in a dry season she could bring it. And Melyn, a Welsh girl who can harp and sing so you forget everything while she’s doing it, forget it all and just sit there with a stupid smile on your face because you’re so happy—she came and played for Alvin and he could feel how the sound that flowed from her could reach inside him like a doodlebug scooting through the earth, reach inside and find all the knots and loosen them up and just make him feel good.

  It was power like he’d been trying to teach the folks back in Vigor, only they could hardly understand it, could hardly get but a glimmer of it now and then, and here it was so thick on the ground you could rake it up like leaves. Maggie who helped out in Goody Trader’s store, she could ride any horse no matter how wild, plenty of witnesses of that. And one who scared Alvin a little, a girl named Dorcas Bee who could draw portraits of folks that not only looked like their outward face, but also showed everything that was inside them—Alvin didn’t know what to make of her, and even with his eyes he couldn’t rightly understand how she did it.

  Any one of these folks would be remarkable in whatever town they lived in, no matter if it was as big as New Amsterdam or Philadelphia. Yet here they were living in the middle of nowhere, Hatrack River of all places, swelling the numbers of the town but yet nobody seemed to find it remarkable at all that so many knacks was gathered here.

  There’s a reason for it, Alvin thought. Got to be a reason for it. And I have to know it, because there’s going to be a jury of these knacky folks, and they’re going to decide whether Makepeace Smith is a plain liar, or I am. Only this town is full of lies, since the things Vilate Franker says and the things Goody Trader says can’t all be true at the same time. Full of lies and, yes, miseries. Alvin could feel that there was something of the Unmaker going on, but couldn’t lay hands on it or find who it was. Hard to find the Unmaker when the Unmaker didn’t want to be found. Especially hard from a jail cell, where all you got was rumor and brief visits.

  Well, they wasn’t all brief. Vilate Franker herse
lf came and stayed sometimes half an hour at a time, even though there wasn’t no place to sit down. Alvin couldn’t figure what she wanted. She didn’t gossip with him, rightly speaking—all of her gossip Alvin got secondhand from Arthur Stuart. No, Vilate came to him to talk about philosophy and poetry and such, things that no man or woman had talked to him about since Miss Larner. Alvin wondered if maybe Vilate was trying to charm him, but since he couldn’t see the beauty-image from her hexes, he didn’t rightly know. She sure wasn’t pretty to him. But the more she talked, the more he liked her company, till he found himself looking forward to her coming every day. More than anybody except Arthur Stuart, truth be known, and as they talked, Alvin would lie down on the cot in the cell and he’d close his eyes and then. he didn’t have to see either her unprettiness or her hexery, he could just hear the words and think the ideas and see the visions that she conjured in him. She’d say poetry and the words had music inside him. She’d talk of Plato and Alvin understood and it made him feel wise in a way that the adulation of folks back in Vigor Church never did.

  Was this some knack of hers? Alvin didn’t know, just plain couldn’t tell. He only knew that it was only during her visits that he could completely forget that he was in jail. And it dawned on him, after a week or so, that he might just be falling in love. That the feelings that he had only ever had toward Miss Larner were getting waked up, just a little, by Vilate Franker. Now wouldn’t that beat all? Miss Larner had been pretty and young, using knacks to make herself look plain and middle-aged. Now here was a woman plain and middle-aged using knacks that made other folks think she was pretty and young. How opposite could you be? But in both cases, it was the mature woman without obvious beauties that he delighted in.

  And yet, even as he wondered if he was falling in love with Vilate, every now and then, in his lonely hours especially after dark, he would think of another face entirely. A young girl back in Vigor, the girl whose lies had driven him from home in the first place, the girl who claimed he had done forbidden things with her. He found himself thinking of those forbidden things, and there was a place in his heart where he wished he had done them. If he had, of course he would have married her. In fact, he would have married her before doing them, because that was right and the law and Alvin wasn’t no kind of man to do wrong by a woman or break no law if he could help it. But in his imaginings in the dark there wasn’t no law nor right and wrong neither, he just woke up sweating from a dream in which the girl wasn’t no liar after all, and then he was plain ashamed of himself, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, to be falling in love with a woman of words and ideas and experience during the day, but then to be hot with passion for a stupid lying girl who just happened to be pretty and flat-out in love with him once upon a time back home.

  I am an evil man, thought Alvin at times like that. Evil and unconstant. No better than them faithless fellows who can’t leave women alone no matter what. I am the kind of man that I have long despised.

  Only even that wasn’t true, and Alvin knew it. Because he hadn’t done a blamed thing wrong. Hadn’t done anything. Had only imagined it. Imagined... and enjoyed. Was that enough to make him evil? “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” said the scripture. Alvin remembered it because his mother quoted it all the time till his father barked back at her, “That’s just your way of saying that all men are devils!” and Alvin wondered if it was true—if all men had evil in their hearts, and those men as were good, maybe they were simply the ones who controlled theirselves so well they could act contrary to their heart’s desire. But if that were so, then no man was good, not one.

  And didn’t the Holy Book say that, too? No man good, not one. Not me, neither. Maybe me least of all.

  And that was his life in that jail in Hatrack River. Darker and darker thoughts about his own worthiness, falling in love with two women at once, caught up in the gossip of a town where the Unmaker was surely at work, and where knacks abounded.

  Calvin was pretty good with stone—he always did all right with that. Well, not always. He wasn’t born finding the natural weaknesses of stone. But after Alvin went off to be a prentice to a smith, Calvin started trying to do what he saw or heard of his big brother doing. In those days he was still hoping to show Alvin how good he was at Makering when he got back, to hear his brother say to him, “Calvin, why, you’re most as good as I am!” Which Alvin never said, nor even close to it. But it was true, at least about stone. Stone was easy, really, not like flesh and bone. Calvin could find his way into the stone, part it, shift it.

  Which is what he started doing right away with the Bastille, of course. He didn’t know why the secret police had put him inside those walls, clammy and cold. It wasn’t a dungeon, not like in those stories, where the prisoner never sees any light except when A guard comes down with a torch, so he can go blind without knowing it. There was light enough, and a chair to sit on and a bed to lie on and a chamber pot that got emptied every day, once he figured out he was supposed to leave it by the door.

  It was still a prison, though.

  It took Calvin about five minutes to figure out that he could pretty much dissolve the whole locking mechanism, but he remembered just in time that getting out of his cell wasn’t exactly the same thing as getting out of the Bastille. He couldn’t make himself invisible, and Maker or not, a musket ball would knock him down or maim him or kill him like any other man.

  He’d have to find another way out. And that meant going right through the wall, right through stone. Trouble was, he didn’t have any idea whether he was forty feet up or twenty feet under the street level. Or if the wall at the back of his cell opened on the outside or into an inner courtyard. Who might see if a gap appeared in the wall? He couldn’t just remove a stone—he had to remove it in once piece, so he could put it back after if he had to.

  He waited till night, then began working on a stone block right near floor level. It was heavy, and he didn’t know of any way to make it lighter. Nor was there some subtle way to make stone move across stone. Finally he just softened the stone, plunged his fingers into it, then let it harden around his fingers, so he had a grip right in the middle of the stone block. Now, as he pulled on it, he made a thin layer of the stone turn liquid on the bottom and sides, so it was easier to pull it out, once he got it moving. It also made it silent as rock slid across rock. Except for the loud thud as the back of the stone dropped out of the hole and fell the few inches to the floor.

  A breeze came through the cell, making it all the cooler. He slid the stone out of the way and then lay down and thrust his head and shoulders into the gap.

  He was maybe twelve feet above the ground and directly over the head of a group of a dozen soldiers marching from somewhere to somewhere. Fortunately, they didn’t look up. But that didn’t keep Calvin’s heart from beating halfway out of his chest. Once they were past, though, he figured he could go feet-first through the hole and drop safely down to the ground and just walk away into the streets of Paris. Let them wonder how he got a stone out of the wall. That’d teach them to lock up folks who heal beggars.

  He was all set to go, his feet already going into the hole, when it suddenly dawned on him that escaping was about as dumb a thing as he could do. Wasn’t he here to see the Emperor? If he became a fugitive, that wasn’t going to be too helpful. Bonaparte had powers that even Alvin didn’t know about. Calvin had to learn them, if he could. The smart thing to do was sit tight here and see if somehow, someone in the chain of command might realize that a fellow who could heal beggars might be able to help with Bonaparte’s famous gout.

  So he got his back into it and hefted the stone back up into the gap and shoved it into place. He left the finger holes in it—it was dark at the back of the cell and besides, maybe if they noticed those holes in the stone they’d have more respect for his powers.

  Or maybe not. How could he know? Everything was out of his control now. He hated that. But if you want to get something, you got to put y
ourself in the way of getting it.

  Now that he wasn’t trying to escape—but knew that he could if he wanted to—Calvin spent the days and nights lying on his cot or pacing his cell. Calvin wasn’t good at being alone. He’d learned that on his trek through the woods after leaving Vigor. Alvin might be happy running along like a Red, but Calvin soon abandoned the forest tracks and got him on a road and hitched a ride on a farmer’s wagon and then another and another, making friends and talking for company the whole way.

  Now here he was stuck again, and even if the guards had been willing to talk to him, he didn’t know the language. It hadn’t bothered him that much when he was free to walk the streets of Paris and feel himself surrounded by the bustle of busy city life. Here, though, his inability to so much as ask a guard what day it was it made him feel crippled.

  Finally he began to amuse himself with mischief. It was no trouble at all to get his doodle bug inside the lock mechanism and ruin the guard’s key by softening it when he inserted it. When the guard took the key back out, it had no teeth and the door was still locked. Angry, the guard stalked off to get another key. This time Calvin let him open the door without a problem—but what was it that made the first key lose its teeth?

  And it wasn’t just his own lock. He began to search far and wide with his doodlebug until he located the other occupied cells. He played games with their locks, too, including fusing a couple of them shut so no key could open them, and ruining a couple of others so they couldn’t be locked at all. The shouting, the stomping, the running, it kept Calvin greatly entertained, especially as he imagined what the guards must be thinking. Ghosts? Spies? Who could be doing these strange things with the locks in the Bastille?

  He also learned a few things. Back in Vigor, whenever he sat down for long he’d either get impatient and get up and move again, or he’d start thinking about Alvin and get all angry. Either way, he didn’t spend all that much time testing the limits of his powers, not since Alvin came home. Now, though, he found that he could send his doodle bug right far, and into places that he’d never seen with his own eyes. He began to get used to moving his bug through the stone, feeling the different textures of it, sensing the wooden frames to the heavy doors, the metal hinges and locks. Damn, but he was good at this!