ALVIN JOURNEYMAN

by Orson Scott Card

  “That don’t prove he didn’t find gold along the way!” cried Makepeace.

  “Summations to the jury!” the judge called out.

  “In every particular that we could test,” said Verily Cooper, “Alvin Smith has proven himself to be truthful and reliable. And all the county has to assail him is the unproven and unprovable speculations of a man whose primary motive seems to be to get his hands upon gold. There are no witnesses but Alvin himself of how the gold came to be shaped like a plow, or the plow came to be made of gold. But we have eight witnesses, not to mention His Honor, myself, and my respected colleague, not to mention Alvin himself, all swearing to you that this plow is not just gold, but also alive. What possible property interest can Makepeace Smith have in an object which clearly belongs to itself and only keeps company with Alvin Smith for its own protection? You have more than a reasonable doubt—you have a certainty that my client is an honest man who has committed no crime, and that the plow should stay with him.”

  It was Marty Laws’ turn then. He looked like he’d had sour milk for breakfast. “You’ve heard the witnesses, you’ve seen the evidence, you’re all wise men and you can figure this out just fine without my help,” said Laws. “May God bless your deliberations.”

  “Is that your summing up?” demanded Makepeace. “Is that how you administer justice in this county? I’ll support your opponent in the next local election, Marty Laws! I swear you haven’t heard the end of this!”

  “Sheriff, kindly arrest Mr. Makepeace Smith again, three days this time, contempt of court and I’ll consider a charge of attempted interference with the course of justice by offering a threat to a sitting judge in order to influence the outcome of a case.”

  “You’re all ganging up against me! All of you are in this together! What did he do, Your Honor, bribe you? Offer to share some of that gold with you?”

  “Quickly, Sheriff Doggly,” said the judge, “before I get angry with the man.”

  When Makepeace’s shouting had died down enough to proceed, the judge asked the jury, “Do we need to traipse on back to the courtroom for hours of deliberation? Or should we just stand back and let you work things out right here?”

  The foreman whispered to his fellow jurors; they whispered back. “We have a unanimous verdict, Your Honor.”

  “What say you, etcetera etcetera?”

  “Not guilty of all charges,” said the foreman.

  “We’re done. I commend both attorneys for fine work in a difficult case. And to the jury, my commendation for cutting through the horse pucky and seeing the truth. Good citizens all. This court stands adjourned until the next time somebody brings a blame fool charge against an innocent man, at least that’s what I’m betting on.” The judge looked around at the people, who were still standing there. “Alvin, you’re free to go,” he said. “Let’s all go home.”

  Of course they didn’t all go; nor, strictly speaking, was Alvin free. Right now, surrounded by a crowd and with a dozen deputies on guard, he was safe enough. But as he gripped the sack with the plow inside, he could almost feel the covetings of other men directed toward that plow, that warm and trembling gold.

  He wasn’t thinking of that, however. He was looking over at Margaret Larner, whose arm was around young Ramona’s waist. Someone was speaking to Alvin-it was Verily Cooper, he realized, congratulating him or something, but Verily would understand. Alvin put a hand on Verily’s shoulder, to let him know that he was a good friend even though Alvin was about to walk away from him. And Alvin headed on over to Miss Larner and Ramona.

  At the last moment he got shy, and though he had his eyes on Margaret all the way through the crowd, it was Ramona he spoke to when he got there. “Miss Ramona, it was brave of you to come forward, and honest too.” He shook her hand.

  Ramona beamed, but she was also alittle upset and nervous. “That whole thing with Amy was my fault I think. She was telling me those tales about you, and I was doubting her, which only made her insist more and more. And she stuck to it so much that for a while I believed maybe it was true and that’s when I told my folks and that’s what started all the rumors going, but then when she went with Thatch under the freak show tent and she comes out pregnant but babbling about how it was you got her that way, well, I had my chance then to set things straight, didn’t I? And then I didn’t get to testify!”

  “But you told my friends,” said Alvin, “so the people who matter most to me know the truth, and in the meantime you didn’t have to hurt your friend Amy.” In the back of his mind, though, Alvin couldn’t shake the bitter certainty that there would always be some who believed her charges, just as he was sure that she would never recant. She would go on telling those lies about him, and some folks at least would go on believing them, and so he would be known for a cad or worse no matter how clean he lived his life. But that was spilled milk.

  Ramona was shaking her head. “I don’t reckon she’ll be my friend no more.”

  “But you’re her friend whether she likes it or not. So much of a friend that you’d even hurt her rather than let her hurt someone else. That’s something, in my book.”

  At that moment, Mike Fink and Armor-of-God came up to him. “Sing us that song you thought up in jail, Alvin!”

  At once several others clamored for the song—it was that kind of festive occasion.

  “If Alvin won’t sing it, Arthur Stuart knows it!” somebody said, and then there was Arthur tugging at his arm and Alvin joined in singing with him. Most of the jury was still there to hear the last verse:

  I trusted justice not to fail. The jury did me proud. Tomorrow I will hit the trail, And sing my hiking song so loud, It’s like to start a gale!

  Everybody laughed and clapped. Even Miss Larner smiled, and as Alvin looked at her he knew that this was the moment, now or never. “I got another verse that I never sung to anybody before, but I want to sing it now,” he said. They all hushed up again to hear:

  Now swiftly from this place I’ll fly, And underneath my boots, A thousand lands will pass me by, Until we choose to put down roots, My lady love and I.

  He looked at Margaret with all the meaning he could put in his face, and everybody hooted and clapped. “I love you, Margaret Larner,” he said. “I asked you before, but I’ll say it again now. We’re about to journey together for a ways, and I can’t think of a good reason why it can’t be our honeymoon journey. Let me be your husband, Margaret. Everything good that’s in me belongs to you, if you’ll have me.”

  She looked flustered. “You’re embarrassing me, Alvin,” she murmured.

  Alvin leaned close and spoke into her ear. “I know we got separate work to do, once we leave the weavers house. I know we got long journeys apart.”

  She held his face between her hands. “You don’t know what you might meet on that road. What woman you might meet and love better than me.”

  Alvin felt a stab of dread. Was this something she had seen with her torchy knack? Or merely the worry any woman might feel? Well, it was his future, wasn’t it? And even if she saw the possibility of him loving somebody else, that didn’t mean he had to let it come true.

  He wrapped his long arms around her waist and drew her close, and spoke softly. “You see things in the future that I can’t see. Let me ask you like an ordinary man, and you answer me like a woman that knows only the past and the present. Let my promise to you now keep watch over the future.”

  She was about to raise another objection, when he kissed her lightly on the lips. “If you’re my wife, then whatever there is in the future, I can bear it, and I’ll do my best to help you bear it too. The judge is right here. Let me begin my life of new freedom with you.”

  For a moment, her eyes looked heavy and sad, as if she saw some awful pain and suffering in his future. Or was it in her own?

  Then she shook it off as if it was just the shadow of a cloud passing over her and now the sun was back. Or as if she had decided to live a certain life, no matter what the cost of
it, and now would no longer dread what couldn’t be helped. She smiled, and tears ran down her cheeks. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Alvin, but I’m proud and glad to have your love, and I’ll be your wife.”

  Alvin turned to face the others, and in a loud voice he cried, “She said yes! Judge! Somebody stop the judge from leaving! He’s got him one more job to do!” While Peggy went off to find her father and drag him back so he could give her away properly, Verily Cooper fetched the judge.

  On the way over to where Alvin waited, the judge put a kindly arm across Verily’s back. “My lad, you have a keen mind, a lawyer’s mind, and I approve of that. But there’s something about you that sets a fellow’s teeth on edge.”

  “If I knew what it was, sir, you may be sure that I’d stop.”

  “Took me a while to figure it out. And I don’t know what you can do about it. What makes folks mad at you right from the start is you sound so damnably English and educated and fine.”

  Verily grinned, then answered in the vernacular accent he had grown up with, the one he had spent so many years trying to lose. “You mean, sir, that if I talks like a common feller, I’ll be more likable?”

  The judge whooped with laughter. “That’s what I mean, lad, though I don’t know as how that accent is much better!”

  And with that they reached the spot where the wedding party was assembled. Horace stood beside his daughter, and Arthur Stuart was there as Alvin’s best man.

  The judge turned to Sheriff Doggly. “Do the banns, my good sir.”

  Po Doggly at once cried out, “Is there a body here so foolish as to claim there’s any impediment to the marriage of this pair of good and godly citizens?” He turned to the judge. “Not a soul as I can see, Judge.”

  So Alvin and Peggy were married, Horace Guester on one side, Arthur Stuart on the other, all standing there in the open on the grounds of the smithy where Alvin had served his prenticehood. Just up the hill was the springhouse where Peggy had lived in disguise as a schoolteacher; the very springhouse where twenty-two years before, as a five-year-old girl, she had seen the heartfires of a family struggling across the Hatrack River in flood, and in the womb of the mother of that family there was a baby with a heartfire so bright it dazzled her, the like of which she’d never seen before or since. She ran then, ran down this hill, ran to this smithy, got Makepeace Smith and the other men gathered there to race to the river and save the family. All of it began here, within sight of this place. And now she was married to him. Married to the boy whose heartfire shone like the brightest star in her memory, and in all her life since then.

  There was dancing that night at Horace’s roadhouse, you can bet, and Alvin had to sing his song five more times, and the last verse thrice each time through. And that night he carried his Margaret—his now, and he was hers—in those strong blacksmith’s arms up the stairs to the room where Margaret herself had been conceived twenty-eight years before. He was awkward and they both were shy and it didn’t help that half the town was charivareeing outside the roadhouse halfway till dawn, but they were man and wife, made one flesh as they had so long been one heart even though she had tried to deny it and he had tried to live without her. Never mind that she had seen his grave in her mind, and herself and their children standing by it, weeping. That scene was possible in every wedding night; and at least there would be children; at least there would be a loving widow to grieve him; at least there would be memory of this night, instead of regretful loneliness. And in the morning, when they awoke, they were not quite so shy, not quite so awkward, and he said such things to her as made her feel more beautiful than anyone who had ever lived before, and more beloved, and I don’t know who would dare to say that in that moment it wasn’t the pure truth.

  Chapter 18 -- Journeys

  Two days later they were ready to light out. They made no secret about the carriage Armor-of-God hired in Wheelwright, ready to take them off the ferry as soon as they crossed the Hio. That would be enough to decoy the stupid ones. As for the clever ones, well, Mike Fink had his own plan, and even Margaret allowed as how it might well work.

  Friends came to the roadhouse all that evening to bid goodbye. Alvin and Peggy and Arthur were well known to them all; Armor-of-God had a few friends here, from business traveling; and Verily had made some new friends, having been the spokesman for the winning side in a highly emotional trial. If Mike Fink had local friends, they weren’t the sort to show up in Horace Guester’s roadhouse; as Mike confided to Verily Cooper, his friends were most of them the very men Alvin’s enemies had hired to kill him and take the plow once he got out on the road tomorrow.

  When the last soul had left, Horace embraced his daughter and his new son-in-law and the adopted son he had helped to raise, shook hands with Verily, Armor, and Mike, and then went about as he always did, dousing the candles, putting the night log on the fire, checking to make sure all was secure. As he did, Measure helped the travelers, make their way, lightly burdened, quietly down the stairs and out the back, finding the path with only the faintest sliver of moon. Even at that, they walked at first toward the privy, so that anyone casually glancing wouldn’t think a thing amiss, unless they noticed the satchel or bag each one carried. Meantime, Measure kept watch, in case someone else was thinking to snatch Alvin that night while he was relieving himself. He kept watch even though Peggy Larner—or was it Goody Smith now? --assured him that not a soul was watching the back of the house.

  “All my teaching is in your hands now, Measure,” Alvin whispered as he was about to step off the back porch into the night. “I leave you behind this time again, but you know that we set out on the real journey together as true companions, and always will be to the end.”

  Measure heard him, and wondered if Peggy maybe whispered to him something she had seen in his heartfire, that Measure worried lest Alvin forget how much Measure loved him and wanted to be on this journey by his side. But no, Alvin didn’t need Peggy to tell him he had a brother who was more loyal than life and more sure than death. Alvin kissed his brother’s cheek and was gone, the last to go.

  They met up again in the woods behind the privy. Alvin went about among them, calming them with soft words, touching them, and each time he touched them they could hear it just a little clearer, a kind of soft humming, or was it the soughing of the wind, or the call of a far-off bird too faint to hear, or perhaps a distant coyote mumbling in its sleep, or the soft scurry of squirrel feet on a tree on the next rise? It was a kind of music, and finally it didn’t matter what it was that produced the sound, they fell into the rhythm of it, all holding each other’s hands, and at the head of the line, Alvin. They moved swift and sure, keeping step to the music, sliding easily among the trees, making few sounds, saying nothing, marveling at how they could have walked past these woods before and never guessed that such a clear and well-marked path was here, except when they looked back, there was no path, only the underbrush closed off again, for the path was made by Alvin’s progress in the midst of the greensong, and behind his party the forest relaxed back into its ordinary shape.

  They came to the river, where Po Doggly waited, watching over two boats. “Mind you,” he whispered, “I’m not sheriff tonight. I’m only doing what Horace and I done so many times in the past, long before I had me a badge—helping folks as ought to be free get safe across the river.” Po and Alvin rowed one of them and Mike and Verily the other, for though he was unaccustomed to such labor, no wooden oar would ever leave a blister on Verily’s hands. Silently they moved out across the Hio. Only when they got to the middle did anyone speak. Peggy, controlling the tiller, whispered to Alvin, “Can we talk a little now?”

  “Soft and low,” said Alvin. “And no laughing.”

  How had he known she was about to laugh? “We passed a dozen of them as we walked through the woods, all of them asleep, waiting for first light. But there’s none on the opposite shore, except the heartfire we’re looking for.”

  Alvin nodded, and gave
a thumbs up to the men in the other boat.

  They skirted the shore on the Appalachee side for about a quarter mile before coming to the landing site they looked for. Once it had been a putting-in place for flatboats, before the Red fog on the Mizzipy and the new railroad lines slowed and then stopped most of the flatboat traffic. Now an elderly couple lived there mostly from fishing and an orchard that still produced, poorly, but enough for their needs.

  Dr. Whitley Physicker was waiting in the front yard of that house with his carriage and four saddled horses; he had insisted on buying or lending them himself, and refused any thought of reimbursement. He also paid the old folks who lived there for the annoyance of having visitors arrive so late at night.

  He had a man with him—Arthur Stuart recognized him at once and called him by name. John Binder smiled shyly and shook hands all around, as did Whitley Physicker. “I’m not much for rowing, at my age,” Dr. Physicker explained. “So John, being as trustworthy a man as ever there was, agreed to come along, asking no questions. I suppose all the questions he didn’t ask are answered now.”

  Binder smiled and chuckled. “Reckon so, all but one. I heard about how you was teaching folks about Makery away out there in Vigor Church, and I hoped you might teach some of it here. Now you’re going.”

  Alvin reassured him. “My brother is holed up in the roadhouse. Nobody’s to know he’s there, but if you go to Horace Guester and tell him I sent you, he’ll let you go up and talk to Measure. There’s a hard tale he’ll have to tell you—“

  “I know about the curse.”

  “Well good,” said Alvin. “Cause once that’s done, he can teach you just what I was teaching in Vigor Church.”

  Po Doggly and John Binder pushed the boats off the shore before the others were even mounted on their horses or properly seated in the carriage; Whitley Physicker waved from Binder’s boat. Alvin shook hands with the old couple, who had got up from their beds to see them off. Then he climbed up into the front seat of the carriage with Margaret; Verily and Arthur sat behind. Armor and Mike rode two of the horses; Verily’s horse and the horse that Alvin and Arthur would ride together were tied to the back of the carriage.