Seventh Son: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume I (5 page)

It wasn’t just the boy’s family, either, that was so careful of him. Everyone acted the same way—the Germans, the Scandinavians, the English, newcomers and old-timers alike. As if the raising of this boy were a community project, like the raising of a church or the bridging of a river.

“Easy, easy, easy!” shouted Wastenot, who was perched near the east ridgepole to guide the heavy beam into place. It had to be just so, for the rafters to lean evenly against it and make a sturdy roof.

“Too far your way!” shouted Measure. He was standing on scaffolding above the crossbeam on which rested the short pole that would support the two ridgebeams where they butted ends in the middle. This was the most crucial point of the whole roof, and the trickiest to get right; they had to lay the ends of two heavy beams onto a pole top that was barely two palms wide. That was why Measure stood there, for he had grown into his name, keen-eyed and careful.

“Right!” shouted Measure. “More!”

“My way again!” shouted Wastenot.

“Steady!” shouted Measure.

“Set!” shouted Wastenot.

Then “Set!” from Measure, too, and the men on the ground relaxed the tension on the ropes. As the lines went slack, they let out a cheer, for the ridgebeam now went half the length of the church. It was no cathedral, but it was still a mighty thing to achieve in this benighted place, the largest structure anyone had dared to think of for a hundred miles around. The mere fact of building it was a declaration that the settlers were here to stay, and not French, not Spanish, not Cavaliers, not Yankees, not even the savage Reds with their fire arrows, no man would get these folks to leave this place.

So of course Reverend Thrower went inside, and so did all the others, to see the sky blocked for the first time by a ridgebeam no less than forty feet in length—and that only half of what it would finally be. My church, thought Thrower, and already finer than most I saw in Philadelphia itself.

Up on the flimsy scaffolding, Measure was driving a wooden pin through the notch in the end of the ridgebeam and down into the hole in the top of the ridgepole. Wastenot was doing the same at his end, of course. The pins would hold the beam in place until the rafters could be laid. When that was done, the ridgebeam would be so strong that they could almost remove the crossbeam, if it weren’t needed for the chandelier that would light the church at night. At night, so that the stained glass would shine out against the darkness. That’s how grandiose a place Reverend Thrower had in mind. Let their simple minds stand in awe when they see this place, and so reflect upon the majesty of God.

Those were his thoughts when, suddenly, Measure let out a shout of fear, and all saw in horror that the center ridgepole had split and shivered at the blow of Measure’s mallet against the wooden pin, bouncing the great heavy ridgebeam some six feet into the air. It pulled the beam out of Wastenot’s hands at the other end, and broke the scaffolding like tinderwood. The ridgebeam seemed to hover in the air a moment, level as you please, then rushed downward as if the Lord’s own foot were stomping it.

And Reverend Thrower knew without looking that there would be someone directly under that beam, right under the midpoint of it when it landed. He knew because he was
aware
of the boy, of how he was running just exactly the wrong direction, of how his own shout of “Alvin!” brought the boy to a stop in just exactly the wrong place.

And when he looked, it was exactly as he knew it would be—little Al standing there, looking up at the shaven tree that would grind him into the floor of the church. Nothing else would be damaged—because the beam was level, its impact would be spread across the whole floor. The boy was too small even to slow the ridgebeam’s fall. He would be broken, crushed, his blood spattering the white wood of the church floor. I’ll never get that stain out, thought Thrower—insanely, but one could not control one’s own thoughts in the moment of death.

Thrower saw the impact as if it were a blinding flash of light. He heard the crash of wood on wood. He heard the screams. Then his eyes cleared and he saw the ridgebeam lying there, the one end exactly where it should be, the other too, but in the middle, the beam split in two parts, and between the two parts little Alvin standing, his face white with terror.

Untouched. The boy was untouched.

Thrower didn’t understand German or Swedish, but he knew what the muttering near him meant, well enough. Let them blaspheme—I must understand what has happened here, thought Thrower. He strode to the boy, placed his hands on the child’s head, searching for injury. Not a hair out of place, but the boy’s head felt warm, very warm, as if he had been standing near a fire. Then Thrower knelt and looked at the wood of the ridgebeam. It was cut as smooth as if the wood had grown that way, just exactly wide enough to miss the boy entirely.

Al’s mother was there only a moment later, scooping up her boy, sobbing and babbling with relief. Little Alvin also cried. But Thrower had other things on his mind. He
was
a man of science, after all, and what he had seen was not possible. He made the men step off the length of the ridgebeam, measuring it again. It lay exactly its original length along the floor—the east end just as far from the west end as it should be. The boy-sized chunk in the middle had simply disappeared. Vanished in a momentary flash of fire that left Alvin’s head and the butt ends of the wood as hot as coals, yet not marked or seared in any way.

Then Measure began yelling from the crossbeam, where he dangled by his arms, having caught himself after the collapse of the scaffolding. Wantnot and Calm climbed up and got him down safely. Reverend Thrower had no thought for that. All he could think about was a six-year-old boy who could stand under a falling ridgebeam, and the beam would break and make room for him. Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, on the right hand and the left.

“Seventh son,” murmured Wastenot. The boy sat astride the fallen ridgebeam, just west of the break.

“What?” asked Reverend Thrower.

“Nothing,” said the young man.

“You said ‘Seventh son,’” said Thrower. “But it’s little Calvin who’s the seventh.”

Wastenot shook his head. “We had another brother. He died a couple minutes after Al was born.” Wastenot shook his head again. “Seventh son of a seventh son.”

“But that makes him devil’s spawn,” said Thrower, aghast.

Wastenot looked at him with contempt. “Maybe in England you think so, but around here we look on such to be a healer, maybe, or a doodlebug, and a right good one of whatever he is.” Then Wastenot thought of something and grinned. “‘Devil’s spawn,’” he repeated, maliciously savoring the words. “Sounds like hysteria to me.”

Furious, Thrower stalked out of the church.

He found Mistress Faith sitting on a stool, holding Alvin Junior on her lap and rocking him as he continued to whimper. She was scolding him gently. “Told you not to run without looking, always underfoot, can’t never hold still, makes a body go plumb lunatic looking after you—” Then she saw Thrower standing before her, and fell silent.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll not bring him back here.”

“For his safety, I’m glad,” said Thrower. “If I thought my churchhouse had to be built at the cost of a child’s life, I’d sooner preach in the open air all the days of my life.”

She looked close at him and knew that he meant it with his whole heart. “It’s no fault of youra,” she said. “He’s always been a clumsy boy. Seems to live through scrapes that’d kill an ordinary child.”

“I’d like—I’d like to understand what happened in there.”

“Ridgepole shivered, of course,” she said. “It happens sometimes.”

“I mean—how it happened to miss him. The beam split—before it touched his head. I want to feel his head, if I may—”

“Not a mark on him,” she said.

“I know. I want to feel it to see if—”

She rolled her eyes upward and muttered, “Dowsing for brains,” but she also moved her hands away so he could feel the child’s head. Slowly now, and carefully, trying to understand the map of the boy’s skull, to read the ridges and bumps, the troughs and depressions. He had no need to consult a book. The books were nonsense, anyway. He had found that out quite quickly—they all spouted idiotic generalities, such as, “The Red will always have a bump just over the ear, indicating savagery and cannibalism,” when of course Reds had just as much variety in their heads as Whites. No, Thrower had no faith in those books—but he
had
learned a few things about people with particular skills, and head bumps they had in common. He had developed a knack of understanding, a map of the shapes of the human skull; he knew as his hands passed over Al’s head what it was he found there.

Nothing remarkable, that’s what he found. No one trait that stood out above all others. Average. As average as can be. So utterly average that it could be a virtual textbook example of normality, if only there were any textbook worth reading.

He lifted his fingers away, and the boy—who had stopped crying under his hands—twisted on his mother’s lap to look at him. “Reverend Thrower,” he said, “your hands are so cold I like to froze.” Then he squirmed off his mother’s lap and ran off, shouting for one of the German boys, the one he had been wrestling so savagely before.

Faith laughed ruefully. “You see how quickly they forget?”

“And you, too,” he said.

She shook her head. “Not me,” she said. “I don’t forget a thing.”

“You’re already smiling.”

“I
go on
, Reverend Thrower. I just go on. That’s not the same as forgetting.”

He nodded.

“So—tell me what you found,” she said.

“Found?”

“Feeling his bumps. Brain-dowsing. Does he got any?”

“Normal. Absolutely normal. Not a single thing unusual about his head.”

She grunted. “
Nothing
unusual?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.” She picked up the stool and carried it off, calling to Al and Cally as she went.

After a moment, Reverend Thrower realized she was right. Nobody was so perfectly average. Everybody had
some
trait that was stronger than the others. It wasn’t normal for Al to be so well balanced. To have every possible skill that could be marked by the skull, and to have it in exactly even proportions. Far from being average, the child was extraordinary, though Thrower had no notion what it would mean in the child’s life. Jack of all trades and master of none? Or master of all?

Superstition or not, Thrower found himself wondering. A seventh son of a seventh son, a startling shape to the head, and the miracle—he could think of no other word—of the ridgebeam. An ordinary child would have died this day. Natural law demanded it. But someone or something was protecting this child, and natural law had been overruled.

Once the talk had subsided, the men resumed work on the roof. The original beam was useless, of course, and they carried the two sections of it outside. After what had happened, they had no intention of using the beams for anything at all. Instead they set to work and completed another beam by midafternoon, rebuilt the scaffolding, and by nightfall the whole roof ridge was set in place. No one spoke of the incident with the ridgebeam, at least not in Thrower’s presence. And when he went to look for the shivered ridgepole, he couldn’t find it anywhere.

A
LVIN
J
UNIOR WASN’T SCARED
when he saw the beam falling, and he wasn’t scared when it crashed to the floor on either side. But when all the grown-ups started carrying on like the Day of Rapture, a-hugging him and talking in whispers,
then
he got scared. Grown-ups had a way of doing things for no reason at all.

Like the way Papa was setting on the floor by the fire, just studying the split pieces of the shivered ridgepole, the piece of wood that sprung under the weight of the ridgebeam and sent it all crashing down. When Mama was being herself, not Papa or nobody could bring big old pieces of split and dirty wood into her house. But today Mama was as crazy as Papa, and when he showed up toting them big old splinters of wood, she just bent over, rolled up the rug, and got herself out of Papa’s way.

Well, anybody who didn’t know to get out of Papa’s way when he had that look on his face was too dumb to live. David and Calm was lucky, they could go off to their own houses on their own cleared land, where their own wives had their own suppers cooking and they could decide whether to be crazy or not. The rest of them weren’t so lucky. With Papa and Mama being crazy, the rest of them had to be crazy, too. Not one of the girls fought with any of the others, and they all helped fix supper and clean up after without a word of complaint. Wastenot and Wantnot went out and chopped wood and did the evening milking without so much as punching each other in the arm, let alone getting in a wrestling match, which was right disappointing to Alvin Junior, seeing as how he always got to wrestle the loser, which was the best wrestling he ever got to do, them being eighteen years old and a real challenge, not like the boys he usually hunkered down with. And Measure, he just sat there by the fire, whittling out a big old spoon for Mama’s cooking pot, never so much as looking up—but he was waiting, just like the others, for Papa to come back to his right self and yell at somebody.

The only normal person in the house was Calvin, the three-year-old. The trouble was that normal for him meant tagging along after Alvin Junior like a kitten on a mouse’s trail. He never came close enough to
play
with Alvin Junior, or to touch him or talk to him or anything useful. He was just there, always there at the edge of things, so Alvin would look up just as Calvin looked away, or catch a glimpse of his shirt as he ducked behind a door, or sometimes in the dark of night just hear a faint breathing that was closer than it ought to be, which told him Calvin wasn’t lying on his cot, he was standing right there by Alvin’s bed,
watching
. Nobody ever seemed to notice it. It had been more than a year since Alvin gave up trying to get him to stop. If Alvin Junior ever said, “Ma, Cally’s pestering me,” Mama would just say, “Al Junior, he didn’t say a thing, he didn’t touch you, and if you don’t like him just standing quiet as a body could ask, well, that’s just too bad for you, because it suits me fine. I wish certain other of my children could learn to be as still.” Alvin figured that it wasn’t that Calvin was
normal
today, it’s that the rest of the family had just come up to his regular level of craziness.

Papa just stared and stared at the split wood. Now and then he’d fit it together the way it was. Once he spoke, real quiet. “Measure, you sure you got all them pieces?”

Measure said, “Ever single bit, Pa, I couldn’t’ve got more with a broom. I couldn’t’ve got more if I’d bent down and lapped it up like a dog.”

Ma was listening, of course. Papa once said that when Ma was paying attention, she could hear a squirrel fart in the woods a half mile away in the middle of a storm with the girls rattling dishes and the boys all chopping wood. Alvin Junior wondered sometimes if that meant Ma knew more witchery than she let on, since one time he sat in the woods not three yards away from a squirrel for more than an hour, and he never heard it so much as belch.

Anyway, she was right there in the house tonight, so of course she heard what Papa asked, and she heard what Measure answered, and her being as crazy as Papa, she lashed out like as if Measure had just taken the name of the Lord. “You mind your tongue, young man, because the Lord said unto Moses on the mount, honor your father and mother that your days may be long on the land which the Lord your God has given you, and when you speak fresh to your father then you are taking days and weeks and even
years
off your own life, and your soul is not in such a condition that you should welcome an early visit to the judgment bar to meet your Savior and hear him say your eternal fate!”

Measure wasn’t half so worried about his eternal fate as he was worried about Mama being riled at him. He didn’t try to argue that he wasn’t talking smart or being sassy—only a fool would do that when Mama was already hot. He just started in looking humble and begging her pardon, not to mention the forgiveness of Papa and the sweet mercy of the Lord. By the time she was done with ragging him, poor Measure had already apologized a half a dozen times, so that she finally just grumped and went back to her sewing.

Then Measure looked up at Alvin Junior and winked.

“I saw that,” said Mama, “and if you don’t go to hell, Measure, I’ll get up a petition to Saint Peter to send you there.”

“I’d sign that petition myself,” said Measure, looking meek as a puppy dog that just piddled on a big man’s boot.

“That’s right you would,” said Mama, “and you’d sign it in blood, too, because by the time I’m through with you there’ll be enough open wounds to keep ten clerks in bright red ink for a year.”

Alvin Junior couldn’t help himself. Her dire threat just struck him funny. And even though he knew he was taking his life in his hands, he opened up his mouth to laugh. He knew that if he laughed he’d have Mama’s thimble hard on his head, or maybe her hand clapped hard on his ear, or even her hard little foot smashed right down on his bare foot, which she did once to David the time he told her she should have learnt the word
no
sometime before she had thirteen mouths to cook for.

This was a matter of life and death. This was more frightening than the ridgebeam, which after all never hit him, which was more than he could say for Mama. So he caught that laugh before it got loose, and he turned it into the first thing he could think of to say.

“Mama,” he said, “Measure can’t sign no petition in blood, cause he’d already be dead, and dead people don’t bleed.”

Mama looked him in the eye and spoke slow and careful. “They do when I tell them to.”

Well, that did it. Alvin Junior just laughed out loud. And that set half the girls to laughing. Which made Measure laugh. And finally Mama laughed, too. They all just laughed and laughed till they were mostly crying and Mama started sending people upstairs to bed, including Alvin Junior.

All the excitement had Alvin Junior feeling pretty spunky, and he hadn’t figured out yet that sometimes he ought to keep all that jumpiness locked up tight. It happened that Matilda, who was sixteen and fancied herself a lady, was walking up the stairs right in front of him. Everybody hated walking anywhere behind Matilda, she took such delicate, ladylike steps. Measure always said he’d rather walk in line behind the moon, cause it moved faster. Now Matilda’s backside was right in Al Junior’s face, swaying back and forth, and he thought of what Measure said about the moon, and reckoned how Matilda’s backside was just about as round as the moon, and then he got to wondering what it would be like to
touch
the moon, and whether it would be hard like a beetle’s back or squishy as a slug. And when a boy six years old who’s already feeling spunky gets a thought like that in his head, it’s not even half a second till his finger is two inches deep in delicate flesh.

Matilda was a real good screamer.

Al might have got slapped right then, except Wastenot and Wantnot were right behind him, saw the whole thing, and laughed so hard at Matilda that she started crying and fled on up the stairs two steps at a time, not ladylike at all. Wastenot and Wantnot carried Alvin up the stairs between them, so high up he got a little dizzy, singing that old song about St. George killing the dragon, only they sang it about St. Alvin, and where the song usually said something about poking the old dragon a thousand times and his sword didn’t melt in the fire, they changed
sword
to
finger
and made even Measure laugh.

“That’s a filthy filthy song!” shouted ten-year-old Mary, who stood guard outside the big girls’ door.

“Better stop singing that song,” said Measure, “before Mama hears you.”

Alvin Junior could never understand why Mama didn’t like that song, but it was true that the boys never sang it where she could hear. The twins stopped singing and clambered up the ladder to the loft. At that moment the door to the big girls’ room was flung open and Matilda, her eyes all red from crying, stuck her head out and shouted, “You’ll be sorry!”

“Ooh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Wantnot said in a squeaky voice.

Only then did Alvin remember that when the girls set out to get even, he would be the main victim. Calvin was still considered the baby, so he was safe enough, and the twins were older and bigger and there was always two of them. So when the girls got riled, Alvin was first in line for their deadly wrath. Matilda was sixteen, Beatrice was fifteen, Elizabeth was fourteen, Anne was twelve, Mary was ten, and they all preferred picking on Alvin to practically any other recreation that the Bible would permit. One time when Alvin was tormented past endurance and only Measure’s strong arms held him back from hot-blooded murder with a hayfork, Measure allowed as how the punishments of hell would most likely consist of living in the same house with five women who were all about twice a man’s size. Ever since then, Alvin wondered what sin he committed before he was born to make him deserve to grow up half-damned to start with.

Alvin went into the little room he shared with Calvin and just set there, waiting for Matilda to come and kill him. But she didn’t come and didn’t come, and he realized that she was probably waiting till after the candles were all out, so that no one would know which of his sisters snuck in and snuffed him out. Heaven knew he’d given them all ample reason to want him dead in the last two months alone. He was trying to guess whether they’d stifle him with Matilda’s goosedown pillow—which would be the first time he was ever allowed to touch it—or if he’d die with Beatrice’s precious sewing scissors in his heart, when all of a sudden he realized that if he didn’t get outside to the privy in about twenty-five seconds he’d embarrass himself right in his trousers.

Somebody was in the privy, of course, and Alvin stood outside jumping and yelling for three minutes and still they wouldn’t come out. It occurred to him that it was probably one of the girls, in which case this was the most devilish plan they’d ever come up with, keeping him out of the privy when they knew he was scared to go into the woods after dark. It was a terrible vengeance. If he messed himself he’d be so ashamed he’d probably have to change his name and run away, and that was a whole lot worse than a poke in the behind. It made him mad as a constipated buffalo, it was so unfair.

Finally he was mad enough to make the ultimate threat. “If you don’t come out I’ll do it right in front of the door so you’ll step in it when you come out!”

He waited, but whoever was in there
didn’t
say, “If you do I’ll make you lick it off my shoe,” and since that was the customary response, Al realized for the first time that the person inside the privy might not be one of his sisters after all. It was certainly not one of the boys. Which left only two possibilities, each one worse than the other. Al was so mad at himself he smacked his own head with his fist, but it didn’t make him feel no better. Papa would probably give him a lick, but even worse would be Mama. She might give him a tongue-lashing, which was bad enough, but if she was in a real vile temper, she’d get that cold look on her face and say real soft, “Alvin Junior, I used to hope that at least one of my boys would be a born gentleman, but now I see my life was wasted,” which always made him feel about as low as he knew how to feel without dying.

So he was almost relieved when the door opened and Papa stood there, still buttoning his trousers and looking none too happy. “Is it safe for me to step out this door?” he asked coldly.

“Yup,” said Alvin Junior.

“What?”

“Yes sir.”

“Are you sure? There’s some wild animals around here that think it’s smart to leave their do on the ground outside privy doors. I tell you that if there’s any such animal I’ll lay a trap and catch it by the back end one of these nights. And when I find it in the morning, I’ll stitch up its bung hole and turn it loose to bloat up and die in the woods.”

“Sorry, Papa.”

Papa shook his head and started walking toward the house. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your bowel, boy. One minute you don’t need to go and the next minute you’re about to die.”

“Well if you’d just build another outhouse I’d be fine,” Al Junior muttered. Papa didn’t hear him, though, because Alvin didn’t actually say it till the privy door was closed and Papa’d gone back to the house, and even then he didn’t say it very loud.

Alvin rinsed his hands at the pump a long time, because he feared what was waiting for him back in the house. But then, alone outside in the darkness, he began to be afraid for another reason. Everybody said that a White man never could hear when a Red man was walking through the woods, and his big brothers got some fun out of telling Alvin that whenever he was alone outside, especially at night, there was Reds in the forest, watching him, playing with their flint-bladed tommy-hawks and itching to have his scalp. In broad daylight, Al didn’t believe them, but at night, his hands cold with the water, a chill ran through him, and he thought he even knew where the Red was standing. Just over his shoulder, back over near the pigsty, moving so quiet that the pigs didn’t even grunt and the dogs didn’t bark or nothing. And they’d find Al’s body, all hairless and bloody, and
then
it’d be too late. Bad as his sisters were—and they were
bad—
Al figured they’d be better than dying from a Red man’s flint in his head. He fair to flew from the pump to the house, and he
didn’t
look back to see if the Red was really there.