Seventh Son

Chapter Twelve—Book

They kept a three-log fire, night and day, so the stones of the wall seemed to glow with heat, and the air in his room was dry. Alvin lay unmoving on his bed, his right leg heavy with splints and bandages, pressing into the bed like an anchor, the rest of his body afloat, adrift, pitching and rolling and yawing. He was dizzy, and a little sick.

But he hardly noticed the weight of his leg, or the dizziness. The pain was his enemy, throbs and stabs of it taking his mind away from the task that Taleswapper had set him: to heal himself.

Yet the pain was his friend, too. It built a wall around him so he scarce knew he was in a house, in a roof, on a bed. The outside world could burn up and turn to ash and he'd never notice it. It was the world inside that he was exploring now.

Taleswapper didn't know half what he was talking about. It wasn't a matter of making pictures in his mind. His leg wouldn't get better from just pretending it was all healed up. But Taleswapper still had the right idea. If Alvin could feel his way through the rock, could find the weak and strong places and teach them where to break and where to hold firm, why couldn't he do it with skin and bone?

Trouble was, skin and bone was all mixed up. The rock was pretty much the same thing through and through, but the skin changed with every layer, and it wasn't no easy trick figuring where everything went. He lay there with his eyes closed, looking into his own flesh for the first time. At first he tried following the pain, but that didn't get nowhere, just led him to where everything was mashed and cut and messed up so he couldn't tell up from down. After a long while he tried a different tack. He listened to his heart beating. At first the pain kept tearing him away, but after a while he closed in on that sound. If there was noise in the world outside he didn't know about it, because the pain shut all that out. And the rhythm of the heartbeat, that shut out the pain, or mostly, anyway.

He followed the tracks of his blood, the big strong stream, the little streams. Sometimes he got lost. Sometimes a stab from his leg just broke in and demanded to be heard. But by and by he found his way to healthy skin and bone in the other leg. The blood wasn't half so strong there, but it led him where he wanted to go. He found all the layers, like the skin of an onion. He learned their order, saw how the muscle was tied together, how the tiny veins linked up, how the skin stretched taut and bonded tight.

Only then did he find his way to the bad leg. The patch of skin Mama sewed on was pretty much dead, just turning to rot. Alvin Junior knew what it needed, though, if any part of it was to live. He found the mashed-off ends of the arteries around the wound, and began to urge them to grow, just the way he made cracks travel through stone. The stone was easy, compared to this—to make a crack, it just had to let go, that's all. The living flesh was slower to do what he wanted, and pretty soon he gave up on all but the strongest artery.

He began to see how it was using bits and pieces of this and that to build with. A lot was happening that was far too small and fast and complicated for Alvin to get hold of with his mind. But he could get his body to free up what the artery needed in order to grow. He could send it where it was needed, and after a while the artery linked up with the rotted tissue. It took some doing, but he finally found the end of a shriveled artery and linked them up, and sent the blood flowing into the sewn-on patch.

Too soon, too fast. He felt the heat on his leg from blood pouring out of the dead flesh at a dozen points; it couldn't hold in all the blood he sent. Slow, slow, slow. He followed the blood, now seeping instead of pumping, and again linked up blood vessels, arteries to veins, trying to match it, as best he could, to the other leg.

Finally it was done, or well enough. The normal flow of blood could be contained. Many parts of the patch of skin came back to life as the blood returned. Other parts stayed dead. Alvin kept going around and around with the blood, stripping away the dead parts, breaking them up into bits and pieces too small for him to recognize. But the living parts recognized them well enough, took them up, put them to work. Wherever Alvin explored, he made the flesh grow.

Until he was so weary in his mind from thinking so small and working so hard that he fell asleep in spite of himself.

"I don't want to wake him."

"No way to change the bandage without touching it, Faith."

"All right, then—oh, be careful, Alvin! No, let me!"

"I've done this before—"

"On cows, Alvin, not on little boys!"

Alvin Junior felt pressure on his leg. Something pulling at the skin there. The pain wasn't as bad as yesterday. But he was still too tired even to open his eyes. Even to make a sound to let them know he was awake, he could hear them.

"Good laws, Faith, he must have bled something awful in the night."

"Mama, Mary says I have to—"

"Hush up and get on out of here, Cally! Can't you see your ma's worried about—"

"No need to yell at the boy, Alvin. He's only seven."

"Seven's old enough to keep his mouth shut and leave grown-ups alone when we've got things to—look at that."

"I can hardly believe it."

"I thought to see pus coming out like cream from a cow's tit."

"Clean as can be."

"And skin growing back, will you look at that? Your sewing must've took."

"I hardly dared to hope that skin would live."

"Can't even see no bone under there."

"The Lord is blessing us. I prayed all night, Alvin, and look what God has done."

"Well, you should've prayed harder, then, and got it healed up tight. I need this boy for chores."

"Don't you get blasphemous with me, Alvin Miller."

"It just gripes me hollow, the way God always sneaks in to take the credit. Maybe Alvin's just a good healer, you ever think of that?"

"Look, your nastiness is waking the boy."

"See if he wants a drink of water."

"He's getting one whether he wants it or not."

Alvin wanted it badly. His body was dry, not just his mouth; it needed to make back what it lost in blood. So he swallowed as much as he could, from a tin cup held to his mouth. A lot of it spilled around his face and neck but he didn't hardly notice that. It was the water that trickled into his belly that mattered. He lay back and tried to find out from the inside how his wound was doing. But it was too hard to get back there, too hard to concentrate. He dropped off before he was halfway there.

He woke again, and thought it must be night again, or maybe the curtains were drawn. He couldn't find out cause it was too hard to open his eyes, and the pain was back, fierce again, and something maybe even worse: the wound was a-tickling till he could hardly keep himself from reaching down to scratch. After a while, though, he was able to find the wound and once again help the layers to grow. By the time he slept, there was a thin, complete layer of skin over the whole wound. Underneath, the body was still working to renew the ravaged muscles and knit the broken bones. But there'd be no more loss of blood, no more open wound to get infected.

"Look at this, Taleswapper. You ever seen the like of this?"

"Skin like a newborn baby."

"Maybe I'm crazy, but except for the splint I can't see no reason to leave this leg bound up no more."

"Not a sign of a wound. No, you're right, there's no need for a bandage now."

"Maybe my wife is right, Taleswapper. Maybe God just rared back and passed a miracle on my boy."

"Can't prove anything. When the boy wakes up, maybe he'll know something about it."

"Not a chance of that. He hasn't even opened his eyes this whole time."

"One thing's certain, Mr. Miller. The boy isn't about to die. That's more than I could have guessed yesterday."

"I was set to build him a box to hold him underground, that I was. I didn't see no chance him living. Will you look at how healthy he is? I want to know what's protecting him, or who."

"Whatever is protecting him, Mr. Miller, the boy is stronger. That's something to think about. His protector split that stone, but Al Junior put it back together and not a thing his protector could do about it."

"Reckon he even knew what he was doing?"

"He must have some notion of his powers. He knew what he could do with the stone."

"I never heard of a knack like this, to tell you straight. I told Faith what he did with that stone, dressing it on the backside without ever laying on a tool, and she starts reading from the Book of Daniel and crying about fulfilment of the prophecy. Wanted to rush in here and warn the boy about clay feet. Don't that beat all? Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn't crazy with religion."

The door opened.

"Get out of here! Are you so dumb I have to tell you twenty times, Cally? Where's his mother, can't she keep one seven-year-old boy away from—"

"Be easy on the lad, Miller. He's gone now, anyway."

"I don't know what's wrong with him. As soon as Al Junior is down, I see Cally's face wherever I look. Like an undertaker hoping for a fee."

"Maybe it's strange to him. To have Alvin hurt."

"As many times as Alvin's been an inch from death—"

"But never injured."

A long silence.

"Taleswapper."

"Yes, Mr. Miller?"

"You've been a good friend to us here, sometimes in spite of ourselfs. But I reckon you're still a walking man."

"That I am, Mr. Miller."

"What I'm saying is, not to rush you off, but if you go anytime soon, and you happen to be heading generally eastward, do you think you could carry a letter for me?"

"I'd be glad to. And no fee, to sender or receiver."

"That's right kind of you. I been thinking on what you said. About a boy needing to be sent far off from certain dangers. And I thought, in all the world where's there some folks I can trust to took after the boy? We got no kin worth speaking of back in New England—I don't want the boy raised Puritan on the brink of hell anyway."

"I'm relieved to hear that, Mr. Miller, because I have no great longing to see New England again myself."

"If you just follow back on the road we made coming west, sooner or later you come along to a place on the Hatrack River, some thirty miles north of the Hio, not all that far downriver from Fort Dekane. There's a road house there, or leastwise there was, with a graveyard out back where a stone says ‘Vigor he died to save his kin.'"

"You want me to take the boy?"

"No, no, I'll not send him now that the snow's come. Water—"

"I understand."

"There's a blacksmith there, and I thought he might want a prentice. Alvin's young, but he's big for his age, and I reckon he'll be a bargain for the smith."

"Prentice?"

"Well, I sure won't make him a bond slave, now, will I? And I got no money to send him off to school."

"I'll take the letter. But I hope I can stay till the boy is awake, so I can say good-bye."

"I wasn't going to send you out tonight, was I? Nor tomorrow, with new snow deep enough to smother bunnies."

"I didn't know if you had noticed the weather."

"I always notice when there's water underfoot." He laughed wryly, and they left the room.

Alvin Junior lay there, trying to figure why Pa wanted to send him away. Hadn't he done right all his life, as best he could? Hadn't he tried to help all he knew how? Didn't he go to Reverend Thrower's school, even though the preacher was out to make him mad or stupid? Most of all, didn't he finally get a perfect stone down from the mountain, holding it together all the time, teaching it the way to go, and at the very end risking his leg just so the stone wouldn't split? And now they were going to send him away.

Prentice! To a blacksmith! In his whole life he never even saw a blacksmith up to now. They had to ride three days to the nearest smithy, and Pa never let him go along. In his whole life he never even been ten mile from home one way or any other.

In fact, the more he thought about it the madder he got. Hadn't he been begging Mama and Papa just to let him go out walking in the woods alone, and they wouldn't let him. Had to have somebody with him all the time, like he was a captive or a slave about to run off. If he was five minutes late getting somewhere, they came to look for him. He never got to go on long trips—the longest one ever was to the quarry a few times. And now, after they kept him penned up like a Christmas goose all his life, they were set to send him off to the end of the whole earth.

It was so blame unfair that tears come to his eyes and squeezed out and tickled down his cheeks right into his ears, which felt so silly it made him laugh.

"What you laughing at?" asked Cally.

Alvin hadn't heard him come in.

"Are you all better now? It ain't bleeding nowhere, Al."

Cally touched his cheek.

"You crying cause it hurts so bad?"

Alvin probably could have spoke to him, but it seemed like too much work to open up his mouth and push words out, so he kind of shook his head, slow and gentle.

"You going to die, Alvin?" asked Cally.

He shook his head again.

"Oh," said Cally.

He sounded so disappointed that it made Alvin a little mad. Mad enough to get his mouth working after all. "Sorry," he croaked.

"Well it ain't fair, anyhow," said Cally. "I didn't want you dead, but they all said you was going to die. And I got to thinking what it'd be like if I was the one they all took care of. All the time, everybody watching out for you, and when I say one little thing they just say, Get out of here, Cally, Just shut up, Cally. Nobody asked you, Cally, Ain't you spose to be in bed, Cally? They don't care what I do. Except when I start hitting you, then they all say, Don't get in fights, Cally."

"You wrestle real good for a field mouse." At least that was what Alvin meant to say, but he didn't know for sure if his lips even moved.

"You know what I did one time when I was six? I went out and got myself lost in the woods. I just walked and walked. Sometimes I closed my eyes and spun around a few times so I'd sure not know where I was. I must have been lost half the day. Did one soul come looking for me? I finally had to turn around and find my own way home. Nobody said, Where you been all day, Cally? Mama just said, Your hands are dirty as the back end of a sick horse, go wash yourself."

Alvin laughed again, near silently, his chest heaving.

"It's funny for you. Everybody looks after you."

Alvin worked hard to make a sound this time. "You want me gone?"

Cally waited a long time to answer. "No. Who'd play with me then? Just the dumb old cousins. There ain't a good wrassler in the bunch of them."

"I'm going," whispered Alvin.

"No you ain't. You're the seventh son, and they'll never let you go."

"Going."

"Course the way I count up it's me that's number seven. David, Calm, Measure, Wastenot, Wantnot, Alvin Junior that's you, and then me, that's seven."

"Vigor."

"He's dead. He's been dead a long time. Somebody ought to tell that to Ma. and Pa."

Alvin lay there, near wore out from the few things he said. Cally didn't say anything much after that. Just sat there, still as could be. Holding Alvin's hand real tight. Pretty soon Alvin started drifting, so he wasn't sure altogether whether Cally really spoke or it was in a dream. But he heard Cally say, "I don't never wish you dead, Alvin." And then he might have said, "I wish I was you." But anyway Alvin drifted off to sleep, and when he woke up again there was nobody with him and the house was still except for nightsounds, the wind rattling the shutters, the timbers popping as they shrunk from the cold, the log snapping in the hearth.

One more time Alvin went inside himself and worked his way down to the wound. Only this time he didn't have much to do with the skin and muscle. It was the bones he worked on now. It surprised him how lacy it was, pocked with little hollows all over, not solid straight through like the millstone was. But he learned the way of it soon enough, and it was easy after a while to knit the bones up tight.

Still, there was something wrong with that bone. Something in his bad leg just wouldn't get exactly like the good leg. But it was so small he couldn't see it clear. Just knew that whatever it was, it made the bone sick inside, just a little patch of sickness, but he couldn't figure how to make it better. Like trying to pick up snowflakes off the ground, whenever he thought he had ahold of something, it turned out to be nothing, or maybe just too small to see.

Maybe, though, it would just go away. Maybe if everything else got better, that sick place on his bone would get better by itself.

Eleanor was late getting back from her mother's house. Armor believed that a wife should have strong ties with her family, but coming home at dusk was too dangerous.

"There's talk of wild Reds up from the south," said Armor-of-God. "And you traipsing about after dark."

"I hurried home," she said. "I know the way in the dark."

"It's not a question of knowing the way," he said sternly. "The French are giving guns as bounty on White scalps now. It won't tempt the Prophet's people, but there's many a Choc-Taw who'd be glad to come up to Fort Detroit, gathering scalps along the way."

"Alvin isn't going to die," said Eleanor.

Armor hated it when she turned the subject like that. But it was such news that he couldn't very well not ask after it. "They decide to take off the leg, then?"

"I saw the leg. It's getting better. And Alvin Junior was awake late this afternoon. I talked to him awhile."

"I'm glad he was awake, Elly, I truly am, but I hope you don't expect the leg to get better. A big wound like that may look to be healing for a while, but the rot'll set in pretty soon."

"I don't think so this time," she said. "You want supper?"

"I must have gnawed down two loaves just pacing back and forth wondering whether you were even coming home."

"It isn't good for a man to get a belly."

"Well, I got one, and it calls out for food just like any other man's."

"Mama gave me a cheese to bring home." She set it out on the table.

Armor had his doubts. He figured half the reason Faith Miller's cheeses turned out so good was because she did things to the milk. At the same time, there wasn't no better cheese on the banks of the Wobbish, nor up Tippy-Canoe Creek neither.

It put him out of sorts when he caught himself compromising with witchery. And being out of sorts, he wasn't about to let anything lie, even though he knew Elly plain didn't want to talk about it. "Why don't you think the leg will rot?"

"It's just getting better so fast," she said.

"How much better?"

"Oh, pert near fixed."

"How near?"

She turned around, rolled her eyes, and turned back away from him. She started cutting up an apple to eat with the cheese.

"I said how near, Elly? How near fixed?"

"Fixed."

"Two days after a millstone rips off the front half of his leg, and it's fixed?"

"Only two days?" she said. "Seems like a week to me."

"Calendar says it's two days," said Armor. "Which means there's been witchery up there."

"As I read the gospels, the one that healed people wasn't no witch."

"Who did it? Don't tell me your pa or ma suddenly figured out something as strong as that. Did they conjure up a devil?"

She turned around, the knife in her hands still poised for cutting. There was a flash in her eyes. "Pa may be no kind of church man, but the devil never set foot in our house."

That wasn't what Reverend Thrower said, but Armor knew better than to bring him into the conversation. "It's that beggar, then."

"He works for his room and board. Hard as anyone."

"They say he knew that old wizard Ben Franklin. And that atheist from Appalachee, Tom Jefferson."

"He tells good stories. And he didn't heal the boy neither."

"Well, somebody did."

"Maybe he just healed up himself. Anyway, the leg's still broke. So it ain't a miracle or nothing. He's just a fast healer."

"Well maybe he's a fast healer cause the devil takes care of his own."

From the look in her eye when she turned around, Armor kind of wished he hadn't said it. But dad-gum it, Reverend Thrower as much as said the boy was as bad as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

But beast or boy, he was Elly's brother, and whereas she might be as quiet as you please most of the time, when she got her dander up she could be a terror.

"Take that back," she said.

"Now, that's about as silly a thing as I ever heard. How can I take back what I said?"

"By saying you know it ain't so."

"I don't know it is and I don't know it ain't. I said maybe, and if a man can't say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead."

"I reckon that's about true," she said. "And if you don't take that back you'll wish you was dead!" And she started coming after him with two chunks of apple, one in each hand.

Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad, if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up laughing. But not this time. She mushed one apple in his hair and threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs bedroom, crying her eyes out.

She wasn't one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.

"I take it back, Elly," he said. "He's a good boy, I know that."

"Oh, I don't care what you think," she said. "You don't know a thing about it anyway."

There weren't many husbands who'd let their wife say such a thing without slapping her upside the head. Armor wished sometimes that Elly'd appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.

"I know a thing or two," he said.

"They're going to send him off," she said. "Once spring comes, they're going to prentice him out. He's none too happy about it, I can tell, but he don't argue none, he just lies there in his bed, talking real quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying good-bye all the time."

"What are they wanting to send him off for?"

"I told you, to prentice him."

"The way they baby that boy, I can't hardly believe they'd let him out of their sight."

"They ain't talking about nothing close by, neither. Clear back at the east end of Hio Territory, near Fort Dekane. Why, that's halfway to the ocean."

"You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it."

"It does?"

"With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone. The others can all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior."

She looked at him with withering contempt. "Sometimes you're so suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God."

"It ain't suspicion to say what's really happening."

"You can't tell real from a rutabaga."

"You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you lick it out?"

"I expect I'll have to do something, or you'll rub it all over the bed linen."

Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he left. Two pair of thick stockings. A new blanket. An elkhide cloak. Jerky and cheese. A good whetstone.

And things they couldn't even know they gave him. A rested body, free of aches and bruises. A jaunty step. Kind faces fresh in his mind. And stories. Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones he wrote down himself. And true stories painfully inscribed by their own hands.

Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to. Roofs patched for winter, other jobs here and there. More important, they'd seen a book with Ben Franklin's own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamilton—even Aaron Burr, from before the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after. Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the Wobbish country, and that's all. Now they belonged to much larger stories. The War of Appalachee Independence. The American Compact. They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many, and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads. Not a tapestry, really. A rug. A good, thick, solid rug that generations of Americans after them could tread on. There was a poem in that; he'd work that into a poem sometime.

He left them a few other things, too. A beloved son he pulled from under a falling millstone. A father who now had the strength to send away his son before he killed him. A name for a young man's nightmare, so he could understand that his enemy was real. A whispered encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.

And a single drawing, burnt into a fine slab of oakwood with the tip of a hot knife. He'd rather have worked with wax and acid on metal, but there was neither to be had in this place. So he burnt lines into the wood, making of it what he could. A picture of a young man caught in a strong river, bound up in the roots of a floating tree, gasping for breath, his eyes facing death fearlessly. It would have earned nothing but scorn at the Lord Protector's Academy of Art, being so plain. But Goody Faith cried out when she saw it, and hugged it to her, dropping her tears over it like the last drips from the eaves after a rainstorm. And Father Alvin, when he saw it, nodded and said, "That's your vision, Taleswapper. You got his face perfect, and you never even saw him. That's Vigor. That's my boy." Then he cried, too.

They set it right up on the mantel. It might not be great art, thought Taleswapper, but it was true, and it meant more to these folks than any portrait could mean to some fat old lord or parliamentarian in London or Camelot or Paris or Vienna.

"It's fair morning now," said Goody Faith. "You've got long to go before dark."

"You can't blame me for being reluctant to leave. Though I'm glad you trusted me with this errand, and I won't fail you." He patted his pocket, wherein lay the letter to the blacksmith of Hatrack River.

"You can't go without you say good-bye to the boy," said Miller.

He'd put it off as long as it could be delayed. He nodded once, then eased himself from the comfortable chair by the fire and went on into the room where he'd slept the best nights of his life. It was good to see Alvin Junior's eyes wide open, his face lively, no longer slack the way it was for a while, or winced up with pain. But the pain was still there, Taleswapper knew.

"You going?" asked the boy.

"I'm gone, except for saying good-bye to you."

Alvin looked a little angry. "So you ain't even going to let me write in your book?"

"Not everybody does, you know."

"Pa did. And Mama."

"And Cally, too."

"I bet that looks good," said Alvin. "He writes like a, like a—"

"Like a seven-year-old." It was a rebuke, but Alvin had no intention of squirming.

"Why not me, then? Why Cally and not me?"

"Because I only let people write the most important thing they ever did or ever saw with their own eyes. What would you write?"

"I don't know. Maybe about the millstone."

Taleswapper made a face.

"Then maybe my vision. That's important, you said so yourself."

"And that got written up somewhere else, Alvin."

"I want to write in the book," he said. "I want my sentence in there along with Maker Ben's."

"Not yet," said Taleswapper.

"When!"

"When you've whipped that old Unmaker, lad. That's when I'll let you write in this book."

"What if I don't ever whip him?"

"Then this book won't amount to much, anyway."

Tears sprang to Alvin's eyes. "What if I die?"

Taleswapper felt a thrill of fear. "How's the leg?"

The boy shrugged. He blinked back the tears. They were gone.

"That's no answer, lad."

"It won't stop hurting."

"It'll be that way till the bone knits."

Alvin Junior smiled wanly. "Bone's all knit."

"Then why don't you walk?"

"It pains me, Taleswapper. It never goes away. It's got a bad place on the bone, and I ain't figured out yet how to make it right."

"You'll find a way."

"I ain't found it yet."

"An old trapper once said to me, ‘It don't matter if you start at the bung or the breastbone, any old way you get the skin off a panther is a good way.'"

"Is that a proverb?"

"It's close. You'll find a way, even if it isn't what you expect."

"Nothing's what I expect," said Alvin. "Nothing turns out like anything I figured."

"You're ten years old, lad. Weary of the world already?"

Alvin kept rubbing folds of the blanket between his thumb and fingers. "Taleswapper, I'm dying."

Taleswapper studied his face, trying to see death there. It wasn't. "I don't think so."

"The bad place on my leg. It's growing. Slow, maybe, but it's growing. It's invisible, and it's eating away at the hard places of the bone, and after a while it'll go faster and faster and—"

"And Unmake you."

Alvin started to cry for real this time, and his hands were shaking. "I'm scared to die, Taleswapper, but it got inside me and I can't get it out."

Taleswapper laid a hand on his, to still the trembling. "You'll find a way. You've got too much work to do in this world, to die now."

Alvin rolled his eyes. "That's about as dumb a thing as I've heard this year. Just because somebody's got things to do don't mean he won't die."

"But it does mean he won't die willingly."

"I ain't willing."

"That's why you'll find a way to live."

Alvin was silent for a few seconds. "I've been thinking. About if I do live, what I'll do. Like what I done to make my leg get mostly better. I can do that for other folks, I bet. I can lay hands on them and feel the way it is inside, and fix it up. Wouldn't that be good?"

"They'd love you for it, all the folks you healed."

"I reckon the first time was the hardest, and I wasn't partickler strong when I done it. I bet I can do it faster on other people."

"Maybe so. But even if you heal a hundred sick people every day, and move on to the next place and heal a hundred more, there'll be ten thousand people die behind you, and ten thousand more ahead of you, and by the time you die, even the ones you healed will almost all be dead."

Alvin turned his face away. "If I know how to fix them, then I got to fix them, Taleswapper."

"Those you can, you must," said Taleswapper. "But not as your life's work. Bricks in the wall, Alvin, that's all they'll ever be. You can never catch up by repairing the crumbling bricks. Heal those who chance to fall under your hand, but your life's work is deeper than that."

"I know how to heal people. But I don't know how to beat down the Un—the Unmaker. I don't even know what it is."

"As long as you're the only one that can see him, though, you're also the only one who has a hope of beating him."

"Maybe."

Another long silence. Taleswapper knew it was time to go.

"Wait."

"I've got to leave now."

Alvin caught at his sleeve. "Not yet."

"Pretty soon."

"At least—at least let me read what the others wrote."

Taleswapper reached into his bag and pulled out the book pouch. "I can't promise I'll explain what they mean," he said, sliding the book out of its waterproof cover.

Alvin quickly found the last, newest writings.

In his mother's hand: "Vigor he push a log and he don die til the boy is bornd."

In David's hand: "A mil ston splits in two then it suks bak not a crak."

In Cally's hand: "A sevent sunn."

Alvin looked up. "He ain't talking about me, you know."

"I know," said Taleswapper.

Alvin looked back at the book. In his father's hand: "He dont kil a boy cus a stranjer com in time."

"What's Pa talking about?" asked Alvin.

Taleswapper took the book from his hands and closed it. "Find a way to heal your leg," he said. "There's a lot more souls than you who need it to be strong. It's not for yourself, remember?"

He bent over and kissed the boy on the forehead. Alvin reached up and held him with both arms, hanging on him so that he couldn't stand up without lifting the boy clear out of bed. After a while, Taleswapper had to reach up and pull the boy's arms away. His cheek was wet with Alvin's tears. He didn't wipe them away. He let the breeze dry them as he trudged along the cold dry path, with fields of half-melted snow stretching left and right.

He paused a moment on the second covered bridge. Just long enough to wonder if he'd ever come back here, or see them again. Or get Alvin Junior's sentence for his book. If he were a prophet, he'd know. But he hadn't the faintest idea.

He walked on, setting his feet toward morning.