Seventh Son

Chapter Six—Ridgebeam

Axex rang, strong men sang hymns at their labor, and Reverend Philadelphia Thrower's new church building rose tall over the meadow commons of Vigor Township. It was all happening so much faster than Reverend Thrower ever expected. The first wall of the meetinghouse had hardly been erected a day or so ago, when that drunken one-eyed Red wandered in and was baptized, as if the mere sight of the churchhouse had been the fulcrum on which he could be levered upward to civilization and Christianity. If a Red as benighted as Lolla-Wossiky could come unto Jesus, what other miracles of conversion might not be wrought in this wilderness when his meetinghouse was finished and his ministry firmly under way?

Reverend Thrower was not altogether happy, however, for there were enemies of civilization far stronger than the barbarity of the heathen Reds, and the signs were not all so hopeful as when Lolla-Wossiky donned White man's clothing for the first time. In particular what somewhat darkened this bright day was the fact that Alvin Miller was not among the workers. And his wife's excuses for him had run out. The trip to find a proper millstone quarry had ended, he had rested for a day, and by rights he should be here.

"What, is he ill?" asked Thrower.

Faith tightened her lips. "When I say he won't come, Reverend Thrower, it's not to say he can't come."

It confirmed Thrower's gathering suspicions. "Have I offended him somewise?"

Faith sighed and looked away from him, toward the posts and beams of the meetinghouse. "Not you yourself, sir, not the way a man treads on another, as they say."

Abruptly she became alert. "Now what is that?"

Right up against the building, most of the men were tying ropes to the north half of the ridgebeam, so they could lift it into place. It was a tricky job, and all the harder because of the little boys wrestling each other in the dust and getting underfoot. It was the wrestlers that had caught her eye.

"Al!" cried Faith. "Alvin Junior, you let him up this minute!" She took two strides toward the cloud of dust that marked the heroic struggles of the six-year-olds.

Reverend Thrower was not inclined to let her end the conversation so easily. "Mistress Faith," said Reverend Thrower sharply. "Alvin Miller is the first settler in these parts, and people hold him in high regard. If he's against me for some reason, it will greatly harm my ministry. At least you can tell me what I did to give offense."

Faith looked him in the eye, as if to calculate whether he could stand to hear the truth. "It was your foolish sermon, sir," she said.

"Foolish?"

"You couldn't know any better, being from England, and—"

"From Scotland, Mistress Faith."

"And being how you're educated in schools where they don't know much about—"

"The University of Edinburgh! Don't know much indeed, I—"

"About hexes and doodles and charms and beseechings and suchlike."

"I know that claiming to use such dark and invisible powers is a burning offense in the lands that obey the Lord Protector, Mistress Faith, though in his mercy he merely banishes those who—"

"Well looky there, that's my point," she said triumphantly. "They're not likely to teach you about that in university, now, are they? But it's the way we live here, and calling it a superstition—"

"I called it hysteria—"

"That don't change the fact that it works."

"I understand that you believe that it works," said Thrower patiently. "But everything in the world is either science or miracles. Miracles came from God in ancient times, but those times are over. Today if we wish to change the world, it is not magic but science that will give us our tools."

From the set of her face, Thrower could see that he wasn't making much impression on her.

"Science," she said. "Like feeling head bumps?"

He doubted she had tried very hard to hide her scorn. "Phrenology is an infant science," he said coldly, "and there are many flaws, but I am seeking to discover—"

She laughed—a girlish laugh, that made her seem much younger than a woman who had borne fourteen children. "Sorry, Reverend Thrower, but I just remembered how Measure called it ‘dowsing for brains,' and he allowed as how you'd have slim luck in these parts."

True words, thought Reverend Thrower, but he was wise enough not to say so. "Mistress Faith, I spoke as I did to let people understand that there are superior ways of thought in the world today, and we need no longer be bound by the delusions of—"

It was no use. Her patience had quite run out. "My boy looks about to get himself smacked with a spare joist if he don't let up on them other boys, Reverend, so you'll just have to excuse me." And off she went, to fall on six-year-old Alvin and three-year-old Calvin like the vengeance of the Lord. She was a champion tongue-lasher. He could hear the scolding from where he stood, and that with the breeze blowing the other way, too.

Such ignorance, said Thrower to himself. I am needed here, not only as a man of God among near heathens, but also as a man of science among superstitious fools. Somebody whispers a curse and then, six months later, something bad happens to the person cursed—it always does, something bad happens to everybody at least twice a year—and it makes them quite certain that their curse had malefic effect. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

In Britain, students learned to discard such elementary logic errors while yet studying the trivium. Here it was a way of life. The Lord Protector was quite right to punish practitioners of magic arts in Britain, though Thrower would prefer that he do it on grounds of stupidity rather than heresy. Treating it as heresy gave it too much dignity, as if it were something to be feared rather than despised.

Three years ago, right after he earned his Doctor of Divinity degree, it had dawned on Thrower what harm the Lord Protector was actually doing. He remembered it as the turning point of his life; wasn't it also the first time the Visitor had come to him? It was in his small room in the rectory of St. James Church in Belfast, where he was junior assistant pastor, his first assignment after ordination. He was looking at a map of the world when his eye strayed to America, to where Pennsylvania was clearly marked, stretching from the Dutch and Swedish colonies westward until the lines faded in the obscure country beyond the Mizzipy. It was as if the map then came alive, and he saw the flood of people arriving in the New World. Good Puritans, loyal churchmen, and sound businessmen—all went to New England; Papists, Royalists, and scoundrels all went to the rebellious slave country of Virginia, Carolina, and Jacobia, the so-called Crown Colonies. The sort of people who, once they found their place, stayed in it forever.

But it was another kind of people went to Pennsylvania. Germans, Dutchmen, Swedes, and Huguenots fled their countries and turned Pennsylvania Colony into a slop pot, filled with the worst human rubbish of the continent. Worse yet, they would not stay put. These dimwitted country people would debark in Philadelphia, discover that the settled—Thrower did not call them "civilized"—portions of Pennsylvania were too crowded for them, and immediately head westward into the Red country to hew out a farm among the trees. Never mind that the Lord Protector specifically forbade them to settle there. What did such pagans care for law? Land was what they wanted, as if the mere ownership of dirt could turn a peasant into a squire.

Then Thrower's vision of America turned from bleak to black indeed. He saw that war was coming to America with the new century. In his vision, he foresaw that the King of France would send that obnoxious Corsican colonel, Bonaparte, to Canada, and his people would stir up the Reds from the French fortress town in Detroit. The Reds would fall upon the settlers and destroy them; scum they might be, but they were mostly English scum, and the vision of the Reds' savagery made Thrower's skin crawl.

Yet even if the English won, the overall result would be the same. America west of the Appalachees would never be a Christian land. Either the damned Papist French and Spanish would have it, or the equally damned heathen Reds would keep it, or else the most depraved sort of Englishmen would thrive and thumb their noses at Christ and the Lord Protector alike. Another whole continent would be lost to the knowledge of the Lord Jesus. It was such a fearsome vision that Thrower cried out, thinking none would hear him in the confines of his little room.

But someone did hear him. "There's a life's work for a man of God," said someone behind him. Thrower turned at once, startled; but the voice was gentle and warm, the face old and kindly, and Thrower was not afraid for more than a moment, despite the fact that the door and window were both locked tight, and no natural man could have come inside his little room.

Thinking that this man was surely a part of the manifestation he had just seen, Thrower addressed him reverently. "Sir, whoever you are, I have seen the future of North America, and it looks like the victory of the devil to me."

"The devil takes his victories," the man replied, "wherever men of God lose heart, and leave the field to him."

Then the man simply was not there.

Thrower had known in that moment what the work of his life would be. To come to the wilds of America, build a country church, and fight the devil in his own country. It had taken him three years to get the money and the permission of his superiors in the Scottish Church, but now he was here, the posts and beams of his church were rising, their white and naked wood a bright rebuke to the dark forest of barbarism from which they had been hewn.

Of course, with such a magnificent work under way, the devil was bound to take notice. And it was obvious that the devil's chief disciple in Vigor Township was Alvin Miller. Even though all his sons were here, helping to build the churchhouse, Thrower knew that this was Faith's doing. The woman had even allowed as how she was probably Church of Scotland in her heart, even though she was born in Massachusetts; her membership would mean that Thrower could look forward to having a congregation—provided Alvin Miller could be kept from wrecking everything.

And wreck it he would. It was one thing if Alvin had been offended by something Thrower had inadvertently said and done. But to have the quarrel be about belief in sorcery, right from the start—well, there was no hiding from this conflict. The battle lines were laid. Thrower stood on the side of science and Christianity, and on the other side stood all the powers of darkness and superstition; the bestial, carnal nature of man was on the other side, with Alvin Miller as its champion. I am only at the beginning of my tournament for the Lord, thought Thrower. If I can't vanquish this first opponent, then no victory will ever, be possible for me.

"Pastor Thrower!" shouted Alvin's oldest boy, David. "We're ready to raise the ridgebeam!"

Thrower started toward them at a trot, then remembered his dignity and walked the rest of the way. There was nothing in the gospels to imply that the Lord ever ran—only walked, as befitted his high station. Of course, Paul had his comments about running a good race, but that was allegory. A minister was supposed to be a shadow of Jesus Christ, walking in His way and representing Him to the people. It was the closest these people would ever come to beholding the majesty of God. It was Reverend Thrower's duty to deny the vitality of his youth and walk at the reverent pace of an old man, though he was only twenty-four.

"You mean to bless the ridgebeam, don't you?" asked one of the farmers. It was Ole, a Swedish fellow from the banks of the Delaware, and so a Lutheran at heart; but he was willing enough to help build a Presbyterian Church here in the Wobbish valley, seeing how the nearest church besides that was the Papist Cathedral in Detroit.

"I do indeed," said Thrower. He laid his hand on the heavy, axehewn beam.

"Reverend Thrower." It was a child's voice behind him, piercing and loud as only a child's voice can be. "Ain't it a kind of a charm, to give a blessing to a piece Of wood?"

Thrower turned around to see Faith Miller already hushing the boy. Only six years old, but Alvin Junior was obviously going to grow up to be just as much trouble as his father. Maybe more—Alvin Senior had at least had the good grace to stay away from the church-raising.

"You go on," said Faith. "Never mind him. I haven't learned him yet when to speak and when to keep silence."

Even though his mother's hand was tight-clamped over his mouth, the boy's eyes were steady, looking right at him. And when Thrower turned back around, he found that all the grown men were looking at him expectantly. The child's question was a challenge that he had to answer, or he'd be branded a hypocrite or fool before the very men he had come to convert.

"I suppose that if you think my blessing actually does something to change the nature of the ridgebeam," he said, "that might be akin to ensorcelment. But the truth is that the ridgebeam itself is just the occasion. Whom I'm really blessing is the congregation of Christians who'll gather under this roof. And there's nothing magic about that. It's the power and love of God we're asking for, not a cure for warts or a charm against the evil eye."

"Too bad," murmured a man. "I could use a cure for warts."

They all laughed, but the danger was over. When the ridgebeam went up, it would be a Christian act to raise it, not a pagan one.

He blessed the ridgebeam, taking care to change the usual prayer to one that specifically did not confer any special properties upon the beam itself. Then the men tugged on the rope, and Thrower sang out "0 Lord Who on the Mighty Sea" at the top of his magnificent baritone voice, to give them the rhythm and inspiration for their labors.

All the time, however, he was acutely aware of the boy Alvin Junior. It was not just because of the boy's embarrassing challenge a moment ago. The child was as simpleminded as most children—Thrower doubted he had any dire purpose in mind. What drew him to the child was something else entirely. Not any property in the boy himself, but rather something about the people near him. They always seemed to keep him in attention. Not that they always looked at him—that would be a full-time occupation, he ran about so much. It was as if they were always aware of him, the way the college cook had always been aware of the dog in the kitchen, never speaking to it, but stepping over and around it without so much as pausing in his work.

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 yourn," 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.