Well, I'm not one of them. I'm my own man, smarter than he is, and more powerful, too, if I can just learn what I need to learn. After all, Alvin was only a seventh son for a couple of moments after he was born, until our oldest brother Vigor died. But I have been a seventh son my whole life, and still am one today. Before long I'm bound to surpass Alvin. I'm the real Maker. The real thing. Not a hypocrite. Not a pretender.
“When you see Alvin, tell him not to follow me. He won't see I me again until I'm ready for him to square off against me, Maker against Maker.”
“There can never be a battle of Maker against Maker,” said Taleswapper.
“Oh?”
“Because if there's a battle,” said Taleswapper, “it's because one of them, at least, is not a Maker at all, but rather its opposite.”
Calvin laughed. “That old wives' tale? About some supposed Unmaker? Alvin tells the stories, but it's all a bunch of hogwash to make him look like more of a hero.”
“I'm not surprised that you don't believe in the Unmaker,” said Taleswapper. “The first lie the Unmaker always tells is that he doesn't exist. And his true servants always believe him, even as they carry out his work in the world.”
“So I'm the Unmaker's servant?” asked Calvin.
“Of course,” said Taleswapper. “I have the bruises on my body now to prove it.”
“Those bruises prove you're a weak man with a big mouth.”
“Alvin would have healed me and strengthened me,” said Taleswapper. “That's what Makers do.”
Calvin couldn't take any more of this. He kicked the man right in the face. He could feel Taleswapper's nose break under the ball of his foot; then the old man flopped back into the grass and lay there still. Calvin didn't even bother to check his pulse. If he was dead, so be it. The world would be a better place without his lies and rudeness.
Not until he was well into the woods, about five minutes later, did the enormity of what he had done flow over him. Killed a man! I might have killed a man, and left him to die!
I should have healed him before I left. The way Alvin healed people. Then he would have know that I'm truly a Maker, because I healed him. How could I have missed such an opportunity to show what I can do?
At once he turned and raced back through the forest, dodging the roots, skittering down a bank he had so eagerly climbed only moments before. But when, panting, he emerged into the meadow, the old man wasn't there, though bits of blood still clung to the grass and pooled where his head had lain. Not dead, then. He got up and walked, so he can't be dead.
What a fool I was, thought Calvin. Of course I didn't kill him. I'm a Maker. Makers don't destroy things, they build them. Isn't that what Alvin always tells me? So if I'm a Maker, nothing I do can possibly be destructive.
For a moment he almost headed down the hill toward the millhouse. Let Taleswapper accuse him in front of everybody. Calvin would simply deny it and let them work out how to deal with the problem. Of course they'd all believe Taleswapper. But Calvin only needed to say, “That's his knack, to make people believe his lies. Why else would you trust in this stranger instead of Alvin Miller's youngest boy, when you all know I don't go around beating people up?” It was a delicious scene to contemplate, with Father and Mother and Alvin all frozen into inaction.
But a better scene was this: Calvin free in the city. Calvin out of his brother's shadow.
Best of all, they couldn't even get up a group of men to follow him. For here in the town, of Vigor Church, the adults were all bound by Tenskwa-Tawa's curse, so that any stranger they met, they had to tell him the story of how they slaughtered the innocent Reds at Tippy-Canoe. If they didn't tell the story, their hands and arms would become covered with dripping blood, mute testimony of their crime. Because of that they didn't venture out into the world where they might run into strangers. Alvin himself might come looking for him, but no one else except those who had been too young to take part in the massacre would be able to join with him. Oh, yes, their brother-in-law Armor, he wasn't under the curse. And maybe Measure wasn't really under the curse, because he took it on himself, even though he wasn't part of the battle. So maybe he could leave. But that still wouldn't be much of a search party.
And why would they bother to search for him anyway? Alvin thought Calvin was a nothing. Not worth teaching. So how could he be worth following?
My freedom was always just a few steps away, thought Calvin. All it took was my realizing that Alvin was never going to accept me as his true friend and brother. Taleswapper showed me that. I should thank him.
Hey, I already gave him all the thanks he deserved.
Calvin chuckled. Then he turned and headed back into the forest. He tried to move as silently as Alvin always did, moving through the forest– a trick Al had learned from the wild Reds back before they either gave across the Mizzipy into the empty country of the west. But despite all his efforts, Calvin always ended up making noise and breaking branches.
For all I know, Calvin told himself, Alvin makes just as much noise, and simply uses his knack to make us think he's quiet. Because if everybody thinks you're silent, you are silent, right? Makes no difference at all.
Wouldn't it be just like that hypocrite Alvin to have us all thinking he's in such harmony with the greenwood when he's really just as clumsy as everyone else! At least I'm not ashamed to make an honest noise.
With that reassuring thought, Calvin plunged on into the underbrush, breaking off branches and disturbing falled leaves with every step.
Chapter 3 – Watchers
While Calvin was a-setting out on his journey to wherever, trying not to think about Alvin with every step, there was someone else already on a journey, also wishing she could stop thinking about Alvin. That's about where the semblance ends, though. Because this was Peggy Larner, who knew Alvin better and loved Alvin more than any living soul. She was riding in a coach along a country road in Appalachee, and she was at least as unhappy as Calvin ever was. Difference was, she blamed her woes on nary a soul but her own self.
In the days after her mother was murdered, Peggy Larner figured that she would stay in Hatrack River for the rest of her life, helping her father tend his roadhouse. She was done with the great matters of the world. She had set her hand to meddling in them, and the result had been that she didn't tend to her own backyard and so she faded to see her mother's death looming. Preventable, easily, it was so dependent upon merest chance; a simple word of warning and her mother and father would have known the Slave Finders were coming back that night and how many of them there were, and how armed, and through what door coming. But Peggy had been watching the great matters of the world, had been minding her foolish love for the young journeyman smith named Alvin who had learned to make a plow of living gold and then asked her to marry him and go with him through the world to do battle with the Unmaker, and all the while the Unmaker was destroying her own life through the back door, with a shotgun blast that shredded her mother's flesh and gave Peggy the most terrible of burdens to carry all her life. What kind of child does not watch out to save her own mother's life?
She could not marry Alvin. That would be like rewarding herself for her own selfishness. She would stay and help her father in his work.
And yet she couldn't do even that, not for long. When her father looked at her– or rather, when he wouldn't look at her– she felt his grief stab to her heart. He knew she could have prevented it. And though it was his great effort not to reproach her with it, she didn't need to hear his words to know what was in his heart. No, nor did she need to use her knack to see his heart's desire, his bitter memories. She knew without looking, because she knew him deep, as children know parents.