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.
Chapter Seven – Altar
Alvin Junior 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.