So it didn't surprise him, as he lay on the bed, to feel the muscles of his body unknotting, as if this bed and this room were undoing the weariness of twenty-five years of wandering. It occurred to him that when he died, he hoped the grave was as comfortable as this bed.
When Alvin Junior rocked him awake, the whole house smelled of sage and pepper and simmered beef. “You've just got time to use the privy, wash up, and come eat,” said the boy.
“I must have fallen asleep,” said Taleswapper.
“That's what I made that hex to do,” said the boy. “Works good, don't it?” Then he charged out of the room.
Almost immediately Taleswapper heard one of the girls yelling the most alarming series of threats at the boy. The quarrel continued at top volume as Taleswapper went out to the privy, and when he came back inside, the yelling was still going on– though Taleswapper thought perhaps now it was a different sister yelling.
“I swear tonight in your sleep Al Junior I'll sew a skunk to the soles of your feet!” Al's answer was muffled by distance, but it caused another bout of screaming. Taleswapper had heard yelling before. Sometimes it was love and sometimes it was hate. When it was hate, he got out as quickly as he could. In this house, he could stay.
Hands and face washed, he was clean enough that Goody Faith allowed him to carry the loaves of bread to ihe table– “as long as you don't let the bread touch that gamy shirt of yours.” Then Taleswapper took his place in line, bowl in hand, as the whole family trooped into the kitchen and emerged with the majority of a hog parceled out among them.
It was Faith, not Miller himself, who called on one of the girls to pray, and Taleswapper took note that Miller didn't so much as close his eyes, though all the children had bowed heads and clasped hands. It was as if prayer was a thing he tolerated, but didn't encourage. Without having to ask, Taleswapper knew that Alvin Miller and the preacher down in that fine white church did not get along at all. Taleswapper decided Miller might even appreciate a proverb from his book: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”
The meal was not a time of chaos, to Taleswapper's surprise. Each child in turn reported what he did that day, and all listened, sometimes giving advice or praise. Finally, when the stew was gone and Taleswapper was dabbing at the last traces in his bowl with a sop of bread, Miller turned to him, just like he had to everyone else in the family.
“And your day, Taleswapper. Was it well spent?”
“I walked some miles before noon, and climbed a tree,” said Taleswapper. “There I saw a steeple, which led me to a town. There a Christian man feared my hidden powers, though he saw none of them, and so did a preacher, though he said he didn't believe I had any. Still, I was looking for a meal and a bed, and a chance to work to earn them, and a woman said that the folks at the end of a particular wagon track would take me in.”
“That would be our daughter Eleanor,” said Faith.
“Yes,” said Taleswapper. “I see now that she has her mother's eyes, which are always calm no matter what is happening.”
“No, friend,” said Faith. “It's just that these eyes have seen, such times that since then it hasn't been easy to alarm me.”
“I hope before I leave to hear the story of such times,” Taleswapper said.
Faith looked away as she put another slab of cheese on a grandchild's bread.
Taleswapper went right on with his account of the day, however, not wishing to show that she might have embarrassed him by not answering. “That wagon track was most peculiar,” he said. “There were covered bridges over brooks that a child could wade in, and a man could step over. I hope to hear the story of those bridges before I go.”
Again, no one would meet his gaze.
“And when I came out of the woods, I found a mill with no millstone, and two boys wrestling on a wagon, and a miller who gave me the worst throw of my life, and a family that took me in and gave me the best room in the house even though I was a stranger, and they didn't know me to be good or evil.”
“Of course you're good,” said Al Junior.
“Do you mind my asking. I've met many hospitable people in my time, and stayed in many a happy home, but not one happier than this, and no one quite so glad to see me.”
All were still around the table. Finally, Faith raised her head and smiled at him. “I'm glad you found us to be happy,” she said. “But we all remember other times as well, and perhaps our present happiness is sweeter, from the memory of grief.”
“But why do you take in a man like me?”
Miller himself answered. “Because once we were strangers, and good folk took us in.”
“I lived in Philadelphia for a time, and it strikes me to ask you, are you of the Society of Friends?”
Faith shook her head. “I'm Presbyterian. So are many of the children.”
Taleswapper looked at Miller.
“I'm nothing,” he said.
“A Christian isn't nothing,” said Taleswapper.
“I'm no Christian, either.”
“Ah,” said Taleswapper. “A Deist, then, like Tom Jefferson.” The children murmured at his mention of the great man's name.
“Taleswapper, I'm a father who loves his children, a husband who loves his wife, a farmer who pays his debts, and a miller without a millstone.” Then the man stood up from the table and walked away. They heard a door close. He was gone away outside.
Taleswapper turned to Faith. "Oh, milady, I'm afraid you must regret my coming to your house.
“You ask a powerful lot of questions,” she said.
“I told you my name, and my name is what I do. Whenever I sense that there's a story, one that matters, one that's true, I hunger for it. And if I hear it, and believe it, then I remember it forever, and tell it again wherever I go.”
“That's how you earn your way?” asked one of the girls.
“I earn my way by helping mend wagons and dig ditches and spin thread and anything else that needs doing. But my life work is tales, and I swap them one for one. You may think right now that you don't want to tell me any of your stories, and that's fine with me, because I never took a story that wasn't willingly told. I'm no thief. But you see, I've already got a story– the things that happened to me today. The kindest people and the softest bed between the Mizzipy and the Alph.”
“Where's the Alph? Is that a river?” asked Cally.
“What, you want a story?” asked Taleswapper.
Yes, clamored the children.
“But not about the river Alph,” said Al Junior. “That's not a real place.”
Taleswapper looked at him in genuine surprise. “How did you know? Have you read Lord Byron's collection of Coleridge's poetry?”
Al Junior looked around in bafflement.
“We don't get much bookstuff here,” said Faith. “The preacher gives them Bible lessons, so they can learn to read.”
“Then how did you know the river Alph isn't real?”
Al Junior scrunched his face, as if to say, Don't ask me questions when I don't even know the answer myself. “The story I want is about Jefferson. You said his name like you met him.”
“Oh, I did. And Tom Paine, and Patrick Henry before they hanged him, and I saw the sword that cut off George Washington's head. I even saw King Robert the Second, before the French sank his ship back in naught one and took him to the bottom of the sea.”
“Where he belonged,” murmured Faith.
“If not deeper,” said one of the older girls.
“I'll say amen to that. They say in Appalachee that he had so much blood on his hands that even his bones are stained brown with it, and even the most indiscriminate fish won't gnaw at them.”
The children laughed.
“Even more than Tom Jefferson,” said Al Junior, “I want a tale of the greatest American wizard. I bet you knew Ben Franklin.”