So it was that after a few months the Sorcerer’s apprentice learned well and quickly when Rubin Bailey finally began to teach. In Allan’s growth was the greatest joy. Each spell he showed proudly to his father and Richard’s friends when he traveled home once a year. Unbeknownst to the Sorcerer, he held simple exhibits for their entertainment — harmless prestidigitation like throwing his voice or levitating logs stacked by the toolshed. However pleased Richard might have been, he gave no sign. Allan’s father never joked or laughed too loudly. He was the sort of man who held his feelings in, and people took this for strength. Allan’s mother, Beatrice, a tall, thick-waisted woman, had told him (for Richard would not) how when she was carrying Allan, they rode a haywagon to a scrub-ball in Abbeville on Freedom Day. Richard fell beneath the wagon. A wheel smashed his thumb open to the bone. “Somebody better go for Rubin Bailey,” was all Richard said, and he stared like it might be a stranger’s hand. And Allan remembered Richard toiling so long in the sun he couldn’t eat some evenings unless he first emptied his stomach by forcing himself to vomit. His father squirreled away money in their mattresses, saving for seven years to buy the land they worked. When he had $600—half what they needed — he grew afraid of theft, so Beatrice took their money to one of the banks in town. She stood in line behind a northern-looking Negro who said his name was Grady Armstrong. “I work for the bank across the street,” he told Beatrice. “You wouldn’t be interested in part-time work, would you? We need a woman to clean, someone reliable, but she has to keep her savings with us.” Didn’t they need the money? Beatrice would ask Allan, later, when Richard left them alone at night. Wouldn’t the extra work help her husband? She followed Grady Armstrong, whose easy, loose-hinged walk led them to the second bank across the street. “Have you ever deposited money before?” asked Grady. “No,” she said. Taking her envelope, he said, “Then I’ll do it for you.” On the boardwalk, Beatrice waited. And waited. After five minutes, she opened the door, found no Grady Armstrong, and flew screaming the fifteen miles back to the fields and Richard, who listened and chewed his lip, but said nothing. He leaned, Allan remembered, in the farmhouse door, smoking his cigars and watching only Lord knew what in the darkness — exactly as he stood the following year, when Beatrice, after swallowing rat poison, passed on.
Allan supposed it was risky to feel if you had grown up, like Richard, in a world of nightriders. There was too much to lose. Any attachment ended in separation, grief. If once you let yourself care, the crying might never stop. So he assumed his father was pleased with his apprenticeship to Rubin, though hearing him say this would have meant the world to Allan. He did not mind that somehow the Sorcerer’s personality seemed to permeate each spell like sweat staining fresh wood, because this, too, seemed to be the way of things. The magic was Rubin Bailey’s, but when pressed, the Sorcerer confessed that the spells had been in circulation for centuries. They were a web of history and culture, like the king-sized quilts you saw as curiosities at country fairs, sewn by every woman in Abbeville, each having finished only a section, a single flower perhaps, so no man, strictly speaking, could own a mystic spell. “But when you kill a bird by pointing,” crabbed Rubin from his rocking chair, “you don’t haveta wave your left hand in the air and pinch your forefinger and thumb together like I do.”
“Did I do that?” asked Allan.
Rubin hawked and spit over the side of the houseboat. “Every time.”
“I just wanted to get it right.” Looking at his hand, he felt ashamed — he was, after all, right-handed — then shoved it deep into his breeches. “The way you do it is so beautiful.”
“I know.” Rubin laughed. He reached into his coat, brought out his pipe, and looked for matches. Allan stepped inside, and the Sorcerer shouted behind him, “You shouldn’t do it because my own teacher, who wore out fifteen flying carpets in his lifetime, told me it was wrong.”
“Wrong?” The boy returned. He held a match close to the bowl of Rubin’s pipe, cupping the flame. “Then why do you do it?”
“It works best for me that way, Allan. I have arthritis.” He slanted his eyes left at his pupil. “Do you?”
The years passed, and Allan improved, even showing a certain flair, a style all his own that pleased Rubin, who praised the boy for his native talent, which did not come from knowledge and, it struck Allan, was wholly unreliable. When Esther Peters, a seamstress, broke her hip, it was not Rubin who the old woman called, but young Allan, who sat stiffly on a fiddle-back chair by her pallet, the fingers of his left hand spread over the bony ledge of her brow and rheumy eyes, whispering the rune that lifted her pain after Esther stopped asking, “Does he know what he doing, Rubin? This ain’t how you did when I caught my hand in that cotton gin.” Afterwards, as they walked the dark footpath leading back to the river, Rubin in front, the Sorcerer shared a fifth with the boy and paid him a terrifying compliment: “That was the best I’ve seen anybody do the spell for exorcism.” He stroked his pupil’s head. “God took holt of you back there — I don’t see how you can do it that good again.” The smile at the corners of Allan’s mouth weighed a ton. He handed back Rubin’s bottle, and said, “Me neither.” The Sorcerer’s flattery, if this was flattery, suspiciously resembled Halloween candy with hemlock inside. Allan could not speak to Rubin the rest of that night.
In the old days of sorcery, it often happened that pupils came to mistrust most their finest creations, those frighteningly effortless works that flew mysteriously from their lips when they weren’t looking, and left the apprentice feeling, despite his pride, as baffled as his audience and afraid for his future — this was most true when the compliments compared a fledgling wizard to other magicians, as if the apprentice had achieved nothing new, or on his own. This is how Allan felt. The charm that cured Esther had whipped through him like wind through a reedpipe, or — more exactly, like music struggling to break free, liberate its volume and immensity from the confines of wood and brass. It made him feel unessential, anonymous, like a tool in which the spell sang itself, briefly borrowing his throat, then tossed him, Allan, aside when the miracle ended. To be so used was thrilling, but it gave the boy many bad nights. He lay half on his bed, half off. While Rubin slept, he yanked on his breeches and slipped outside. The river trembled with moonlight. Not far away, in a rowboat, a young man unbuttoned his lover. Allan heard their laughter and fought down the loneliness of a life devoted to discipline and sorcery. So many sacrifices. So many hours spent hunched over yellow, worm-holed scrolls. He pitched small pebbles into the water, and thought, If a conjurer cannot conjure at will, he is worthless. He must have knowledge, an armory of techniques, a thousand strategies, if he is to unfailingly do good. Toward this end the apprentice applied himself, often despising the spontaneity of his first achievement. He watched Rubin Bailey closely until on his fifth year on the river he had stayed by the Sorcerer too long and there was no more to learn.