Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (13 page)

“I can bring the clothes up this afternoon,” said Eleanor.

Lolla-Wossiky thought this was a very stupid idea. Red men always looked stupid dressed in White man’s clothes. But he didn’t want to argue with them because they were trying to be very friendly. And maybe the baptism would work after all, if he put on White man’s clothes. Maybe then the black noise would go away.

So he didn’t answer. He just looked at where the yellow-hair boy was running around in circles, shouting, “Alvin! Ally!” Lolla-Wossiky tried very hard to see the boy that he was chasing. He saw a foot touching the ground and raising dust, a hand moving through the air, but never quite saw the boy himself. Very strange thing.

Eleanor was waiting for him to answer. Lolla-Wossiky said nothing, since he was now watching the boy who wasn’t there. Finally Armor-of-God laughed and said, “Bring the clothes up, Eleanor. We’ll dress him like a Christian, all right, and maybe tomorrow he can lend a hand on building the church, start learning a Christian trade. Get a saw into his hand.”

Lolla-Wossiky didn’t actually hear that last, or he might have taken off into the woods right away. He had seen what happened to Red men who started using White man’s tools. The way they got cut off from the land, bit by bit, every time they hefted that metal. Even guns. A Red man starts using guns for hunting, he’s half White the first time he pulls the trigger; only thing a Red man can use a gun for is killing White men, that’s what Ta-Kumsaw always said, and he was right. But Lolla-Wossiky didn’t hear Armor talk about wanting Lolla-Wossiky to use a saw because he had just made the most remarkable discovery. When he closed his good eye, he could see that boy. Just like the one-eyed bear in the river. Open his eye, and there was the yellow-head boy chasing and shouting, but no Alvin Miller Junior. Close his eye, and there was nothing but the black noise and the traces of the green—and then, right in the middle, there was the boy, bright and shining with light as if he had the sun in his back pocket, laughing and playing with a voice like music.

And then he didn’t see him at all.

Lolla-Wossiky opened his eye. There was Reverend Thrower. Armor and Eleanor were gone—all the men were back to work on the church. It was Thrower who made the boy disappear, that was plain enough. Or maybe not—because now, with Thrower standing by him, Lolla-Wossiky could see the boy with his good eye. Just like any other child.

“Lolla-Wossiky, it occurs to me that you really ought to have a Christian name. I’ve never baptized a Red before, and so I just thoughtlessly used your uncivilized nomenclature. You’re supposed to take a new name, a Christian name. Not necessarily a saint’s name—we’re not Papists—but something to suggest your new commitment to Christ.”

Lolla-Wossiky nodded. He knew he would need a new name, if the baptism turned out to work after all. Once he met his dream beast and went back home, he would get a name. He tried to explain this to Thrower, but the White minister didn’t really understand. Finally, though, he grasped the idea that Lolla-Wossiky
wanted
a new name and meant to get one soon, so he was mollified.

“While we’re both right here, by the way,” said Thrower, “I wondered if I might examine your head. I am working on developing some orderly categorizations for the infant science of phrenology. It is the idea that particular talents and propensities in the human soul are reflected in or perhaps even caused by protuberances and depressions in the shape of the skull.”

Lolla-Wossiky didn’t have any idea what Thrower was talking about, so he nodded silently. This usually worked with White men who were talking nonsense, and Thrower was no exception. The end of it was that Thrower felt all over Lolla-Wossiky’s head, stopping now and then to make sketches and notes on a piece of paper, muttering things like “Interesting,” “Ha!” and “So much for
that
theory.” When it was over, Thrower thanked him. “You’ve contributed greatly to the cause of science, Mr. Wossiky. You are living proof that a Red man does not necessarily have the bumps of savagery and cannibalism. Instead you have the normal array of knacks and lacks that any human has. Red men are not intrinsically different from White men, at least not in any simple, easily categorized way. In fact, you have every sign of being quite a remarkable speaker, with a profoundly developed sense of religion. It is no accident that you are the first Red man to accept the gospel in my ministry here in America. I must say that your phrenological pattern has many great similarities to my own. In short, my dear new-baptized Christian, I would not be surprised if you ended up being a missionary of the gospel yourself. Preaching to great multitudes of Red men and women and bringing them to an understanding of heaven. Contemplate that vision, Mr. Wossiky. If I am not mistaken, it is your future.”

Lolla-Wossiky barely caught the gist of what Thrower said. Something about him being a preacher. Something
about telling the future. Lolla-Wossiky tried to make sense of this, but it didn’t work.

By nightfall, Lolla-Wossiky was dressed in White man’s clothes, looking like a fool His likker had worn off and he hadn’t had a chance to dodge back into the woods and get his four swallows, so the black noise was getting very bad. Worse yet, it looked to be a rainy night, so he couldn’t see with his eye, and with the black noise as bad as it was, his land sense couldn’t lead him to his keg, either.

The result was that he was staggering worse than when he had likker in him, the ground heaved and tossed so much under his feet. He fell over trying to get out of his chair at Armor’s supper table. Eleanor insisted that he had to spend the night there. “We can’t have him sleep in the woods, not when it rains,” she said, and as if to buttress her point there was a clap of thunder and rain started pelting the roof and walls. Eleanor made up a bed on the floor of the kitchen while Thrower and Armor went around the house closing shutters. Gratefully Lolla-Wossiky crawled to the bed, not even removing the stiff uncomfortable trousers and shirt, and lay down, his eye closed, trying to endure the stabbing in his head, the pain of the black noise like knives cutting out his brain slice by slice.

As usual, they thought he was asleep.

“He seems drunker than he did this morning,” said Thrower.

“I know he never left the hill,” said Armor. “There’s not a chance he got a drink anywhere.”

“I’ve heard it said that when a drunk becomes sober,” said Thrower, “at first he acts more drunk than when he has alcohol in him.”

“I hope that’s all it is,” said Armor.

“I daresay he was somewhat disappointed at the baptism today,” said Thrower. “Of course it’s impossible to understand what a savage is feeling, but—”

“I wouldn’t call him a savage, Reverend Thrower,” said Eleanor. “I think in his own way he’s civilized.”

“You might as well call a badger civilized, then,” said Thrower. “In his own
way
, anyway.”

“I mean to say,” Eleanor said, her voice even quieter
and meeker-sounding, but therefore carrying all the more weight, “that I saw him reading.”

“Turning pages you mean,” said Thrower. “He couldn’t be
reading
.”

“No. He read, and his lips formed the words,” she said. “The signs on the wall in the front room, where we serve customers. He read the words.”

“It’s possible, you know,” said Armor. “I know for a fact that the Irrakwa read just as good as any White men. I been there to do business often enough, and you can bet you have to read the fine print on the contracts they write up. Red men can learn to read, and that’s a fact.”

“But this one, this drunk—”

“Who knows what he can become, when the likker ain’t in him?” said Eleanor.

Then they went away to the other room, and left the house for a while, walking Thrower home to the cabin he was staying in before the rain got so bad he had to stay the night.

Alone in the house, Lolla-Wossiky tried to make sense of things. Baptism alone hadn’t wakened him from his dream. Nor had White man’s clothes. Maybe going without likker for a night would do it, like Eleanor suggested, though it made him crazy with pain so he couldn’t sleep.

Whatever happened, though, he knew that the dream beast was waiting somewhere near here. The white light was suffused all around him now; this was the waking place for Lolla-Wossiky. Maybe if he stayed away from the church hill today, maybe if he wandered in the woods around Vigor Church, then the dream beast could find him.

One thing was sure. He wasn’t going to spend another night without whisky. Not when he had a keg out in a crotch of a tree that could take away the black noise and let him sleep.

Lolla-Wossiky walked everywhere in the woods. He saw many animals, but they all ran from him; he was so drunk
or so bound up in the black noise that he never was part of the land, and they ran from him just as if he were White.

Discouraged, he began to drink more than four swallows, even though he knew he would run out of whisky too fast. He walked less and less in the forest, more and more along the White man’s paths and roads, showing up at farmhouses in the middle of the day. The women sometimes screamed and ran away, carrying a baby and leading children off into the woods. Other women pointed guns at him and made him leave. Some of them fed him and talked about Jesus Christ. Finally Armor-of-God told him not to visit the farms when the men were away, working on the church.

So there was nothing left for Lolla-Wossiky to do. He knew he was close to the dream beast, but he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t walk in the forest because the animals ran from him and he stumbled and fell all the time, more and more, until he feared he might break a bone and die of starvation because he couldn’t even call small animals to feed him. He couldn’t visit the farms because the men were angry. So he lay on the commons, sleeping from drunkenness or trying to endure the pain of the black noise, one or the other.

Sometimes he worked up the energy to go up the hill and see the men working on the church. Whenever he got there, some man would call out, “Here comes the Red Christian!” and Loila-Wossiky knew that there was malice and ridicule in the voices that said it and the voices that laughed.

He was not at the church the day the roof-beam fell. He was sleeping on the grass of the commons, near the porch of Armor’s house, when he heard the crash. It startled him awake, and the black noise came back harsher than ever, even though he had drunk eight swallows that morning and ought to be drunk till noon. He lay there holding his head until men started coming down from the hill, cursing and muttering about the strange thing that happened.

“What happened?” Lolla-Wossiky asked. He had to know, because whatever it was, it had made the black noise worse than it had been in years. “Was a man
killed?” He knew that a gunshot made the black noise in the first place. “Did White Murderer Harrison shoot somebody?”

At first they paid him no attention, because they thought he was drunk, of course. But finally someone told him what happened.

They had been laying the first ridgebeam in place, high on top of the building, when the central ridgepole shivered and tossed the ridgebeam up in the air. “Came down flat, just like God’s own foot stepping on the earth, and wouldn’t you know, there was that little Alvin Junior, Al Miller’s boy, right under the beam. Well, we thought he was dead. The boy just stood there, the beam landed smack—you must have heard the noise, that’s why it sounded like a gun to you—but you won’t believe this. That ridgebeam split right in half, right in the very place where Alvin was standing, split right in two and landed on this side and that side of him, didn’t touch a hair on his head.”

“Something strange about that boy,” said a man.

“He’s got a guardian angel, that’s what he’s got,” said another.

Alvin Junior. The boy he couldn’t see with his eye open.

There was no one at the church when Lolla-Wossiky got there. The ridgebeam was also gone, everything swept out, no sign of the accident. But Lolla-Wossiky was not looking with his eye. He could feel it, almost as soon as he got within sight of the church. A whirlpool, not fast at the edges, but stronger and stronger the closer he came. A whirlwind of light, and the closer he got, the weaker the black noise became. Until he stood on the church floor, in the spot that he knew was where the boy was standing. How did he know? The black noise was quieter. Not gone, the pain not healed, but Lolla-Wossiky could feel the green land again, just a little, not like it used to be, but he could feel the small life under the floor, a squirrel in the meadow not far off, things he hadn’t felt, drunk or sober, in all the years since the gun blew the black noise into his head.

Lolla-Wossiky turned around and around, seeing
nothing but the walls of the church. Until he closed his eye. Then he saw the whirlwind, yes, white light spinning and spinning around him, and the black noise retreating. He was in the end of his own dream now, and he could see with his eye closed, see clearly. There was a shining path ahead of him, a road as bright as the noonday sky, dazzling like meadow snow on a clear day. He knew already, without opening his eye to see, where the path would lead. Up the hill, down the other side, up a higher hill, to a house not far from a stream, a house where lived a White boy who was only visible to Lolla-Wossiky with his eye closed.

His silent step had returned to him, now that the black noise had backed off a bit. He walked around the house, around and around. No one heard him. Inside laughter, shouting, screaming. Happy children, quarreling children. Stern voices of parents. Except for the language, it could be his village. His own sisters and brothers in the happy days before White Murderer Harrison took his father’s life.

The White father, Alvin Miller, came out to the privy. Not long after, the boy himself came, running, as if he was afraid. He shouted at the privy door. With his eye open, Lolla-Wossiky only knew that someone was standing there, shouting. With his eye closed, he saw the boy clearly, radiant, and heard his voice like birdsong across a river, all music, even though what he said was silly, foolish, like a child.