Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (41 page)

All that time, Ta-Kumsaw had been talking to Becca in his Isaac voice, and she to him in her deep melodious way of speech, which had just the slightest hint of foreignness to it, like some of the Dutch in the area around Vigor Church, who’d been in America all their lives but still had a trace of the old country in their talk. Only now, with Alvin standing by the loom and the food on a low table with three chairs around it, only now did he pay attention to what they were saying, and that only because he wanted so badly to ask Becca what all this cloth was
for
, seeing as
how she must have been weaving at it for more than a year, to have it so long, without never once taking shears to it to make something out of it. It was what Ma always called a shameful waste, to have something and make no use of it, like Dally Framer’s pretty singing voice, which she sang with all day at home but wouldn’t ever join in singing hymns at church.

“Eat,” said Ta-Kumsaw. And when he spoke so bluntly to Alvin, his voice lost that Englishness; he was the real Ta-Kumsaw again, It set Alvin’s mind to rest, knowing that there wasn’t some witchery at work, that Ta-Kumsaw just had two different ways of talking; but of course that also set more questions into Alvin’s mind, about how Ta-Kumsaw ever learned such talk. Alvin never even heard so much as a rumor about Ta-Kumsaw having White friends in Appalachee, and you’d think a tale like that would be known. Though it wasn’t hard to guess why Ta-Kumsaw wouldn’t want it noised around much. What would all those het-up Reds think if they saw Ta-Kumsaw here and now? What would it do to Ta-Kumsaw’s war?

And come to think of it, how could Ta-Kumsaw wage such a war, if he had true White friends like the folk of this valley? Surely the land was dead here, at least as the Reds knew it. How could Ta-Kumsaw bear it? It left such a hunger in Alvin that even though he packed bread and cheese down his throat till his belly poked out, he still felt a gnawing inside him, a need to get back to the woodland and feel the song of the land inside himself.

The meal was filled with Becca’s pleasant chatter about doings in the valley, her saying names that meant nothing to Alvin, except any one of them could have been the name of a body back in Vigor Church—there was even folks named Miller, which was natural, seeing how a valley this size no doubt had more than one miller’s worth of grain to grind.

The old man came back to clear away.

“Did you come to see my cloth?” asked Becca.

Ta-Kumsaw nodded. “That’s half why I came.”

Becca smiled, and led him to the loom. She sat on her weaving stool and gathered the newest cloth up into her lap. She started about three yards from the lip of the loom.
“Here,” she said. “The gathering of your folk to Prophetstown.”

Alvin saw how she passed her hand over a whole bunch of threads that seemed to climb out of their proper warp and migrate across the cloth to gather up near the edge.

“Reds from every tribe,” she said. “The strongest of your people.”

Even though the fibers tended to be greenish, they were indeed heavier than most threads, strong and taut. Becca fed the cloth farther down her lap. The gathering grew stronger and clearer, and the threads turned brighter green. How could threads change color that way? And how with the machinery of the loom could the warp shift like that?

“And now the Whites that gathered against them,” she said.

And sure enough, another group of threads, tighter to start with, but gathering, knotting up a little. To Alvin’s eyes it looked like the cloth was a ruin, the threads all tangled and bunched—who’d wear a shirt made of such stuff as that?—and the colors made no sense, all jumbled together without no effort to make a pattern or any kind of regular order.

Ta-Kumsaw reached out his hand and pulled the cloth toward himself. Pulled until he exposed a place were all those pure green threads just went slack and then stopped, most of them. The warp of the cloth was spare and thin, then, maybe one thread for every ten there used to be, like a worn-down raggedy patch in the elbow of an old shirt, so when you bent your elbow maybe a dozen threads made lines across your skin one direction, and no threads at all the other way.

If the green threads stood for Prophetstown, there couldn’t be no mistake what was going on here. “Tippy-Canoe,” Alvin murmured. Now he knew the order of this cloth.

Becca bent over the cloth and tears dropped from her eyes straight down on it.

Tearless, Ta-Kumsaw pulled the cloth again, steadily. Alvin saw the rest of the green threads, the few that remained
from the massacre at Tippy-Canoe, migrate to the edge of the cloth and stop. The cloth was narrower by that many threads. Only now there was another gathering, and the threads were not green. They were mostly black.

“Black with hate,” said Becca. “You are gathering your people with hate.”

“Can you imagine conducting a war with love?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.

“That’s a reason to refuse to make war at all,” she said gently.

“Don’t talk like a White woman,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

“But she is one,” said Alvin, who thought she made perfect sense.

They both looked at Alvin, Ta-Kumsaw impassively, Becca with—amusement? Pity? Then they returned to the cloth.

Very quickly they came to where the cloth hung over the beam, then fed out of the loom. Along the way, the black threads of Ta-Kumsaw’s army worked closer together, knotted, intertwined. And other threads, some blue, some yellow, some black, all gathered in another place, the fabric bunching up something awful. It was thicker, but it didn’t seem to Alvin that it was a speck stronger. Weaker, if anything. Less useful. Less trustworthy.

“This cloth ain’t going to be worth much, if this goes on,” said Alvin.

Becca smiled grimly. “Truer words were never spoken, lad.”

“If this is about a year’s worth of story,” said Alvin, “you must have two hundred years all gathered up here.”

Becca cocked her head. “More than that,” she said.

“How do you find out all that’s going on, to make it all go into the cloth?”

“Oh, Alvin, there’s some things folks just do, without knowing how,” she said.

“And if you change the threads around, can’t you make things go different?” Alvin had in mind a careful rearrangement, spreading the threads out more even-like, and getting those black threads farther apart from each other.

“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “I don’t make things happen, with what I do here. Things that happen, they change
me.
Don’t fret about it, Alvin.”

“But there wasn’t even White folks in this part of America more than two hundred years ago. How can this cloth go farther back?”

She sighed. “Isaac, why did you bring him to plague me with questions?”

Ta-Kumsaw smiled at her.

“Lad, will you tell no one?” she asked. “Will you keep it secret who I am and what I do?”

“I promise.”

“I weave, Alvin. That’s all. My whole family, from before we even remember, we’ve been weavers.”

“That your name, then? Becca Weaver? My brother-in-law, Armor-of-God, his pa’s a Weaver, and—”

“Nobody
calls
us weavers,” said Becca. “If they had any name for us at all, they’d call us—no.”

She wouldn’t tell him.

“No, Alvin, I can’t put such a burden on you. Because you’d want to come. You’d want to come and see—”

“See what?” asked Alvin.

“Like Isaac here. I should never have told him, either.”

“He kept the secret, though. Never breathed a word.”

“He didn’t keep it secret from himself, though. He came to see.”

“See what?” Alvin asked again.

“See how long are the threads a-flowing up into my loom.”

Only then did Alvin notice the back end of the loom, where the warp threads were gathered into place by a rack of fine steel wires. The threads weren’t colored at all. They were raw white. Cotton? Surely not wool. Linen, maybe. With all the colors in the finished cloth, he hadn’t really noticed what it was made of.

“Where do the colors come from?” asked Alvin.

No one answered.

“Some of the threads go slack.”

“Some of them end,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

“Many of them end,” said Becca. “And many begin. It’s the pattern of life.”

“What do you see, Alvin?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.

“If these black threads are your folk,” said Alvin, “then I’d say there’s a battle coming, and a lot are going to die. Not like Tippy-Canoe, though. Not as bad.”

“That’s what I see, too,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

“And these other colors all bunched up, what are they? An army of White folk?”

“Word is that a man named Andrew Jackson of the western Tennizy country is gathering up an army. They call him Old Hickory.”

“I know the man,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “He doesn’t stay in the saddle too well.”

“He’s been doing with White folks what you’ve been doing with Red, Isaac. He’s been going up and down the western country, rousting people out and haranguing them about the Red Menace. About
you
, Isaac. For every Red soldier you’ve gathered, he’s recruited two Whites. And he figures you’ll go north, to join with a French army. He knows all your plans.”

“He knows nothing,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Alvin, tell me, how many threads of this White army end?”

“A lot. More, maybe. I don’t know. It’s about even.”

“Then it tells me nothing.”

“It tells you that you’ll have your battle,” said Becca. “It tells you that there’ll be more blood and suffering in the world, thanks to you.”

“But it says nothing of victory,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

“It never does.”

Alvin wondered if you could just tie another thread onto the end of one of the broken ones, and save somebody’s life. He looked for the spools of thread from which the warp was formed, but he couldn’t find them. The threads hung down from the back beam of the loom, taut like there was a heavy weight hanging on them, but Alvin couldn’t see where the threads came from. They didn’t touch the floor. They didn’t exactly stop, either. He looked this far, and there they were, hanging tight and
long; and he looked this much farther, and there weren’t no threads, nothing there at all. The threads were just coming out of nowhere, and there was no way the human eye could see or make sense of how they started.

But Alvin, he could see with other eyes, inward eyes, the way he studied into the tiny workings of the human body, into the cold inward currents of stone. And with that hidden vision he looked into a single thread and traced its shape, following how the fibers wound around and through, twisting and gripping each other to make the strength of the yarn. This time he could just keep following the thread. Just keep on following until finally, far beyond the place where the threads all disappeared to natural eyes, the thread ended. Whosever soul that thread bespoke, he had a good long life ahead of him, before he died.

All these threads must end, when the person dies. And somehow a new thread must start up when a baby got born. Another thread coming out of nowhere.

“It never ends,” said Becca. “I’ll grow old and die, Alvin, but the cloth will go on.”

“Do you know which thread is you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”

“I reckon I’d like to see. I want to know how many years I got.”

“Many,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Or few. All that matters is what you do with however many years you have.”

“It does too matter how long I live,” said Alvin. “Don’t go saying it don’t, cause you don’t believe that yourself.”

Becca laughed.

“Miss Becca,” said Alvin, “what do you do this for, if you don’t make things happen?”

She shrugged. “It’s a work. Everybody has a work to do, and this is mine.”

“You could go out and weave things for folks to wear.”

“To wear and then wear out,” she said. “And no, Alvin, I can’t go out.”

“You mean you stay indoors all the time?”

“I stay here, always,” she said. “In this room, with my loom.”

“I begged you once to go with me,” said Isaac.

“And I begged you once to stay.” She smiled up at him.

“I can’t live forever where the land is dead.”

“And I can’t live a moment away from my cloth. The way the land lives in your mind, Isaac, that is how the lives of all the souls of America live in mine. But I love you. Even now.”

Alvin felt like he shouldn’t be there. It was like they forgot he was there, even though he’d just been talking to them. It finally dawned on him that they’d probably rather be alone. So he moved away, walked over to the cloth again, and again began tracing its path, the opposite direction this time, scanning quickly but carefully, up the walls, through the bolts and piles, searching for the earliest end of the cloth.

Couldn’t find it. In fact, he must have been looking the wrong direction or got himself twisted up, because pretty soon he found himself on the same familiar path he had followed, the path that first led him to the loom. He reversed direction, and after a short time he found himself again on the path to the loom. He could no more search backward to find the oldest end of the cloth than he could search forward to find where the newest threads were coming from.

He turned again to Ta-Kumsaw and Becca. Whatever whispered conversation they had carried on was over. Ta-Kumsaw sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, his head bowed. She was stroking his hair with gentle hands.

“This cloth is older than the oldest part of this house,” said Alvin.

Becca didn’t answer.

“This cloth’s been going on forever.”

“As long as men and women have known how to weave, this cloth has passed through the loom.”

“But not this loom. This loom’s new,” said Alvin.

“We change looms from time to time. We build the new one around the old. It’s what the men of our kind do.”

“This cloth is older than the oldest White settlements in America,” said Alvin.

“It was once a part of a larger cloth. But one day, back in our old country, we saw a large portion of the threads moving off the edge of the cloth. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather built anew loom. We had the threads we needed. They pulled away from the old cloth; we continued it from there. It’s still connected up—that’s what you’re seeing.”