Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (44 page)

Alvin found a brook and drank, trying not to imagine some dead body lying in it upstream. He washed his face and hands, dipped his head into the water to cool his
brain, the way he used to do at home after a hard day’s work. Then he went back to wake Ta-Kumsaw and bring him here to drink.

Ta-Kumsaw was already awake. Already standing over the body of a fallen friend. His head was tipped back, his mouth open, as if he uttered a cry so deep and loud that human ears couldn’t hear the sound of it, could only feel the earth trembling with the vibration of the shout. Alvin ran to him and flung his arms around him, clinging to him like the child he was, only it was Alvin doing the comforting, Alvin whispering, “You done your best, you done all that could be done.”

And Ta-Kumsaw answered not at all, though his silence was an answer, too, like as if he was saying, I’m alive, which means I didn’t do enough.

They walked away in the afternoon, not even bothering to conceal themselves. Some White men later woke up with hangovers, swearing they saw visions of Ta-Kumsaw and the Renegado Boy walking through the corpses of the Red army, but nobody paid them mind. And what did it matter? Ta-Kumsaw wasn’t no danger to the Whites now. He’d broken against them like a great wave, but they stood against him; he thought to shatter them, but they broke him and his people into spray, and if some drops of it still clung, what did that matter? They had no power anymore. It was all spent in one brutal, futile blow.

Alvin spoke not a word to Ta-Kumsaw all the way south to the headwaters of the My-Ammy, and Ta-Kumsaw spoke nary a word to him as they dug out a canoe together. Alvin made the wood soft in the right places, so it took scarce half an hour, and another half hour to shape a good paddle. Then they dragged the canoe to the river’s edge. Only with the canoe half in the water did Ta-Kumsaw stop and turn to Alvin, reach out a hand and touch his face. “If all White men were true like you, Alvin, I would never have been their enemy.”

And as Alvin watched Ta-Kumsaw paddle steadily down the river out of sight, it occurred to him that it just didn’t feel like Ta-Kumsaw had lost. It was as if the battle wasn’t
about
Ta-Kumsaw. It was about White men, and their worthiness to have this land. They might think they
won, they might think the Red man slunk away or bowed his head in defeat, but in fact it was the White man who lost, because when Ta-Kumsaw paddled down the Wobbish to the Hio, down the Hio to the Mizzipy, and crossed the fogs of the river to the other side, he was taking the land with him, the greensong; what the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it.

But I’m a White man, not a Red, whatever anybody might say. And rotting underfoot or not, this land is all the land we have, and our people all the people that we’ve got. So Alvin walked along the shore of the Wobbish, heading downriver, knowing that where the Tippy-Canoe discharged itself into the larger stream, there he’d find his pa and ma, his brothers and his sisters, all a-waiting there to find out what had happened to him in the year since he set out to become a prentice blacksmith back at Hatrack River.

19

Napoleon did not wear irons on his way back to France. He slept in the second cabin, and ate at table with Governor La Fayette, who was only too glad to have him. In the hot afternoons of the Atlantic crossing, La Fayette confided all his plans of revolution to Napoleon, his dearest friend, and Napoleon offered helpful advice on how to make the revolution go much faster and more effectively.

“The best thing about all these sad events,” said La Fayette the day the lookout first spied the coast of Bretagne, “is’ that we are friends now, and the revolution is assured of success because you are a part of it. To think that once I mistrusted you, figuring you to be a tool of the King. A tool of Charles! But soon all France will know you for the hero that you are, and blame the King and Freddie for the sacking of Detroit. All that territory in the hands of Protestants and savages, while we are here to offer a better way, a truer leadership to the people of France. Ah, Napoleon, I have yearned for such a man as you through all my years of planning for democracy. All we have needed, we Feuillants, was a leader, a man who could guide us, a man who could lead France to true freedom.” And La Fayette sighed and sank deeper into the cushions of his chair.

Through all this Napoleon listened with satisfaction, yes, but also sadness. For he had thought that La Fayette was immune to his charm because of some great inward
strength. Now he knew that it was only a foolish amulet, that La Fayette was like any ordinary man when it came to resisting Napoleon; and now that the amulet lay buried in a mass grave outside Detroit, no doubt still chained to the moldering vertebrae of Frederic de Maurepas, Napoleon knew that he would never find his equal in this world, unless it was God himself, or Nature. There would be no man to deny him, that much was sure. So he listened to La Fayette’s babbling with a wistful longing for the kind of man he once thought La Fayette could be.

The men on deck bustled and hurried and made ten thousand clumbing noises, for they were heaving in to land; Napoleon was home in France at last.

Ta-Kumsaw did not need to fear the thick fog that descended as he reached the Hio’s mouth, pouring into the Mizzipy and getting lost in those stronger currents. He knew the way: west, and any shore would be his refuge, his safety, the end of his life.

For that’s all that he could see ahead of him now. The land west of the Mizzipy was his brother’s land, the place where White man would not come. The land itself, the water, every living thing would work to bar those White who were foolish enough to think that the Red men could be defeated again. But it was the Prophet’s gifts the Red folk needed now, not those of a warrior like Ta-Kumsaw. He might be a figure of legend in the east, among fallen Reds and foolish Whites, but in the west they would know him for what he was. A failure, a bloody-handed man who led his people to destruction.

The water lapped at his canoe. He heard a redbird singing not far off. The fog grew whiter, dazzling; then broke, and the sun shone bright, blinding him. In three paddlestrokes his canoe nosed the shore, and there, to his surprise, was a man silhouetted in the late afternoon sun, standing on the bank. The man sprang down and took the end of Ta-Kumsaw’s canoe and pulled it tight against the riverbank, then helped Ta-Kumsaw out of the little boat. Ta-Kumsaw couldn’t see his face, his eyes were so bedazzled; but he knew who it was all the same, from the touch of the hand. And then the voice, murmuring, “Let
the canoe drift away. There’ll be no more crossing to the other side, my brother.”

“Lolla-Wossiky,” cried Ta-Kumsaw. Then he wept and knelt at his brother’s feet, clinging to his knees. All the anguish, all the grief spilled out of him, while above him Lolla-Wossiky, called Tenskwa-Tawa, called the Prophet, sang to him a song of melancholy, a song about the death of bees.

Things were changed somewhat when Alvin got to town. There was a sign right out on the Wobbish Road, saying:

Pass by, stranger, if you can.

Or hear a tale unfit for ears of man.

Well Alvin knew the purpose of that sign. But he was no stranger here.

Or was he? As he made his way along the little spur of the road toward Vigor Church, he saw that new buildings had been put up, new houses built. Folks were living pretty much cheek-by-jowl here now, and Vigor Church was a proper town. But no one greeted him in the road, and even the children a-playing in the commons had no word for him; no doubt their parents taught them not to welcome strangers, or maybe they just were sick of hearing their fathers and older brothers telling their awful tale to whatever stranger came to call. Better not to welcome any man or woman here.

And the past year had changed Alvin. He was taller, yes, but also he knew that his walk was different, more like a Red man, unaccustomed to the feel of a White man’s road beneath his feet, wishing for the greenwood song, which was near extinguished in these parts. Maybe I
am
a stranger here these days. Maybe I seen and done too much this last year to ever come back and be Alvin Junior anymore.

Even with the changes in the town, Alvin knew his way. This much hadn’t changed: there was still bridges over every little stream on the roadway up to his father’s house. Alvin tried to feel the old way, feel the anger of the water against him. But the black evil that once was his
enemy, it hardly knew him either, now that he walked like a Red man, all at one with the living world. Never mind, thought Alvin. As the land gets tame and broken, I’ll be White again in my step, and the Unmaker will find me. Just as he broke the Red man’s healing hold on this land, he’ll try to break me too, and if Ta-Kumsaw wasn’t strong enough or Tenskwa-Tawa wise enough to stand against the old Unmaker, what will I ever do?

Just make my way, day by day, like the old hymn said. Make my way, day by day, Lord above, light and love, in my grief bring relief, fill my cup, lift me up, heal my soul, make me whole. Amen. Amen.

Cally was a-standing there right on the porch, doing nothing, like as if he was just watching out in case Alvin Junior should come home today, and maybe that’s what he was doing, maybe it was. Anyway it was Cally shouted out, Cally who knew him at once despite all changes in him.

“Alvin! Ally! Alvin Junior! He’s home! You’re home!”

First one to come at his call, running around the house with his sleeves up and the ax still trailing from his hand, was Measure. Soon as he saw it was truly Alvin, he dropped the ax and took Alvin Junior by the shoulders, looked him over for any harm, and Alvin done the same, looking for any scars on Measure. None at all, healed proper. But Measure found some deeper injuries in Alvin, and softly said, “You got older, Al.” To which Alvin had nary a thing to say, it being true, and for a moment they just stared into each other’s eyes, each knowing how far down the long road of the Red man’s suffering and exile the other had walked; no other White man could ever know what they knew.

Then Ma came out onto the porch and Pa out of the mill and up to the house, and oh, there was hugging and kissing and crying and laughing and shouting and silence. They didn’t kill the fatted calf, but there was a young pig didn’t see another sunrise. Cally ran to the brothers’ farms and Armor-of-God’s store and gave notice what was up, and soon all the family was gathered to greet Alvin Junior,
who they knew wasn’t dead but had given up hope of seeing again.

And then, as it was getting late, there came a time when Pa hid his hands in his pockets, and the other men-folk all grew still, and then the womenfolk, till Alvin nodded and said, “I know the tale you have to tell. So tell it now, all of you, and then I’ll tell you my part in it.”

They did, and he did, and there was more weeping, of grief this time instead of joy. This valley of the Wobbish was all the home they’d ever know now; it was the only way they could bear to live, all the folk who’d done murder at Tippy-Canoe, was right among each other and seeing no strangers. Where could they go and live in peace, what with having to tell all comers what it was they done? “So we got to stay, Al Junior. But not you or Cally, you know. And maybe your apprenticeship is still a thing that we can do, what do you think?”

“Time to think of that later,” said Ma. “Time for all those questions later. He’s home, that’s all for now, you hear me? He’s home, who I never thought to lay eyes on again. Thank the Lord God that he didn’t make me a prophet, when I said I’d never lay eyes on my sweet little Alvin anymore.”

Alvin hugged his ma back just as hard as she hugged him. He didn’t tell her that her prophecy was true. That it wasn’t her sweet little Alvin who’d come home this time. Let her find that out on her own. Right now it was enough that the year was over, that he’d seen the unwinding of all the great changes, that now, however different it might be, however bitter, life could go on in a steady path, with no more breaking of the ground underfoot.