Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III (29 page)

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Authors: Orson Scott Card

BOOK: Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III
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“My Visitor told me that Hagar had stolen away your first gift.”
“It’s Him. You’ve seen Him, too.”
“To me he comes as—not an overseer. More like a scientist—a man of unguessable wisdom. Because
I
am a scientist, I imagine, besides my vocation as a minister. I have always supposed that He was a
mere
angel—listen to me, a mere angel—because I dared not hope that He was—was the Master himself. But now what you tell me—could it be that we have both entertained the presence of our Lord? Oh, Cavil, how can I doubt it? Why else would the Lord have brought us together like this? It means that I—that I’m forgiven.”
“Forgiven?”
At Cavil’s question, Thrower’s face darkened.
Cavil hastened to reassure him. “No, you don’t need to tell me if you don’t want.”
“I—it is almost unbearable to think of it. But now that I am clearly deemed acceptable—or at least, now that I’ve been given another chance—Brother Cavil, once I was given a mission to perform, one as dark and difficult and secret as your own. Except that where you have had the courage and strength to prevail, I failed. I tried, but I had not wit or vigor enough to overcome the power of the devil. I thought I was rejected, cast off. That’s why I became a traveling preacher, for I felt myself unworthy to take a pulpit of my own. But now—”
Cavil nodded, holding the man’s hands as tears flowed down his cheek.
At last Thrower looked up at him. “How do you suppose our—Friend—meant me to help you in your work?”
“I can’t say,” said Cavil. “But there’s only one way I can think of, offhand.”
“Brother Cavil, I’m not sure if I can take upon myself that loathsome duty.”
“In my experience, the Lord strengthens a man, and makes it—bearable.”
“But in my case, Brother Cavil—you see, I’ve never known a woman, as the Bible speaks of it. Only once have my lips touched a woman’s, and that was against my will.”
“Then I’ll do my best to help you. How if we pray together good and long, and then I show you once?”
Well, that seemed like the best idea either of them could think of right offhand, and so they did it, and it turned out Reverend Thrower was a quick learner. Cavil felt a great sense of relief to have someone else join in, not to mention a kind of peculiar pleasure at having somebody watch him and then watching the other fellow in turn. It was a powerful sort of brotherhood, to have their seed mingled in the same vessel, so to speak. Like Reverend Thrower said, “When this field comes to harvest, Brother Cavil, we shall not guess whose seed came unto ripeness, for the Lord gave us this field together, for this time.”
Oh, and then Reverend Thrower asked the girl’s name. “Well, we baptized her as ‘Hepzibah,’ but she goes by the name ‘Roach.’”
“Roach!”
“They all take animal names. I reckon she doesn’t have too high an opinion of herself.”
At that, Thrower just reached over and took Roach’s hand and patted it, as kindly a gesture as if Thrower and Roach was man and wife, an idea that made Cavil almost laugh right out. “Now, Hepzibah, you must use your Christian name,” said Thrower, “and not such a debasing animal name.”
Roach just looked at him wide-eyed, lying there curled up on the mattress.
“Why doesn’t she answer me, Brother Cavil?”
“Oh, they never talk during this. I beat that out of them eariy—they always tried to talk me out of doing it. I figure better to have no words than have them say what the devil wants me to hear.”
Thrower turned back to the woman. “But now I ask you to speak to me, Roach. You won’t say devil words, will you?”
In answer, Roach’s eyes wandered upward to where part of a bedsheet was still knotted around a rafter. It had been raggedly hacked off below the knot.
Thrower’s face got kind of sick-looking. “You mean this is the room where—the girl we buried—”
“This room has the best bed,” said Cavil. “I didn’t want us doing this on a straw pallet if we didn’t have to.”
Thrower said nothing. He just left the room, pretty quick, plunging outside into the darkness. Cavil sighed, picked up the lantern, and followed him. He found Thrower leaning over the pump. He could hear Roach skittering out of the room where Salamandy died, heading for her own quarters, but he didn’t give no never mind to her. It was Thrower—surely the man wasn’t so beside himself that he’d throw up on the drinking water!
“I’m all right,” whispered Thrower. “I just—the same room—I’m not at all superstitious, you understand. It just seemed disrespectful to the dead.”
These northerners. Even when they understood somewhat about
slavery, they couldn’t get rid of their notion of Blacks as if they was people. Would you stop using a room just because a mouse died there, or you once killed a spider on the wall? Do you burn down your stable just because your favorite horse died there?
Anyway, Thrower got himself together, hitched up his trousers and buttoned them up proper, and they went back into the house. Brother Cavil put Thrower in their guest room, which wasn’t all that much used, so there was a cloud of dust when Cavil slapped the blanket. “Should have known the house slaves’d be slacking in this room,” said Brother Cavil.
“No matter,” said Thrower. “On a night this warm, I’ll need no blanket.”
On the way down the hall to his own bedroom, Cavil paused a moment to listen for his wife’s breathing. As sometimes happened, he could hear her whimpering softly in her bedroom. The pain must be bad indeed. Oh Lord, thought Cavil, how many more times must I do Thy bidding before You’ll have mercy and heal my Dolores? But he didn’t go in to her—there was nothing he could do to help her, besides prayer, and he’d need his sleep. This had been a late night, and tomorrow had work enough.
Sure enough, Dolores had had a bad night—she was still asleep at breakfast time. So Cavil ended up eating with Thrower. The preacher put away an astonishingly large portion of sausage and grits. When his plate was clean for the third time, he looked at Cavil and smiled. “The Lord’s service can give a man quite an appetite!” They both had a good laugh at that.
After breakfast, they walked outside. It happened they went near the woods where Salamandy had been buried. Thrower suggested looking at the grave, or else Cavil probably never would have known what the Blacks did in the night. There were footprints all over the grave itself, which was churned into mud. Now the drying mud was covered with ants.
“Ants!” said Thrower. “They can’t possibly smell the body under the ground.”
“No,” said Cavil. “What they’re finding is fresher and right on top. Look at that—cut-up entrails.”
“They didn’t—exhume her body and—”
“Not
her
guts, Reverend Thrower. Probably a squirrel or blackbird or something. They did a devil sacrifice last night.”
Thrower immediately began murmuring a prayer.
“They know I forbid such things,” said Cavil. “By evening, the proof of it would no doubt be gone. They’re disobeying me behind my back. I won’t have it.”
“Now I understand the magnitude of the work you slaveowners have. The devil has an iron grip upon their souls.”
“Well, never you mind. They’ll pay for it today. They want blood dropped on her grave? It’ll be their own. Mr. Lashman! Where are you! Mr. Lashman!”
The overseer had only just arrived for the day’s work.
“A little half-holiday for the Blacks this morning, Mr. Lashman,” said Cavil.
Lashman didn’t ask why. “Which ones you want whipped?”
“All of them. Ten lashes each. Except the pregnant women, of course. But even they—one lash for each of them, across the thighs. And all to watch.”
“They get a bit unruly, watching it, sir,” said Lashman.
“Reverend Thrower and I will watch also,” said Cavil.
While Lashman was off assembling the slaves, Thrower murmured something about not really wanting to watch.
“It’s the Lord’s work,” said Cavil. “I have stomach enough to watch any act of righteousness. I thought after last night that you did too.”
So they watched together as each slave in turn was whipped, the blood dripping down onto Salamandy’s grave. After a while Thrower didn’t even flinch. Cavil was glad to see it—the man wasn’t weak, after all, just a little soft from his upbringing in Scotland and his life in the North.
Afterward, as Reverend Thrower prepared to be on his way—he had promised to preach in a town a half-day’s ride south—he happened to ask Cavil a question.
“I noticed that all your slaves seem—not old, you understand, but not young, either.”
Cavil shrugged. “It’s the Fugitive Slave Treaty. Even though my farm’s prospering, I can’t buy or sell any slaves—we’re part of the United States now. Most folks keep up by breeding, but you know all my pickaninnies ended up south, till lately. And now I’ve lost me another breeder, so I’m down to five women now. Salamandy was the best. The others don’t have so many years of babies left in them.”
“It occurs to me,” said Thrower. He paused in thought.
“What occurs to you?”
“I’ve traveled a lot in the North, Brother Cavil, and in most every town in Hio and Suskwahenny and Irrakwa and Wobbish, there’s a family or two of Blacks. Now, you know and I know that they didn’t grow on northern trees.”
“All runaways.”
“Some, no doubt, have their freedom legally. But many—certainly there are many runaways. Now, I understand that it’s a custom for every slaveowner to keep a cachet of hair and nail clippings and—”
“Oh, yes, we take them from the minute they’re born or the minute we buy them. For the Finders.”
“Exactly.”
“But we can’t exactly send the Finders to walk every foot of ground in the whole North, hoping to run into one particular runaway buck. It’d cost more than the price of the slave.”
“It seems to me that the price of slaves has gone up lately.”
“If you mean that we can’t buy one at any price—”
“That’s what I mean, Brother Cavil. And what if the Finders don’t have to go blindly through the North, relying on chance? What if you arranged to hire people in the North to scour the papers and take note of the name and age of every Black they see there? Then the Finders could go armed with information.”
Well, that idea was so good that it stopped Cavil right short. “There’s got to be something wrong with that idea, or somebody’d already be doing it.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you why nobody’s done it so far. There’s a good deal of ill-feeling toward slaveowners in the North. Even though northerners hate their Black neighbors, their misguided consciences
won’t let them cooperate in any kind of slave search. So any southerner who ever went north searching for a runaway soon learned that if he didn’t have his Finder right with him, or if the trail was cold, then there was no use searching.”
“That’s the truth of it. Like a bunch of thieves up North, conspiring to keep a man from recovering his run-off stock.”
“But what if you had northerners doing the searching for you? What if you had an agent in the North, a minister perhaps, who could enlist others in the cause, who could find people who could be trusted? Such an endeavor would be expensive, but given the impossibility of
buying
new slaves in Appalachee, don’t you imagine people would be willing to pay enough to finance the work of recovering their runaways?”
“Pay? They’d pay double what you ask. They’d pay up front on the chance of you doing it.”
“Suppose I charged twenty dollars to register their runaway—birthdate, name, description, time and circumstances of escape—and then charged a thousand dollars if I provide them with information leading to recovery?”
“Fifty dollars to register, or they won’t believe you’re serious. And another fifty whenever you send them information, even if it doesn’t turn out to be the right one. And
three
thousand for runaways recovered healthy.”
Thrower smiled slightly. “I don’t wish to make an unfair profit from the work of righteousness.”
“Profit! You got a lot of folks up there to pay if you’re going to do a good job. I tell you, Thrower, you write up a contract, and then get the printer in town to run you off a thousand copies. Then you just go around and tell what you plan to one slaveowner in each town you come to in Appalachee. I reckon you’ll have to get a new printing done within a week. We’re not talking profit here, we’re talking a valuable service. Why, I’ll bet you get contributions from folks what
never
had a runaway. If you can make it so the Hio River stops being the last barrier before they get away clean, it’ll not only return old runaways, it’ll make the other slaves lose hope and stay home!”
Not half an hour later, Thrower was back outside and on his
horse—but now he had notes written up for the contract and letters of introduction from Cavil to his lawyer and to the printer, along with letters of credit to the tune of five hundred dollars. When Thrower protested that it was too much, Cavil wouldn’t even hear him out. “To get you started,” said Cavil. “We both know whose work we’re doing. It takes money. I have it and you don’t, so take it and get busy.”

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