Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (55 page)

“I think the name should be Becca,” said Peggy.

“I was thinking to call her after you. Call her Little Peggy.”

Peggy smiled. “Becca Margaret, then?”

Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. “People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That’s nothing. We name them.”

He helped her up into the carriage, beside Taleswapper, who
already had the reins in hand. Arthur Stuart led Alvin’s horse to him, and as he mounted, the boy said, “We made up a song about us last night, while you two was upstairs!”

“A song?” said Alvin. “Let’s hear it then.”

“We made it up like as if it was you singing it,” said Arthur Stuart. “Come on, you all got to sing! And at the end I made up a chorus all by myself, I made up the last part
alone
without
no help
from
nobody
.”

Alvin reached down and hauled the boy up behind him. Arthur Stuart’s arms went around his middle. “Come on,” the boy shouted. “Let’s all sing.”

As they began the song, Alvin reached down and took hold of the harness of the carriage’s lead horse, starting the parade up the road leading out of Chapman Valley.

A young man startin’ on his own
Must leave his home so fair.
Better not go wand’rin’ all alone
Or you might get eaten by a bear!

I’m wise enough to heed that song,
But who’ll make up my pair?
If I choose my boon companion wrong
Then I might get eaten by a bear!

I’ll take a certain mixup lad
—
He’s small, but does his share
—
And I’ll watch him close, cause I’d be sad
If the boy got eaten by a bear!

I’ll take along this barrister
With lofty learned air,
And I’ll make of him a forester
So he won’t get eaten by a bear!

Behold this noble river rat
With brag so fine and rare!
He’s as dangerous as a mountain cat
—
He will
not
get eaten by a bear!

Now off we go, where’er we please.
We’re heroes, so we dare
To defy mosquitoes, wasps, and fleas,
And we won’t get eaten by a bear!

They reached the main road and Peggy turned right, heading north, while the men took their horses south. She waved from the driver’s seat, but did not look back. Alvin stopped to watch her, just for a moment, just for a lingering moment, as Arthur Stuart behind him shouted, “Now I get to sing the last part that I made up all by myself! I get to!”

“So sing it,” said Alvin.

So Arthur Stuart sang.

Grizzly bear, grizzly bear,
Run and hide, you sizzly bear!
We’ll take away your coat of hair
And roast you in your underwear!

Alvin laughed till tears streamed down his face.

  19  

When Calvin’s and Honoré’s ship arrived in New Amsterdam, the newspapers were full of chat about the inauguration, which was only a week away in Philadelphia. Calvin remembered Harrison’s name at once—how many times had he listened to the tale of the massacre at Tippy-Canoe? He remembered meeting the bloody-handed bum on the streets of New Amsterdam, and told the tale to Honoré.

“So you created him.”

“I helped him make the best of his limited possibilities,” said Calvin.

“No, no,” said Honoré. “You are too modest. This man created himself as a monster who killed people for political gain. Then this Red prophet destroyed him with a curse. Then, from the hopeless ruin of his life, you turned his path upward again. Calvin, you finally impress me. You have achieved, in life, that infinite power which is usually reserved to the novelist.”

“The power to use up enormous amounts of paper and ink to no avail?”

“The power to make people’s lives take the most illogical turns. Parents, for instance, have no such power. They can help their children along, or, more likely, shatter their lives as someone’s mother once did with her casual adultery even as she abandoned her child to the tender mercies of the boarding school. But such parents have no power then to heal the child they have injured. Having brought the child low, they cannot raise the child up. But
I
can bring a man low, then raise him up, then bring him low again, all with a stroke of the pen.”

“And so can I,” said Calvin thoughtfully.

“Well, to a degree,” said Honoré. “To be honest, however, you did not bring him low, and now, having raised him up, I doubt you can bring him low again. The man has been elected president, even if his domain consists primarily of trees and tree-dwelling beasts.”

“There’s several million people in the United States,” said Calvin.

“It was to them that I referred,” said Honoré.

The challenge was too much for Calvin to resist. Could he bring down the president of the United States? How would he do it? This time there could be no scornful words that would provoke him into self-destruction, as Calvin’s words had helped the man resurrect himself from shameful oblivion. But then, Calvin had learned to do much more subtle things than mere talk in the many months since then. It would be a challenge. It was almost a dare.

“Let’s go to Philadelphia,” said Calvin. “For the inauguration.”

Honoré was perfectly happy to board the train and go along. He was amused by the size and newness of the tiny towns that Americans referred to as “cities,” and Calvin constantly had to watch out for him as he practiced his feeble English with the kind of rough American who was likely to pick up the little Frenchman and toss him into a river. Honoré, armed only with an ornate cane he had purchased from a fellow-voyager, had fearlessly walked through the most wretched immigrant districts
of New Amsterdam and now of Philadelphia. “These men aren’t characters in novels,” said Calvin, more than once. “If they break your neck, it’ll really be broken!”

“Then you’ll have to fix me, my talented knackish friend.” He said the word
knackish
in English, though truth to tell no one would have understood the word but Calvin himself.

“There’s no such word as
knackish
in the English language,” Calvin said.

“There is now,” said Honoré, “because I put it there.”

As Calvin awaited the inauguration, he considered many possible plans. Nothing with mere words would do the job. Harrison’s election had been so openly based on lies that it was hard to imagine how anything could now be revealed about Harrison that would shock or disappoint anyone. When the people elected a president like this one, who ran a campaign like the one he ran, it was hard to imagine what kind of scandal might bring him down.

Besides, Calvin’s knack was now way beyond words. He wanted to get inside Harrison’s body and do some mischief. He remembered Napoleon and how he suffered from the gout; he toyed with the idea of giving Harrison some debilitating condition. Regretfully he concluded that this was beyond his power, to fine-tune such a thing so that it would cause pain without killing. No doubt Calvin would have to wait around to watch, to make sure that whatever he did wasn’t cured. And besides, pain wouldn’t bring Harrison low any more than gout had stopped Napoleon from fulfilling all his ambitions.

Pain without killing. Why had he put such a ridiculous limitation on himself? There was no reason not to kill Harrison. Hadn’t the man ordered the death of Calvin’s own brother Measure? Hadn’t he slaughtered all those Reds and caused all of Calvin’s family and neighbors to be under a curse for most of Calvin’s life? Nothing brought a man lower than dying. Six feet under the ground, that was as low as a body ever got.

The day of the inauguration, the first day of the new year, was bitterly cold, and as Harrison walked through the streets
of Philadelphia to the temporary stand where he would take the oath in front of several thousand spectators, it began to snow. Proudly he refused even to put on a hat—what was cold weather to a man from the west?—and when he reached the platform to give his speech, Calvin was delighted to see that the new president’s throat was already sore, his chest already somewhat congested. It was really a simple matter of Calvin to send his doodling bug inside the chest of White Murderer Harrison and encourage the little animals inside his lungs to grow, to multiply, to spread throughout his body. Harrison, you’re going to be one very, very sick man.

The speech lasted an hour, and Harrison didn’t cut out a single word, though by the end he was coughing thickly into his handkerchief after every sentence. “Philadelphia is colder to hell,” Honoré said in his feeble English as they finally left the square. “And your President he is one dammit long talker.” Then, in French, Honoré asked, “Did I say it right? Did I swear properly?”

“Like a stevedore,” said Calvin. “Like a river rat. I was proud of you.”

“I was proud of you too,” said Honoré. “You looked so serious, I thought maybe you were paying attention to his speech. Then I thought, No, the lad is using his powers. So I hoped you might sever his head as he stood there and make it roll down splat on his speech. Let him put his hands on
that
to take his oath of office.”

“That would have been a memorable inauguration,” said Calvin.

“But it wouldn’t be good for you to take another man’s life,” said Honoré. “All joking aside, my friend, it isn’t good for a man to get a taste for blood.”

“My brother Alvin killed a man,” said Calvin. “He killed a man who needed killing, and nobody said boo to him about it.”

“Dangerous for him, but perhaps more dangerous for you,” said Honoré. “Because you are already filled with hate—I say
this not as criticism, it’s one of the things I find most attractive about you—you are filled with hate, and so it is dangerous for you to open the faucet of murder. That is a stream you may not be able to damp.”

“Not to worry,” said Calvin.

They lingered in Philadelphia for several more weeks, as Harrison’s bad cold turned into pneumonia. He struggled on, being something of a tough old nut, but in the end he died, scarcely a month after his inauguration, having never been healthy enough even to name a cabinet.

This being the first time a president of the United States had died in office, there was some unresolved ambiguity in the Constitution about whether the vice-president merely acted as president or actually took the office. Andrew Jackson neatly resolved the issue by walking into Congress and placing his hand on the Bible they kept there as a reminder of all the virtues they worked so hard to get the voters to believe they possessed. In a loud voice he took the oath of office in front of all of them, daring them to deny him the right to do so. There were jokes about “His Accidency the President” for a while, but Jackson wasn’t a man to be trifled with. All of Harrison’s cronies found themselves with sore backsides from bouncing down the steps of the George Washington Building where the executive branch of the government had its offices. Whatever Harrison had planned for America would never happen now, or at least not in the way that he had planned it. Jackson was in nobody’s pocket but his own.

Calvin and Honoré agreed that they had done a great service for the nation. “Though my part of it was very small,” said Honoré. “A mere word. A suggestion.” Calvin knew, however, that in his own heart Honoré undoubtedly took credit for the whole thing, or at least for everything beneficial that resulted from it. That knowledge scarcely bothered Calvin, though. Nothing really bothered him now, for his power had been confirmed in his own heart. I brought down a president and no one knew that I did it. Nothing messy or awkward like Alvin’s
killing of that Finder with his own bare hands. I learned more than the honing of my knack on the continent. I acquired finesse. Alvin will never have that, crude frontiersman that he is and always will be.

How easy it had been. Easy and free of risk. There was a man who needed to die, and all it took was a little maneuvering in his lungs and it was done. Well, that plus a few adjustments as the man lay in his sickbed in the presidential mansion. It wouldn’t do to have his body fight off the infection and recover, would it? But I never had to touch him. Never even had to speak to him. Didn’t even have to get ink on my fingers, like poor Honoré, whose characters never really breathe despite all his skill, and so never really die.