At once the Overseer recoiled, putting up his hand as if to fend off Cavil’s words. “It is forbidden for any man to call me by that name!” he cried.
In terror, Cavil bowed his head to the dirt. “Forgive me, Overseer! But if I am unworthy to say your name, how is it I can look upon your face? Or am I doomed to die today, unforgiven for my sins?”
“Woe unto you, fool,” said the Overseer. “Do you really believe that you have looked upon my
face?”
Cavil lifted his head and looked at the man. “I see your eyes even now, looking down at me.”
“You see the face that you invented for me in your own mind, the body conjured out of your own imagination. Your feeble wits could never comprehend what you saw, if you saw what I truly am. So your sanity protects itself by devising its own mask to put upon me. If you see me as an Overseer, it is because that is the guise you recognize as having the greatness and power I possess. It is the form that you at once love and fear, the shape that makes you worship and recoil. I have been called by many names. Angel of Light and Walking Man, Sudden Stranger and Bright Visitor, Hidden One and Lion of War, Unmaker of Iron and Water-bearer. Today you have called me Overseer, and so, to you, that is my name.”
“Can I ever know your true name, or see your true face, Overseer?”
The Overseer’s face became dark and terrible, and he opened his
mouth as if to howl. “Only one soul alive in all the world has ever seen my true shape, and that one will surely die!”
The mighty words came like dry thunder and shook Cavil Planter to his very root, so that he gripped the dirt of the shed floor lest he fly off into the air like dust whipped away in the wind before the storm. “Do not strike me dead for my impertinence!” cried Cavil.
The Overseer’s answer came gentle as morning sunlight. “Strike you dead? How could I, when you are a man I have chosen to receive my most secret teachings, a gospel unknown to priest or minister.”
“Me?”
“Already I have been teaching you, and you understood. I know you desire to do as I command. But you lack faith. You are not yet completely mine.”
Cavil’s heart leapt within him. Could it be that the Overseer meant to give him what he gave to Abraham? “Overseer, I am unworthy.”
“Of course you are unworthy. None is worthy of me, no, not one soul upon this earth. But still, if you obey, you may find favor in my eyes.”
Oh, he will! cried Cavil in his heart, yes, he will give me the woman! “Whatever you command, Overseer.”
“Do you think I would give you Hagar because of your foolish lust and your hunger for a child? There is a greater purpose. These Black people are surely the sons and daughters of God, but in Africa they lived under the power of the devil. That terrible destroyer has polluted their Mood—why else do you think they are Black? I can never save them as long as each generation is born pure Black, for then the devil owns them. How can I reclaim them as my own, unless you help me?”
“Will my child be born White then, if I take the girl?”
“What matters to me is that the child will not be born pure Black. Do you understand what I desire of you? Not one Ishmael, but many children; not one Hagar, but many women.”
Cavil hardly dared to name the secretest desire of his heart. “All of them?”
“I give them to you, Cavil Planter. This evil generation is your property. With diligence. you can prepare another generation that will belong to me.”
“I will, Overseer!”
“You must tell no one that you saw me. I speak only to those whose desires already turn toward me and my works, the ones who already thirst for the water I bring.”
“I’ll speak no word to any man, Overseer!”
“Obey me, Cavil Planter, and I promise that at the end of your life you will meet me again and know me for what I truly am. In that moment I will say to you, You are mine, Cavil Planter. Come and be my true slave forever.”
“Gladly!” cried Cavil. “Gladly! Gladly!”
He flung out his arms and embraced the Overseer’s legs. But where he should have touched the visitor, there was nothing. He had vanished.
From that night on. Cavil Planter’s slavewomen had no peace. As Cavil had them brought to him by night, he tried to treat them with the strength and mastery he had seen in the face of the fearful Overseer. They must look at me and see His face, thought Cavil, and it’s sure they did.
The first one he took unto himself was a certain newbought slavegirl who had scarce a word of English. She cried out in terror until he raised the welts upon her that he had seen in his dreams. Then, whimpering, she permitted him to do as the Overseer had commanded. For a moment, that first time, he thought her whimpering was like Dolores’s voice when she wept so quietly in bed, and he felt the same deep pity that he had felt for his beloved wife. Almost he reached out tenderly to the girl as he had once reached out to comfort Dolores. But then he remembered the face of the Overseer and thought, this Black girl is His enemy; she is my property. As surely as a man must plow and plant the land God gave to him, I must not let this Black womb lie fallow.
Hagar, he called her that first night. You do not understand how I am blessing you.
In the morning he looked in the mirror and saw something new
in his face. A kind of fierceness. A kind of terrible hidden strength. Ah, thought Cavil, no one ever saw what I truly am, not even me. Only now do I discover that what the Overseer is, I also am.
He never felt another moment’s pity as he went about his nightly work. Ashen cane in hand, he went to the women’s cabin and pointed at the one who was to come with him. If any hung back, she learned from the cane how much reluctance cost. If any other Black, man or woman, spoke in protest, the next day Cavil saw to it that the Overseer took it out of them in blood. No White guessed and no Black dared accuse him.
The newbought girl, his Hagar, was first to conceive. He watched her with pride as her belly began to grow. Cavil knew then that the Overseer had truly chosen him, and he took fierce joy in having such mastery. There would be a child,
his
child. And already the next step was clear to him. If his White blood was to save as many Black souls as possible, then he could not keep his mix-up babes at home, could he? He would sell them south, each to a different buyer, to a different city, and then trust the Overseer to see that they in turn grew up and spread his seed throughout all the unfortunate Black race.
And each morning he watched his wife eat her breakfast. “Cavil, my love,” she said one day, “is something wrong? There’s something darker in your face, a look of—rage, perhaps, or cruelty. Have you quarreled with someone? I would not speak except you —you frighten me.”
Tenderly he patted his wife’s twisted hand as the Black woman watched him under heavy-lidded eyes. “I have no anger against any man or woman,” said Cavil gently. “And what you call cruelty is nothing more than mastery. Ah, Dolores, how can you look in my face and call me cruel?”
She wept. “Forgive me,” she cried. “I imagined it. You, the kindest man I’ve ever heard of—the devil put such a vision in my mind, I know it. The devil can give false visions, you know, but only the wicked are deceived. Forgive me for my wickedness, Husband!”
He forgave her, but she wouldn’t stop her weeping until he had
sent for the priest. No wonder the Lord chose only men to be his prophets. Women were too weak and compassionate to do the work of the Overseer.
That’s how it began. That was the first footfall on this dark and terrible path. Nor Alvin nor Peggy ever knew this tale until I found it out and told them both long after, and they recognized at once that it was the start of all.
But I don’t want you to think this was the whole cause of all the evil that befell, for it wasn’t. There were other choices made, other mistakes, other lies and other willing cruelties done. A man might have plenty of help finding the short path to hell, but no one else can make him set foot upon it.
Runaway
PEGGY WOKE UP in the morning with a dream of Alvin Miller filling her heart with all kinds of terrible desires. She wanted to run from that boy, and to stay and wait for him; to forget she knew him, and to watch him always.
She lay there on her bed with her eyes almost closed, watching the grey dawnlight steal into the attic room where she slept. I’m holding something, she noticed. The corners of it clenched into her hands so tight that when she let go her palm hurt like she been stung. But she wasn’t stung. It was just the box where she kept Alvin’s birth caul. Or maybe, thought Peggy, maybe she
had
been stung, stung deep, and only just now did she feel the pain of it.
Peggy wanted to throw that box just as far from her as she could, bury it deep and forget where she buried it, drown it underwater and pile rocks on so it wouldn’t float.
Oh, but I don’t mean that, she said silently, I’m sorry for thinking such a thing, I’m plain sorry, but he’s coming now, after all these years he’s coming to Hatrack River and he won’t be the boy I seen in all the paths of his future, he won’t be the man I see him turning
into. No, he’s still just a boy, just eleven years old. He’s seen him enough of life that somewise maybe he’s a man inside, he’s seen grief and pain enough for someone five times his age, but it’s still an eleven-year-old boy he’ll be when he walks into this town.
And I don’t want to see no eleven-year-old Alvin come here. He’ll be looking for me, right enough. He knows who I am, though he never saw me since he was two weeks old. He knows I saw his future on the rainy dark day when he was born, and so he’ll come, and he’ll say to me, “Peggy, I know you’re a torch, and I know you wrote in Taleswapper’s book that I’m to be a Maker. So tell me what I’m supposed to be.” Peggy knew just what he’d say, and every way he might choose to say it—hadn’t she seen it a hundred times, a thousand times? And she’d teach him and he’d become a great man, a true Maker, and—
And then one day, when he’s a handsome figure of twenty-one and I’m a sharp-tongued spinster of twenty-six he’ll feel so
grateful
to me, so
obligated,
that he’ll propose himself for marriage to me as his bounden duty. And I, being lovesick all these years, full of dreams of what he’ll do and what we’ll be together, I’ll say yes, and saddle him with a wife he wished he didn’t have to marry, and his eyes will hunger for other women all the days of our lives together—
Peggy wished, oh she wished so deep, that she didn’t know for certain things would be that way. But Peggy was a torch right enough, the strongest torch she’d ever heard of, stronger even than the folk hereabouts in Hatrack River ever guessed.
She sat up in bed and did not throw the box or hide it or break it or bury it. She opened it. Inside lay the last scrap of Alvin’s birth caul, as dry and white as paper ash in a cold hearth. Eleven years ago when Peggy’s mama served as midwife to pull baby Alvin out of the well of life, and Alvin first sucked for breath in the damp air of Papa’s Hatrack River roadhouse, Peggy peeled that thin and bloody caul from the baby’s face so he could breathe. Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son, and the thirteenth child—Peggy saw at once what the paths of his life would be. Death, that was where
he was headed, death from a hundred different accidents in a world that seemed bent on killing him even before he was hardly alive.
She was Little Peggy then, a girl of five, but she’d been torching for two years already, and in that time she never did a seeing on a birthing child who had so many paths to death. Peggy searched up all the paths of his life, and found in all of them but one single way that boy could live to be a man.
That was if she kept that birth caul, and watched him from afar off, and whenever she saw death reaching out to take him, she’d use that caul. Take just a pinch of it and grind it between her fingers and whisper what had to happen, see it in her mind. And it would happen just the way she said. Hadn’t she held him up from drowning? Saved him from a wallowing buffalo? Caught him from sliding off a roof? She even split a roof beam once, when it was like to fall from fifty feet up and squash him on the floor of a half-built church; she split that beam neat as you please, so it fell on one side of him and the other, with just a space for him to stand there in between. And a hundred other times when she acted so early that nobody ever even guessed his life had been saved, even those times she saved him, using the caul.
How did it work? She hardly knew. Except that it was his own power she was using, the gift born right in him. Over the years he’d learned somewhat about his knack for making things and shaping them and holding them together and splitting them apart. Finally this last year, all caught up in the wars between Red men and White, he’d taken charge of saving his own life, so she hardly had to do a thing to save him anymore. Good thing, too. There wasn’t much of that caul left.
She closed the lid of the box. I don’t want to see him, thought Peggy. I don’t want to know any more about him.
But her fingers opened that lid right back up, cause of course she had to know. She’d lived half her life, it seemed like, touching that caul and searching for his heartfire away far off in the northwest Wobbish country, in the town of Vigor Church, seeing how he was doing, looking up the paths of his future to see what danger lay in
ambush. And when she was sure he was safe, she’d look farther ahead, and see him coming back one day to Hatrack River, where he was born, coming back and looking into her face and saying, It was you who saved me all those times, you who saw I was a Maker back afore a living soul thought such a thing was possible. And then she’d watch him learn the great depths of his power, the work he had to do, the crystal city he had to build; she saw him sire babies on her, and saw him touch the nursing infants she held in her arms; she saw the ones they buried and the ones that lived; and last of all she saw him—
Tears came down her face. I don’t want to know, she said. I don’t want to know all the roads of the future. Other girls can dream of love, the joys of marriage, of being mothers to strong healthy babes; but all my dreams have dying in them, too, and pain, and fear, because my dreams are true dreams, I know more than a body can know and still have any hope inside her soul.
Yet Peggy
did
hope. Yes sir, you can be sure of it—she still clung to a kind of desperate hope, because even knowing what’s likely to come down the pathways of a body’s life, she still caught her some glimpses, some clear plain visions of certain days, certain hours, certain passing moments of joy so great it was worth the grief just to get there.
Trouble was those glimpses were so rare and small in the spreading futures of Alvin’s life that she couldn’t find a road that led there. All the pathways she could find easily, the plain ones, the ones most likely to become real, those all led to Alvin wedding her without love, out of gratitude and duty, a miserable marriage. Like the story of Leah in the Bible, whose beautiful husband Jacob hated her even though she loved him dear and bore him more babies than his other wives and would’ve died for him if he’d as much as asked her.
It’s an evil thing God did to women, thought Peggy, to make us hanker after husband and children till it leads us to a life of sacrifice and misery and grief. Was Eve’s sin so terrible, that God should curse all women with that mighty curse? You will groan and bear
children, said Almighty Merciful God. You will be eager for your husband, and he will rule over you.
That was what was burning in her—eagerness for her husband. Even though he was only an eleven-year-old boy who was looking, not for a wife, but for a teacher. He may be just a boy, thought Peggy, but I’m a woman, and I’ve seen the man he’ll be, and I yearn for him. She pressed one hand against her breast; it felt so large and soft, still somewhat out of place on her body, which used to be all sticks and corners like a shanty cabin, and now was softening, like a calf being fattened up for the return of the prodigal.
She shuddered, thinking what happened to the fatted calf, and once again touched the caul, and
looked:
In the distant town of Vigor Church, young Alvin was breakfasting his last morning at his mother’s table. The pack he was to carry on his journey to Hatrack River lay on the floor beside the table. His mother’s tears flowed undisguised across her cheeks. The boy loved his mother, but never for a moment did he feel sorry to be leaving. His home was a dark place now, stained with too much innocent blood for him to hanker to stay. He was eager to be off, to start his life as a prentice boy to the blacksmith of Hatrack River, and to find the torch girl who saved his life when he was born. He couldn’t eat another bite. He pushed back from the table, stood up, kissed his mama—
Peggy let go the caul and closed the lid of the box as tight and quick as if she was trying to catch a fly inside.
Coming to find me. Coming to start a life of misery together. Go ahead and cry, Faith Miller, but not because your little boy Alvin’s on his way east. You cry for me, the woman whose life your boy will wreck. You shed your tears for one more woman’s lonely pain.
Peggy shuddered, shook off the bleak mood of the grey dawn, and dressed herself quickly, ducking her head to avoid the low sloping crossbeams of the attic roof. Over the years she’d learned ways to push thoughts of Alvin Miller Junior clean out of her mind, long enough to do her duty as daughter in her parents’ household
and as torch for the people of the country hereabouts. She could go hours without thinking about that boy, when she set her mind to it. And though it was harder now, knowing he was about to set his foot on the road toward her that very morning, she still put thoughts of him aside.
Peggy opened the curtain of the south-facing window and sat before it, leaning on the sill. She looked out over the forest that still stretched from the roadhouse, down the Hatrack River and on to the Hio, with only a few pig farms here and there to block the way. Of course she couldn’t see the Hio, not that many miles from here, not even in the clear cool air of springtime. But what her natural eyes couldn’t see, the burning torch in her could find easy enough. To see the Hio, she had only to search for a far-off heartfire, then slip herself inside that fellow’s flame, and see out of his eyes as easy as she could see out of her own. And once there, once she had ahold of someone’s heartfire, she could see other things, too, not just what he saw, but what he thought and felt and wished for. And even more: Flickering away in the brightest parts of the flame, often hidden by all the noise of the fellow’s present thought and wishes, she could see the paths ahead of him, the choices coming to him, the life he’d make for himself if he chose this or that or another way in the hours and days to come.
Peggy could see so much in other people’s heartfires that she hardly was acquainted with her own.
She thought of herself sometimes like that lone lookout boy at the tip-top of a ship’s mast. Not that she ever saw her a ship in her whole life, except the rafts on the Hio and one time a canal boat on the Irrakwa Canal. But she read some books, as many as ever she could get Doctor Whitley Physicker to bring back to her from his visits to Dekane. So she knew about the lookout on the mast. Clinging to the rigging, arms half-wrapped in the lines so he didn’t fall if there was a sudden roll or pitch of the boat, or a gust of wind unlooked-for; froze blue in winter, burnt red in summer; and nothing to do all day, all the long long hours of his watch, but look out onto the empty blue ocean. If it was a pirate ship, the lookout watched for victims’ sails. If it was a whaler, he looked for blows
and breaches. Most ships, he just looked for land, for shoals, for hidden sand bars; looked for pirates or some sworn enemy of his nation’s flag.
Most days he never saw a thing, not a thing, just waves and dipping sea birds and fluffy clouds.
I am on a lookout perch, thought Peggy. Sent up aloft some sixteen years ago the day I was born, and kept here ever since, never once let down below, never once allowed to rest within the narrow bunkspace of the lowest deck, never once allowed to so much as close a hatch over my head or a door behind my back. Always, always I’m on watch, looking far and near. And because it isn’t my natural eyes I look through, I can’t shut them, not even in sleep.
No escape from it at all. Sitting here in the attic, she could see without trying:
Mother, known to others as Old Peg Guester, known to herself as Margaret, cooking in the kitchen for the slew of guests due in for one of her suppers. Not like she has any particular knack for cooking, either, so kitchen work is hard, she isn’t like Gertie Smith who can make salt pork taste a hundred different ways on a hundred different days. Peg Guester’s knack is in womenstuff, midwifery and house hexes, but to make a good inn takes good food and now Oldpappy’s gone she has to cook, so she thinks only of the kitchen and couldn’t hardly stand interruption, least of all from her daughter who mopes around the house and hardly speaks at all and by and large that girl is the most unpleasant, ill-favored child even though she started out so sweet and promising, everything in life turns sour somehow … .
Oh, that was such a joy, to know how little your own mama cared for you. Never mind that Peggy also knew the fierce devotion that her mama had. Knowing that a portion of love abides in your mama’s heart doesn’t take away but half the sting of knowing her dislike for you as well.
And Papa, known to others as Horace Guester, keeper of the Hatrack River Roadhouse. A jolly fellow, Papa was, even now out in the dooryard telling tales to a guest who was having trouble
getting away from the inn. He and Papa always seemed to have something more to talk about, and oh, that guest, a circuit lawyer from up Cleveland way, he fancied Horace Guester was just about the finest most upstanding citizen he ever met, if all folks was as good-hearted as old Horace there’d be no more crime and no more lawyering in the upriver Hio country. Everybody felt that way. Everybody loved old Horace Guester.