Spelling Bee
EARLY JANUARY, WITH deep snow, and a wind sharp enough to slice your nose off—so of course that was a day for Makepeace Smith to decide
he
had to work in the forge all day, while Alvin went into town to buy supplies and deliver finished work. In the summer, the choice of jobs tended to go the other way.
Never mind, thought Alvin. He
is
the master here. But if I’m ever master of my own forge, and if I have me a prentice, you can bet he’ll be treated fairer than I’ve been. A master and prentice ought to share the work alike, except for when the prentice plain don’t know how, and then the master ought to teach him. That’s the bargain, not to have a slave, not to always have the prentice take the wagon into town through the snow.
Truth to tell, though, Alvin knew he wouldn’t have to take the wagon. Horace Guester’s sleigh-and-two would do the job, and he knew Horace wouldn’t mind him taking it, as long as Alvin did whatever errands the roadhouse needed doing in town.
Alvin bundled himself tight and pushed out into the wind—it was right in his face, from the west, the whole way up to the
roadhouse. He took the path up by Miss Lamer’s house, it being the closest way with the most trees to break the wind. Course she wasn’t in. It being school hours, she was with the children in the schoolhouse in town. But the old springhouse, it was Alvin’s schoolhouse, and just passing by the door got him to thinking about his studies.
She had him learning things he never thought to learn. He was expecting more of ciphering and reading and writing, and in a way that’s what she had him doing, right enough. But she didn’t have him reading out of those primers like the children—like Arthur Stuart, who plugged away at his studies by lamplight every night in the springhouse. No, she talked to Alvin about ideas he never would’ve thought of, and all his writing and calculating was about such things.
Yesterday:
“The smallest particle is an atom,” she said. “According to the theory of Demosthenes, everything is made out of smaller things, until you come to the atom, which is smallest of all and cannot be divided.”
“What’s it look like?” Alvin asked her.
“I don’t know. It’s too small to see. Do
you
know?”
“I reckon not. Never saw anything so small but what you could cut it in half.”
“But can’t you
imagine
anything smaller?”
“Yeah, but I can split that too.”
She sighed. “Well, now, Alvin, think again. If there
were
a thing so small it couldn’t be divided, what would it be like?”
“Real
small, I reckon.”
But he was joking. It was a problem, and he set out to answer it the way he answered any practical problem. He sent his bug out into the floor. Being wood, the floor was a jumble of things, the broke-up once-alive hearts of living trees, so Alvin quickly sent his bug on into the iron of the stove, which was mostly all one thing inside. Being hot, the bits of it, the tiniest parts he ever saw clear, they were a blur of movement; while the fire inside, it made its own outward rush of light and heat, each bit of it so small and fine
that he could barely hold the idea of it in his mind. He never really saw the bits of fire. He only knew that they had just passed by.
“Light,” he said. “And heat. They can’t be cut up.”
“True. Fire isn’t like earth—it can’t be cut. But it can be changed, can’t it? It can be extinguished. It can cease to be itself. And therefore the parts of it must become something else, and so they were not the unchangeable and indivisible atoms.”
“Well, there’s nothing smaller than those bits of fire, so I reckon there’s no such thing as an atom.”
“Alvin, you’ve got to stop being so empirical about things.”
“If I knowed what that was, I’d stop being it.”
“If I knew.”
“Whatever.”
“You can’t always answer every question by sitting back and doodlebugging your way through the rocks outside or whatever.”
Alvin sighed. “Sometimes I wish I never told you what I do.”
“Do you want me to teach you what it means to be a Maker or not?”
“That’s just
what
I want! And instead you talk about atoms and gravity and—I don’t care what that old humbug Newton said, nor anybody else! I want to know how to make the—
place
.” He remembered only just in time that there was Arthur Stuart in the corner, memorizing every word they said, complete with tone of voice. No sense filling Arthur’s head with the Crystal City.
“Don’t you understand, Alvin? It’s been so long—thousands of years—that no one knows what a Maker really is, or what he does. Only that there were such men, and a few of the tasks that they could do. Changing lead or iron into gold, for instance. Water into wine. That sort of thing.”
“I expect iron to gold’d be easier,” said Alvin. “Those metals are pretty much all one thing inside. But wine—that’s such a mess of different stuff inside that you’d have to be a—a—” He couldn’t think of a word for the most power a man could have.
“Maker.”
That was the word, right enough. “I reckon.”
“I’m telling you, Alvin, if you want to learn how to do the things
that Makers once did, you have to understand the nature of things. You can’t change what you don’t understand.”
“And I can’t understand what I don’t see.”
“Wrong! Absolutely false, Alvin Smith! It is what you
can
see that remains impossible to understand. The world you actually see is nothing more than an example, a special case. But the underlying principles, the order that holds it all together,
that
is forever invisible. It can only be discovered in the imagination, which is precisely the aspect of your mind that is most neglected.”
Well, last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid, which he said was just fine with him as he’d stayed alive against long odds by being as pure stupid as he was without any help from
her.
Then he stormed on outside and walked around watching the first flakes of this storm start coming down.
He’d only been walking a little while when he realized that she was right, and he knowed it all along. Knew it. He always sent out his bug to see what was
there,
but then when he got set to make a change, he first had to think up what he
wanted
it to be. He had to think of something that wasn’t there, and hold a picture of it in his mind, and then, in that way he was born with and still didn’t understand, he’d say, See this? This is how you ought to be! And then, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, the bits of it would move around until they lined up right. That’s how he always did it: separating a piece off of living rock; joining together two bits of wood; making the iron line up strong and true; spreading the heat of the fire smooth and even along the bottom of the crucible. So I do see what isn’t there, in my mind, and that’s what makes it
come
to be there.
For a terrible dizzying moment he wondered if maybe the whole world was maybe no more than what he imagined it to be, and if that was true then if he stopped imagining, it’d just go away. Of course, once he got his sense together he knew that if he’d been thinking it up, there wouldn’t be so many strange things in the world that he never could’ve thought of himself.
So maybe the world was all dreamed up in the mind of God. But
no, can’t be that neither, because if God dreamed up men like White Murderer Harrison then God wasn’t too good. No, the best Alvin could think of was that God worked pretty much the way Alvin did—told the rocks of the earth and the fire of the sun and stuff like that, told it all how it was supposed to be and then let it be that way. But when God told
people
how to be, why, they just thumbed their noses and laughed at him, mostly, or else they pretended to obey while they still went on and did what they pleased. The planets and the stars and the elements, they all might be thought up from the mind of God, but people were just too cantankerous to blame them on anybody but their own self.
Which was about the limit of Alvin’s thinking last night, in the snow—wondering about what he could never know. Things like I wonder what God dreams about if he ever sleeps, and if all his dreams come true, so that every night he makes up a whole new world full of people. Questions that couldn’t never get him a speck closer to being a Maker
So today, slogging through the snow, pushing against the wind toward the roadhouse, he started thinking again about the original question—what an atom would be like. He tried to picture something so tiny that he couldn’t cut it. But whenever he imagined something like that—a little box or a little ball or something—why, then he’d just up and imagine it splitting right in half.
The only way he couldn’t split something in half was if it was so thin nothing could be thinner. He thought of it squished so flat it was thinner than paper, so thin that in that direction it didn’t even
exist
, if you looked at it edge-on it would just plain not be there. But even then, he might not be able to split it along the edge, but he could still imagine turning it and slicing it across, just like paper.
So—what if it was squished up in another direction, too, so it was all edge, going on like the thinnest thread you ever dreamed of? Nobody could see it, but it would still be there, because it would stretch from here to there. He sure couldn’t split that along the edge, and it didn’t have any flat surface like paper had. Yet as long as it stretched like invisible thread from one spot to another, no
matter how short the distance was, he could still imagine snipping it right in half, and each half in half again.
No, the only way something could be small enough to be an atom is if it had no size at all in any direction, not length nor breadth nor depth. That would be an atom all right—only it wouldn’t even
exist,
it’d just be
nothing.
Just a place without anything in it.
He stood on the porch of the roadhouse, stamping snow off his feet, which did better than knocking for telling folks he was there. He could hear Arthur Stuart’s feet running to open the door, but all he was thinking about was atoms. Because even though he’d just figured out that there couldn’t be no atoms, he was beginning to realize it might be even crazier to imagine there
not
being atoms, so things could always get cut into smaller bits and
those
things into smaller bits, and those into even
smaller
bits, forever and ever. And when you think about it, it’s got to be one or the other. Either you get to the bit that can’t be split, and it’s an atom, or you never do, and so it goes on
forever,
which is more than Alvin’s head could hold.
Alvin found himself in the roadhouse kitchen, with Arthur Stuart piggyback, playing with Alvin’s hat and scarf. Horace Guester was out in the barn stuffing straw into new bedticks, so Alvin asked Old Peg for use of the sleigh. It was hot in the kitchen, and Goody Guester didn’t look to be in good temper. She allowed as how he could take the sled, but there was a price to pay.
“Save the life of a certain child, Alvin, and take Arthur Stuart with you,” she said, “or I swear he’ll do one more thing to rile me and end up in the pudding tonight.”
It was true that Arthur Stuart seemed to be in a mood to make trouble—he was strangling Alvin with his own scarf and laughing like a fool.
“Let’s do some lessons, Arthur,” said Alvin. “Spell ‘choking to death.’”
“C-H-O-K-I-N-G,” said Arthur Stuart. “T-W-O. D-E-A-T-H.”
Mad as she was, Goody Guester just had to break up laughing —not because he spelled “to” wrong, but because he’d spelled out
the words in the most perfect imitation of Miss Larner’s voice. “I swear, Arthur Stuart,” she said, “you best never let Miss Larner hear you go on like that or your schooling days are over.”
“Good! I hate school!” said Arthur.
“You don’t hate school so much as you’d hate working with me in the kitchen every day.” said Goody Guester. “All day every day, summer and winter, even swimming days.”
“I might as well be a slave in Appalachee!” shouted Arthur Stuart.
Goody Guester stopped teasing and being mad, both, and turned solemn. “Don’t even joke like that, Arthur. Somebody died once just to keep you from being such a thing.”
“I know,” said Arthur.
“No you don’t, but you’d better just think before you—”
“It was my mama,” said Arthur.
Now Old Peg started looking scared. She took a glance at Alvin and then said, “Never mind about that, anyway.”
“My mama was a blackbird.” said Arthur. “She flew so high, but then the ground caught her and she got stuck and died.”
Alvin saw how Goody Guester looked at him, even more nervous-like. So maybe there was something to Arthur’s story of flying after all. Maybe somehow that girl buried tip beside Vigor, maybe somehow she got a blackbird to carry her baby somehow. Or maybe it was just some vision. Anyway, Goody Guester had decided to act like it was nothing after all—too late to fool Alvin, of course, but she wouldn’t know that. “Well, that’s a pretty story, Arthur,” said Old Peg.