Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III (11 page)

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Authors: Orson Scott Card

BOOK: Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III
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Dowser
HANK DOWSER’D SEEN him prentice boys a-plenty over the years, but never a one as fresh as this. Here was Makepeace Smith bent over old Picklewing’s left forehoof, all set to drive in the nail, and up spoke his boy.
“Not that nail,” said the blacksmith’s prentice boy. “Not there.”
Well, that was as fine a moment as Hank ever saw for the master to give his prentice boy a sharp cuff on the ear and send him bawling into the house. But Makepeace Smith just nodded, then looked at the boy.
“You think you can nail this shoe, Alvin?” asked the master. “She’s a big one, this mare, but I see you got you some inches since last I looked.”
“I can,” said the boy.
“Now just hold your horses,” said Hank Dowser. “Picklewing’s my only animal, and I can’t just up and buy me another. I don’t want your prentice boy learning to be a farrier and making his mistakes at my poor old nag’s expense.” And since he was already
speaking his mind so frank like, Hank just rattled right on like a plain fool. “Who’s the master here, anyway?” said he.
Well, that was the wrong thing to say. Hank knew it the second the words slipped out of his mouth. You don’t say Who’s the master, not in front of the prentice. And sure enough, Makepeace Smith’s ears turned red and he stood up, all six feet of him, with arms like oxlegs and hands that could crush a bear’s face, and he said, “I’m the master here, and when I say my prentice is good enough for the job, then he’s good enough, or you can take your custom to another smith.”
“Now just hold your horses,” said Hank Dowser.
“I
am
holding your horse,” said Makepeace Smith. “Or at least your horse’s leg. In fact, your horse is leaning over on me something heavy. And now you start asking if I’m master of my own smithy.”
Anybody whose head don’t leak knows that riling the smith who’s shoeing your horse is about as smart as provoking the bees on your way in for the honey. Hank Dowser just hoped Makepeace would be somewhat easier to calm down. “Course you are,” said Hank. “I meant nothing by it, except I was surprised when your prentice spoke up so smart and all.”
“Well that’s cause he’s got him a knack,” said Makepeace Smith. “This boy Alvin, he can tell things about the inside of a horse’s hoof—where a nail’s going to hold, where it’s going into soft hurting flesh, that kind of thing. He’s a natural farrier. And if he says to me, Don’t drive that nail, well I know by now that’s a nail I don’t want to drive, cause it’ll make the horse crazy or lame.”
Hank Dowser grinned and backed off. It was a hot day, that’s all, that’s why tempers were so high. “I have respect for every man’s knack,” said Hank. “Just like I expect them to have respect for mine.”
“In that case, I’ve held up your horse long enough,” said the smith. “Here, Alvin, nail this shoe.”
If the boy had swaggered or simpered or sneered, Hank would’ve had a reason to be so mad. But Prentice Alvin just hunkered down with nails in his mouth and hooked up the left forehoof. Picklewing leaned on him, but the boy was right tall, even though his face had
no sign of beard yet. and he was like a twin of his master, when it come to muscle under his skin. It wasn’t one minute, the horse leaning that way, before the shoe was nailed in place. Picklewing didn’t so much as shiver, let alone dance the way he usually did when the nails went in. And now that Hank thought about it a little, Picklewing always
did
seem to favor that leg just a little, as if something was a mite sore inside the hoof. But he’d been that way so long Hank hardly noticed it no more
The prentice boy stepped back out of the way, still not showing any brag at all. He wasn’t doing a thing that was the tiniest bit benoctious, but Hank still felt an unreasonable anger at the boy. “How old is he?” asked Hank.
“Fourteen,” said Makepeace Smith. “He come to me when he was eleven.”
“A mite old for a prentice, wouldn’t you say?” asked Hank.
“A year late in arriving, he was, because of the war with the Reds and the French—he’s from out in the Wobbish country.”
“Them was hard years,” said Hank. “Lucky me I was in Irrakwa the whole time. Dowsing wells for windmills the whole way along the railroad they were building. Fourteen, eh? Tall as he is, I reckon he lied about his age even so.”
If the boy disliked being named a liar, he didn’t show no sign of it. Which made Hank Dowser all the more annoyed. That boy was like a burr under his saddle, just made him mad whatever the boy did.
“No,” said the smith. “We know his age well enough. He was born right here in Hatrack River, fourteen years ago, when his folks were passing through on their way west. We buried his oldest brother up on the hill. Big for his age though, ain’t he?”
They might’ve been discussing a horse instead of a boy. But Prentice Alvin didn’t seem to mind. He just stood there, staring right through them as if they were made of glass.
“You got four years left of his contract, then?” asked Hank.
“Bit more. Till he’s near nineteen.”
“Well, if he’s already this good, I reckon he’ll be buying out early and going journeyman.” Hank looked, but the boy didn’t brighten up at this idea, neither.
“I reckon not,” said Makepeace Smith. “He’s good with the horses, but he gets careless with the forge. Any smith can do shoes, but it takes a
real
smith to do a plow blade or a wheel tire, and a knack with horses don’t help a bit with that. Why, for my masterpiece I done me an anchor! I was in Netticut at the time, mind you. There ain’t much call for anchors
here,
I reckon.”
Picklewing snorted and stamped—but he didn’t dance lively, the way horses do when their new shoes are troublesome. It was a good set of shoes, well shod. Even
that
made Hank mad at the prentice boy. His own anger made no sense to him. The boy had put on Picklewing’s last shoe, on a leg that might have been lamed in another farrier’s hands. The boy had done him
good.
So why this wrath burning just under the surface, getting worse whatever the boy did or said?
Hank shrugged off his feelings. “Well, that’s work well done,” he said. “And so it’s time for me to do my part.”
“Now, we both know a dowsing’s worth more than a shoeing,” said the smith. “So if you need any more work done, you know I owe it to you, free and clear.”
“I
will
come back, Makepeace Smith, next time my nag needs shoes.” And because Hank Dowser was a Christian man and felt ashamed of how he disliked the boy, he added praise for the lad. “I reckon I’ll be sure to come back while this boy’s still under prentice bond to you, him having the knack he’s got.”
The boy might as well not’ve heard the good words, and the master smith just chuckled. “You ain’t the only one who feels like that,” he said.
At that moment Hank Dowser understood something that he might’ve missed otherwise. This boy’s knack with hooves was good for trade, and Makepeace Smith was just the kind of man who’d hold that boy to every day of his contract, to profit from the boy’s name for clean shoeing with no horses lost by laming. All a greedy master had to do was claim the boy wasn’t good at forgework or something like, then use that as a pretext to hold him fast. In the meantime the boy’d make a name for this place as the best farriery in eastern Hio. Money in Makepeace Smith’s pocket, and nothing for the boy at all, not money nor freedom.
The law was the law, and the smith wasn’t breaking it—he had the right to every day of that boy’s service. But the custom was to let a prentice go as soon as he had the skill and had sense enough to make his way in the world. Otherwise, if a boy couldn’t hope for early freedom, why should he work hard to learn as quick as he could, work as hard as he could? They said even the slaveowners in the Crown Colonies let their best slaves earn a little pocket money on the side, so’s they could buy their freedom sometime before they died.
No, Makepeace Smith wasn’t breaking no law, but he was breaking the custom of masters with their prentice boys, and Hank thought ill of him for it; it was a mean sort of master who’d keep a boy who’d already learned everything the master had to teach.
And yet, even knowing that it was the boy who was in the right, and his master in the wrong—even knowing that, he looked at that boy and felt a cold wet hatred in his heart. Hank shuddered, tried to shake it off.
“You say you need a well,” said Hank Dowser. “You want it for drinking or for washing or for the smithy?”
“Does it make a difference?” asked the smith.
“Well, I think so,” said Hank. “For drinking you need pure water, and for washing you want water that got no disease in it. But for your work in the smithy, I reckon the iron don’t give no never mind whether it cools in clear or murky water, am I right?”
“The spring up the hill is giving out, slacking off year by year,” said the smith. “I need me a well I can count on. Deep and clean and pure.”
“You know why the stream’s going slack,” said Hank. “Everybody else is digging wells, and sucking out the water before it can seep out the spring. Your well is going to be about the last straw.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said the smith. “But I can’t undig their wells, and I got to have my water, too. Reason I settled here was because of the stream, and now they’ve dried it up on me. I reckon I could move on, but I got me a wife and three brats up at the house, and I like it here, like it well enough. So I figure I’d rather draw water than move.”
Hank went on down to the stand of willows by the stream, near
where it came out from under an old springhouse, which had fallen into disrepair. “Yours?” asked Hank.
“No, it belongs to old Horace Guester, him who owns the roadhouse up yonder.”
Hank found him a thin willow wand that forked just right, and started cutting it out with his knife. “Springhouse doesn’t get much use now, I see.”
“Stream’s dying, like I said. Half the time in summer there ain’t enough water in it to keep the cream jars cool. Springhouse ain’t no good if you can’t count on it all summer.”
Hank made the last slice and the willow rod pulled free. He shaved the thick end to a point and whittled off all the leaf nubs, making it as smooth as ever he could. There was some dowsers who didn’t care how smooth the rod was, just broke off the leaves and left the ends all raggedy, but Hank knew that the water didn’t always want to be found, and then you needed a good smooth willow wand to find it. There was others used a clean wand, but always the same one, year after year, place after place, but that wasn’t no good neither, Hank knew, cause the wand had to be from willow or, sometimes, hickory that grew up sucking the water you were hoping to find. Them other dowsers were mountebanks, though it didn’t do no good to say so. They found water most times because in most places if you dig down far enough there’s
bound
to be water. But Hank did it right, Hank had the true knack. He could feel the willow wand trembling in his hands, could feel the water singing to him under the ground. He didn’t just pick the first sign of water, either. He was looking for clear water, high water, close to the surface and easy to pull. He took
pride
in his work.
But it wasn’t like that prentice boy—what was his name?—Alvin. Wasn’t like him. Either a man could nail horseshoes without ever laming the horse, or he couldn’t. If he
ever
lamed a horse, folks thought twice before they went to that farrier again. But with a dowser, it didn’t seem to make no difference if you found water every time or not. If you called yourself a dowser and had you a forked stick, folks would pay you for dowsing wells, without bothering to find out if you had any knack for it at all.
Thinking that, Hank wondered if maybe that was why he hated this boy so much—because the boy already had a name for his good work, while Hank got no fame at all even though he was the only true dowser likely to pass through these parts in a month of Sundays.
Hank set down on the grassy bank of the stream and pulled off his boots. When he leaned to set the second boot on a dry rock where it wouldn’t be so like to fill up with bugs, he saw two eyes blinking in the shadows inside a thick stand of bushes. It gave him such a start, cause he thought to see a bear, and then he thought to see a Red man hankering after dowser’s scalp, even though both such was gone from these parts for years. No, it was just a little light-skinned pickaninny hiding in the bushes. The boy was a mixup, half-White, half-Black, that was plain to see once Hank got over the surprise. “What’re you looking at?” demanded Hank.
The eyes closed and the face was gone. The bushes wiggled and whispered from something crawling fast.
“Never you mind him,” said Makepeace Smith. “That’s just Arthur Stuart.”
Arthur Stuart! Not a soul in New England or the United States but knew that name as sure as if they lived in the Crown Colonies. “Then you’ll be glad to hear that I’m the Lord Protector,” said Hank Dowser. “Cause if the King be that partickler shade of skin, I got some news that’ll get me three free dinners a day in any town in Hio and Suskwahenny till the day I die.”
Makepeace laughed brisk at that idea. “No, that’s Horace Guester’s joke, naming him that way. Horace and Old Peg Guester, they’re raising that boy, seeing how his natural ma’s too poor to raise him. Course I don’t think that’s the whole reason. Him being so light-skinned, her husband, Mock Berry, you can’t blame him if he don’t like seeing that child eat at table with his coal-black children.”

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