Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV Read Online Free

“Just as I can speak French to a Frenchman and Spanish to a Spaniard and four kinds of Red talk depending on which tribe I’m with. But you, Calvin, do you speak Scorn and Mockery to everyone? Or just to your betters?”
    It took Calvin a moment to realize that he had been put down, hard and low. “I could kill you without using my hands,” he said.
    “Harder than you think,” said Taleswapper. “Killing a man, that is. Why not ask your brother Alvin about it? He’s done it the once, for just cause, whereas you think of killing a man because he tweaks your nose. And then you wonder why I call myself your better.”
    “You just want to put me down because I named you for what you are. Hypocrite. Like all the others.”
    “
All
the others?”
    Calvin nodded grimly.
    “
Everyone
is a hypocrite except Calvin Miller?”
    “Calvin
Maker
” said Calvin. Even as he said it, he knew it was a mistake; he had never told anyone the name by which he thought of himself, and now he had blurted it out, a boast, a brag, a
demand,
to this most unsympathetic of listeners. This man who was most likely, of all men, to repeat Calvin’s secret dream to others.
    “Well, now it seems to be unanimous,” said Taleswapper. “We’re all pretending to be something that we’re not.”
    “I
am
a Maker!” Calvin insisted, raising his voice, even though he knew he was making himself seem even weaker and more vulnerable. He just couldn’t stop himself from talking to this slimy old man. “I’ve got all the knack for it that Alvin ever had, if anyone would bother to notice!”
    “Made any millstones lately, without tools?” asked Taleswapper.
    “I can make stones in a fence fit together like as if they growed that way out of the ground!”
    “Healed any wounds?”
    “I killed a bug crawling on my leg just a moment ago without so much as laying a hand on it.”
    “Interesting. I ask of healing and you answer with killing. Doesn’t sound like a Maker to me.”
    “You said yourself that Alvin killed a man!”
    “With his hands, not with his knack. A man who had just murdered an innocent woman who died to protect her son from captivity. The bug—was it going to harm you or anyone?”
    “Yes, there you are, Alvin is always righteous and wonderful, while Calvin can’t do nothing right! But Alvin hisself told me the story of how he caused a bunch of roaches to get theirselfs kilt when he was a boy and—”
    “And you learned nothing from his story, except that you have the power to torment insects.”
    “
He
gets to do what he wants and then talks about how he’s learned better now, but if
I
do the same things then I’m not worthy! I can’t be taught any of his secrets because I’m not
ready
for them only I
am
ready for them, I’m just not ready to let Alvin decide
how
I’ll use the knack I was born with. Who tells
him
what to do?”
    “The inner light of virtue,” said Taleswapper, “for lack of a clearer name.”
    “Well what about
my
inner light?”
    “I imagine that your parents ask themselves this very question, and often.”
    “Why can’t
I
be allowed to figure things out on my own like Alvin did?”
    “But of course you
are
being allowed to do
exactly
that,” said Taleswapper.
    “No I’m not! He sits there trying to explain to those bone-headed no-knack followers of his how to get inside other thingsand learn what they are and how they’re shaped inside and then ask them to take on new forms, as if that’s a thing that folks can learn—”
    “But they
do
learn it, don’t they?”
    “If you call an inch a year moving, then I guess you can call that learning,” said Calvin. “But me, the one who actually understands everything he says, the one who could actually put it all to use, he won’t even let me in the room. If I stay there he just tells stories and makes jokes and won’t teach a
thing
until I leave, and why? I’m his best pupil, ain’t I? I learn it all, I soak it in fast and I can use it