"He's that thread I saw running through the fabric out of place." She smiled at Alvin. "Come here," she said. "I want to see the legendary Boy Renegado."

"Who's that?" asked Alvin. "The Boy Rainy G.o.d"

"Renegado. There are stories all through Appalachee, don't you know that? About Ta-k.u.msaw, who appears one day in the Osh-Kontsy country and the next day in a village on the banks of the Yazoo, stirring up Reds to do ma.s.sacre and torture. And always with him is a White boy who urges the Reds to be ever more brutal, who teaches them the secret methods of torture that used to be practiced by the Papist Inquisitions in Spain and Italy."

"That ain't so," said Alvin.

She smiled. The flames of her eyes danced.

"They must hate me," said Alvin. "I don't even know what a Inky-zitchum is."

"Inquisition," said Isaac.

Alvin felt a sick dread in his heart. If folks were tellin such tales about him, why, folks would regard him as a criminal, a monster, practically. "I'm only going along with"

"I know what you're doing, and why," said Becca. "Around here we all know Isaac well enough to disbelieve such lies about him and you both."

But Alvin didn't care about "around here." What he cared about was back home in Wobbish country.

"Don't worry yourself," said Becca. "n.o.body knows who this legendary White boy is. Certainly not one of the two Innocents that Ta-k.u.msaw chopped to bits in the forest. Certainly not Alvin or Measure. Which one are you, by the way?"

"Alvin," said Isaac.

"Oh, yes," said Becca. "You already told me that. I have such a hard time holding people's names in my head."

"Ta-k.u.msaw didn't chop n.o.body up."

"As you might guess, Alvin, we didn't believe that story here, either."

"Oh." Alvin didn't know what to say, and since he'd been living like a Red for so long, he did what Reds do when they have nothing to say, something that a White man hardly ever thinks of doing. He said nary a thing at all.

"Bread and cheese?" asked Becca.

"You're too kind. Thank you," said Isaac.

If that didn't beat all. Ta-k.u.msaw saying thank you like a fine gentleman. Not that he wasn't n.o.ble and fairspoke among his kind. But in White man's language he was always so cold, so unflowered in his talk. Till now. Witchery.

Becca rang a little bell.

"It's simple fare, but we live simply in this house. And especially in this room. Which is fitting it's such a simple place."

Alvin looked around. She was right. It only just now occurred to him that this room was the original log cabin, with its one remaining window casting southern light into the room. Around it the walls were all still rough old wood; he just hadn't noticed, from all the cloth draped here and there, hanging on hooks, piled up on furniture, rolled up in bolts. A strange kind of cloth, lots of color in it but the color making no pattern or sense, just weaving this way, that way, changing shades and colors, a broad streak of blue, a few narrow strands of green, all twisting in and out of each other.

Somebody came into the room to answer Becca's bell, an older man from the sound of his voice; she sent him for food, but Alvin didn't even know what he looked like, he couldn't take his eyes off the cloth. What was so much cloth for? Why would somebody make it such a bright and ugly unorganized set of colors?

And where did it end?

He walked over to where maybe a dozen bolts of cloth were standing in a corner, leaning on each other, and he realized that each bolt grew out of the one before. Somebody'd taken the end of cloth from one bolt and wrapped it around itself to start the next one, so the cloth spooled off the end of one bolt, then leapt up and plunged right down into the center of the next, one after the other, making a chain of fabric. It wasn't a bunch of different cloths, it was all one cloth, rolled up until it was almost too heavy to move, and then the next bolt started right up, with never a scissor touching the cloth. Alvin began to wander around the room, his fingers tracing the pattern of the cloth, following its path up over hooks on the wall, down into folds stacked up on the floor. He followed, he followed, until finally, just is the old man returned with the bread and cheese, he found the end of the cloth. It was feeding out the front of Becca's loom.

All that time, Ta-k.u.msaw had been talking to Becca in his Isaac voice, and she to him in her deep melodious way of speech, which had just the slightest hint of foreignness to it, like some of the Dutch in the area around Vigor Church, who'd been in America all their lives but still had a trace of the old country in their talk. Only now, with Alvin standing by the loom and the food on a low table with three chairs around it, only now did he pay attention to what they were saying, and that only because he wanted so badly to ask Becca what all this cloth was for, seeing as how she must have been weaving at it for more than a year, to have it so long, without never once taking shears to it to make something out of it. It was what Ma always called a shameful waste, to have something and make no use of it, like Dally Framer's pretty singing voice, which she sang with all day at home but wouldn't ever join in singing hymns at church.

"Eat," said Ta-k.u.msaw. And when he spoke so bluntly to Alvin, his voice lost that Englishness; he was the real Ta-k.u.msaw again. It set Alvin's mind to rest, knowing that there wasn't some witchery at work, that Ta-k.u.msaw just had two different ways of talking; but of course that also set more questions into Alvin's mind, about how Ta-k.u.msaw ever learned such talk. Alvin never even heard so much as a rumor about Ta-k.u.msaw having White friends in Appalachee, and you'd think a tale like that would be known. Though it wasn't hard to guess why Ta-k.u.msaw wouldn't want it noised around much. What would all those het-up Reds think if they saw Ta-k.u.msaw here and now? What would it do to Ta-k.u.msaw's war?

And come to think of it, how could Ta-k.u.msaw wage such a war, if he had true White friends like the folk of this valley? Surely the land was dead here, at least as the Reds knew it. How could Ta-k.u.msaw bear it? It left such a hunger in Alvin that even though he packed bread and cheese down his throat till his belly poked out, he still felt a gnawing inside him, a need to get back to the woodland and feel the song of the land inside himself.

The meal was filled with Becca's pleasant chatter about doings in the valley, her saying names that meant nothing to Alvin, except any one of them could have been the name of a body back in Vigor Church there was even folks named Miller, which was natural, seeing how a valley this size no doubt had more than one miller's worth of grain to grind.

The old man came back to clear away.

"Did you come to see my cloth?" asked Becca.

Ta-k.u.msaw nodded. "That's half why I came."

Becca smiled, and led him to the loom. She sat on her weaving stool and gathered the newest cloth up into her lap. She started about three yards from the lip of the loom.

"Here," she said. "The gathering of your folk to Prophetstown."

Alvin saw how she pa.s.sed her hand over a whole bunch of threads that seemed to climb out of their proper warp and migrate across the cloth to gather up near the edge.

"Reds from every tribe," she said. "The strongest of your people."

Even though the fibers tended to be greenish, they were indeed heavier than most threads, strong and taut. Becca fed the cloth farther down her lap. The gathering grew stronger and clearer, and the threads turned brighter green. How could threads change color that way? And how with the machinery of the loom could the warp shift like that?

"And now the Whites that gathered against them," she said.

And sure enough, another group of threads, tighter to start with, but gathering, knotting up a little. To Alvin's eyes it looked like the cloth was a ruin, the threads all tangled and bunched who'd wear a shirt made of such stuff as that? and the colors made no sense, all jumbled together without no effort to make a pattern or any kind of regular order.

Ta-k.u.msaw reached out his hand and pulled the cloth toward himself. Pulled until he exposed a place were all those pure green threads just went slack and then stopped, most of them. The warp of the cloth was spare and thin, then, maybe one thread for every ten there used to be, like a worn-down raggedy patch in the elbow of an old shirt, so when you bent your elbow maybe a dozen threads made lines across your skin one direction, and no threads at all the other way.

If the green threads stood for Prophetstown, there couldn't be no mistake what was going on here. "Tippy-Canoe," Alvin murmured. Now he knew the order of this cloth.

Becca bent over the cloth and tears dropped from her eyes straight down on it.

Tearless, Ta-k.u.msaw pulled the cloth again, steadily. Alvin saw the rest of the green threads, the few that remained from the ma.s.sacre at Tippy-Canoe, migrate to the edge of the cloth and stop. The cloth was narrower by that many threads. Only now there was another gathering, and the threads were not green. They were mostly black.

"Black with hate," said Becca. "You are gathering your people with hate."

"Can you imagine conducting a war with love?" asked Ta-k.u.msaw.

"That's a reason to refuse to make war at all," she said gently.

"Don't talk like a White woman," said Ta-k.u.msaw.

"But she is one," said Alvin, who thought she made perfect sense.

They both looked at Alvin, Ta-k.u.msaw impa.s.sively, Becca with amus.e.m.e.nt? Pity? Then they returned to the cloth.

Very quickly they came to where the cloth hung over the beam, then fed out of the loom. Along the way, the black threads of Ta-k.u.msaw's army worked closer together, knotted, intertwined. And other threads, some blue, some yellow, some black, all gathered in another place, the fabric bunching up something awful. It was thicker, but it didn't seem to Alvin that it was a speck stronger. Weaker, if anything. Less useful. Less trustworthy.

"This cloth ain't going to be worth much, if this goes on," said Alvin.

Becca smiled grimly. "Truer words were never spoken, lad."

"If this is about a year's worth of story," said Alvin, "you must have two hundred years all gathered up here."

Becca c.o.c.ked her head. "More than that," she said.

"How do you find out all that's going on, to make it all go into the cloth?"

"Oh, Alvin, there's some things folks just do, without knowing how," she said.

"And if you change the threads around, can't you make things go different?" Alvin had in mind a careful rearrangement, spreading the threads out more even-like, and getting those black threads farther apart from each other.

"It doesn't work like that," she said. "I don't make things happen, with what I do here. Things that happen, they change me. Don't fret about it, Alvin."

"But there wasn't even White folks in this part of America more than two hundred years ago. How can this cloth go farther back?"

She sighed. "Isaac, why did you bring him to plague me with questions?"

Ta-k.u.msaw smiled at her.

"Lad, will you tell no one?" she asked. "Will you keep it secret who I am and what I do?"

"I promise."

"I weave, Alvin. That's all. My whole family, from before we even remember, we've been weavers."

"That your name, then? Becca Weaver? My brother-in-law, Armor-of-G.o.d, his pa's a Weaver, and"

"n.o.body calls us weavers," said Becca. "If they had any name for as at all, they'd call us no."

She wouldn't tell him.

"No, Alvin, I can't put such a burden on you. Because you'd want to come. You'd want to come and see."

"See what?" asked Alvin.

"Like Isaac here. I should never have told him, either."

"He kept the secret, though. Never breathed a word."

"He didn't keep it secret from himself, though. He came to see."

"See what?" Alvin asked again.

"See how long are the threads a-flowing up into my loom."

Only then did Alvin notice the back end of the loom, where the warp threads were gathered into. place by a rack of fine steel wires. The threads weren't colored at all. They were raw white. Cotton? Surely not wool. Linen, maybe. With all the colors in the finished cloth, he hadn't really noticed what it was made of.

"Where do the colors come from?" asked Alvin.

No one answered.

"Some of the threads go slack."

"Some of them end," said Ta-k.u.msaw.

"Many of them end," said Becca. "And many begin. It's the pattern of life."

"What do you see, Alvin?" asked Ta-k.u.msaw.

"If these black threads are your folk," said Alvin, "then I'd say there's a battle coming, and a lot are going to die. Not like Tippy-Canoe, though. Not as bad."

"That's what I see, too," said Ta-k.u.msaw.

"And these other colors all bunched up, what are they? An army of White folk?"

"Word is that a man named Andrew Jackson of the western Tennizy country is gathering up an army. They call him Old Hickory."

"I know the man," said Ta-k.u.msaw. "He doesn't stay in the saddle too well."

"He's been doing with White folks what you've been doing with Red, Isaac. He's been going up and down the western country, rousting people out and haranguing them about the Red Menace. About you, Isaac. For every Red soldier you've gathered, he's recruited two Whites. And he figures you'll go north, to join with a French army. He knows all your plans."

"He knows nothing," said Ta-k.u.msaw. "Alvin, tell me, how many threads of this White army end?"

"A lot. More, maybe. I don't know. It's about even."

"Then it tells me nothing."

"It tells you that you'll have your battle," said Becca. "It tells you that there'll be more blood and suffering in the world, thanks to you."

"But it says nothing of victory," said Ta-k.u.msaw.

"It never does."

Alvin wondered if you could just tie another thread onto the end of one of the broken ones, and save somebody's life. He looked for the spools of thread from which the warp was formed, but he couldn't find them. The threads hung down from the back beam of the loom, taut like there was a heavy weight hanging on them, but Alvin couldn't see where the threads came from. They didn't touch the floor. They didn't exactly stop, either. He looked this far, and there they were, hanging tight and long; and he looked this much farther, and there weren't no threads, nothing there at all. The threads were just coming out of nowhere, and there was no way the human eye could see or make sense of how they started.

But Alvin, he could see with other eyes, inward eyes, the way he studied into the tiny workings of the human body, into the cold inward currents of stone. And with that hidden vision he looked into a single thread and traced its shape, following how the fibers wound around and through, twisting and gripping each other to make the strength of the yarn. This time he could just keep following the thread. Just keep on following until finally, far beyond the place where the threads all disappeared to natural eyes, the thread ended. Whosever soul that thread bespoke, he had a good long life ahead of him, before he died.

All these threads must end, when the person dies. And somehow a new thread must start up when a baby got born. Another thread coming out of nowhere.

"It never ends," said Becca. "I'll grow old and die, Alvin, but the cloth will go on."

"Do you know which thread is you?"

"No," she said. "I don't want to know."

"I reckon I'd like to see. I want to know how many years I got."