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

was, she blamed her woes on nary a soul but her own self.
    In the days after her mother was murdered, Peggy Larner figured that she would stay in Hatrack River for the rest of her life, helping her father tend his roadhouse. She was done with the great matters of the world. She had set her hand to meddling in them, and the result had been that she didn’t tend to her own backyard and so she failed to see her mother’s death looming. Preventable, easily, it was so dependent upon merest chance; a simple word of warning and her mother and father would have known the Slave Finders were coming back that night,and how many of them there were, and how armed, and through what door coming. But Peggy had been watching the great matters of the world, had been minding her foolish love for the young journeyman smith named Alvin who had learned to make a plow of living gold and then asked her to marry him and go with him through the world to do battle with the Unmaker, and all the while the Unmaker was destroying her own life through the back door, with a shotgun blast that shredded her mother’s flesh and gave Peggy the most terrible of burdens to carry all her life. What kind of child does not watch out to save her own mother’s life?
    She could not marry Alvin. That would be like rewarding herself for her own selfishness. She would stay and help her father in his work.
    And yet she couldn’t do even that, not for long. When her father looked at her—or rather, when he wouldn’t look at her—she felt his grief stab to her heart. He knew she could have prevented it. And thought it was his great effort not to reproach her with it, she didn’t need to hear his words to know what was in his heart. No, nor did she need to use her knack to see his heart’s desire, his bitter memories. She knew without looking, because she knew him deep, as children know parents.
    There came a day, then, when she could bear it no longer. She had left home once before, as a girl, with a note left behind. This time she left with more courage, facing her father and telling him that she couldn’t stay.
    “Have I lost my daughter then, as well as my wife?”
    “Your daughter you have as well as ever,” said Peggy. “But the woman who could have prevented your wife’s death, and failed to do it—that woman can’t live here anymore.”
    “Have I said anything? Have I by word or deed—”
    “It’s your knack to make folks feel welcome under your roof, Father, and you’ve done your best with me. But there’s no knack can take away the terrible burden charged to my soul. There’s no love or kindness you can show toward me that will hide—from
me
—what you suffer at the very sight of me.”
    Father knew he couldn’t deceive his daughter any longer, her being a torch and all. “I’ll miss you with all my heart,” he said.
    “And I’ll miss you, Father,” she answered. With a kiss, with a brief embrace, she took her leave. Once again she rode in Whitley Physicker’s carriage to Dekane. There she visited with a family that had done her much kindness, once upon a time.
    She didn’t stay long, though, and soon she took the coach down to Franklin, the capital of Appalachee. She knew no one there, but she soon would—no heart could remain closed to her, and she quickly found those people who hated the institution of slavery as much as she did. Her mother had died for taking a half-black boy into her home, into her family as her own son, even though by law he belonged to some white man down in Appalachee.
    The boy, Arthur Stuart, was still free, living with Alvin in the town of Vigor Church. But the institution of slavery, which had killed both the boy’s birth mother and his adoptive mother, that lived on, too. There was no hope of changing it in the King’s lands to the south and east, but Appalachee was the nation that had won its freedom by the sacrifice of George Washington and under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson. It was a land of