Step aside? Yep, I reckon I can step aside. I can step right out the door and out into the hot sun and right out onto the path going up the hill to the tree line. And what's to stop me from keeping right on? What's to stop me from walking on to the edge of the world and then jumping right off?
But Calvin didn't keep walking. He leaned against a big old maple and then hunkered down in the grass and looked out over Father's land. The house. The barn. The chicken coops. The pigpen. The millhouse.
Did the wheel ever turn in Father's mill anymore? The water passed useless through the chase, the wheel leaned forward but never moved, and so the stones inside were still, too. Might as well have left the huge millstone in the mountain, as to bring it down here to stand useless while big brother Alvin filled these poor people's minds with hopeless hopes. Alvin was grinding them up as surely as if he put their heads between the stones. Grinding them up, turning them to flour which Alvin himself would bake into bread and eat up for supper. He may have prenticed as a blacksmith all those years in Hatrack River, but here in Vigor Church he was a baker of brains.
Thinking of Alvin eating everybody's ground-up heads made Calvin feel nasty in a delicious kind of way. It made him laugh. He stretched his long thin legs out into the meadow grass and lay back against the trunk of the maple. A bug was scampering along the skin of his leg, up under his trousers, but he didn't bother to reach down and pull it out, or even to shake his leg to get it off. Instead, he got his doodlebug going, like a spare pair of eyes, like an extra set of fingers, looking for the tiny rapid flutter of the bug's useless stupid life and when he found it he gave it a little pinch, or really more like a squint, a tiny twitch of the muscles around his eyes, but that was all it took, just that little pinch and then the bug wasn't moving no more. Some days, little bug, it just don't pay to get up in the morning.
“That must be some funny story,” said a voice.
Calvin fairly jumped out of his skin. How did somebody come on him unawares? Still, he didn't let himself show he'd been surprised. His heart might be beating fast inside his chest, but he still waited a minute before even turning around to look, and then he made sure to look about as uninterested as a fellow can look without being dead.
A bald fellow, old and in buckskins. Calvin knew him, of course. A far traveler and sometime visitor named Taleswapper. Another one who thought the world began with God and ended with Alvin. Calvin looked him up and down. The buckskins were about as old as the man. “Did you get them clothes off a ninety-year-old deer, or did your daddy and grandpa wear them all their lives to get them so worn out like that?”
“I've worn these clothes so long,” said the old man, “that I sometimes send them on errands when I'm too busy to go, and nobody can tell the difference.”
“I think I know you,” said Calvin. “You're that old Taleswapper fellow.”
“So I am,” said the old man. “And you're Calvin, old Miller's youngest boy.”
Calvin waited.
And here it came: “Alvin's little brother.”
Calvin folded himself sitting down and then unfolded himself standing. He liked how tall he was. He liked looking down at the old man's bald head. “You know, old man, if we had another just like you, we could put your smooth pink heads together and you'd look like a baby's butt.”
“Don't like being called Alvin's little brother, eb?” asked Taleswappeir.
“You know where to go for your free meal,” said Calvin. He started to walk away into the meadow. Having no destination in mind, of course, his walking pretty soon petered out, and he paused a moment, looking around, wishing there was something he wanted to do.
The old man was right behind him. Damn but the old boy was quiet! Calvin had to remember to keep a watch out for people. Alvin did it without thinking, dammit, and Calvin could do it too if he could just remember to remember.
“Heard you chuckling,” said Taleswapper. “When I first walked up behind you.”
“Well, then, I guess you ain't deaf yet.”
“Saw you watching the millhouse and heard you chuckling and I thought, What does this boy see so funny in a mill whose wheel don't turn?”
Calvin turned to face him. “You were born in England, weren't you?”
“I was.”
“And you lived in Philadelphia awhile, right? Met old Ben Franklin there, right?”
“What a memory you have.”
“Then how come you talk like a frontiersman? You know and I know that it's supposed to be 'a mill whose wheel doesn't turn,' but here you are talking bad grammar as if you never went to school but I know you did. And how come you don't talk like other Englishmen?”
“Keen ear, keen eye,” said Taleswapper. “A sharp one for details. Dull on the big picture, but sharp on details. I notice you talk worse than you know how, too.”
Calvin ignored the insult. He wasn't going to let this old coot distract him with tricks. “I said how come you talk like a frontiersman?”
“Spend a lot of time on the frontier.”
“I spend a lot of time in the chicken coop but that don't make me cluck.”
Taleswapper grinned. “What do you think, boy?”
“I think you try to sound like the people you're telling your lies to, so they'll trust you, they'll think you're one of them. But you're not one of us, you're not one of anybody. You're a spy, stealing the hopes and dreams and wishes and memories and imaginings of everybody and leaving them nothing but lies in exchange.”
Taleswapper seemed amused. “If I'm such a criminal, why ain't I rich?”
“Not a criminal,” said Calvin.
“I'm relieved to be acquitted.”
“Just a hypocrite.”
Taleswapper's eyes narrowed.
“A hypocrite,” Calvin said again. “Pretending to be what you're not. So other people will trust you, but they're trusting in a bunch of pretenses.”
“That's an interesting idea, there, Calvin,” said Taleswapper. “Where do you draw the line between a humble man who knows his own weaknesses but tries to act out virtues he hasn't quite mastered yet, and a proud man who pretends to have those virtues without the slightest intention of acquiring them?”
“Listen to the frontiersman now,” said Calvin scornfully. “I knew you could shed that folksy talk the minute you wanted to.”
“Yes, I can do that,” said Taleswapper. “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.