Orson Card - ALVIN JOURNEYMAN

At that moment, Mike Fink and Armor-of-God came up to him. "Sing us that song you thought up in jail, Alvin!"

At once several others clamored for the song—it was that kind of festive occasion.

"If Alvin won't sing it, Arthur Stuart knows it!" somebody said, and then there was Arthur tugging at his arm and Alvin joined in singing with him. Most of the jury was still there to hear the last verse:

I trusted justice not to fail. The jury did me proud. Tomorrow I will hit the trail, And sing my hiking song so loud, It's like to start a gale!

Everybody laughed and clapped. Even Miss Larner smiled, and as Alvin looked at her he knew that this was the moment, now or never. "I got another verse that I never sung to anybody before, but I want to sing it now," he said. They all hushed up again to hear:

Now swiftly from this place I'll fly, And underneath my boots, A thousand lands will pass me by, Until we choose to put down roots, My lady love and I.

He looked at Margaret with all the meaning he could put in his face, and everybody hooted and clapped. "I love you, Margaret Larner," he said. "I asked you before, but I'll say it again now. We're about to journey together for a ways, and I can't think of a good reason why it can't be our honeymoon journey. Let me be your husband, Margaret. Everything good that's in me belongs to you, if you'll have me."

She looked flustered. "You're embarrassing me, Alvin," she murmured.

Alvin leaned close and spoke into her ear. "I know we got separate work to do, once we leave the weavers house. I know we got long journeys apart."

She held his face between her hands. "You don't know what you might meet on that road. What woman you might meet and love better than me."

Alvin felt a stab of dread. Was this something she had seen with her torchy knack? Or merely the worry any woman might feel? Well, it was his future, wasn't it? And even if she saw the possibility of him loving somebody else, that didn't mean he had to let it come true.

He wrapped his long arms around her waist and drew her close, and spoke softly. "You see things in the future that I can't see. Let me ask you like an ordinary man, and you answer me like a woman that knows only the past and the present. Let my promise to you now keep watch over the future."

She was about to raise another objection, when he kissed her lightly on the lips. "If you're my wife, then whatever there is in the future, I can bear it, and I'll do my best to help you bear it too. The judge is right here. Let me begin my life of new freedom with you."

For a moment, her eyes looked heavy and sad, as if she saw some awful pain and suffering in his future. Or was it in her own?

Then she shook it off as if it was just the shadow of a cloud passing over her and now the sun was back. Or as if she had decided to live a certain life, no matter what the cost of it, and now would no longer dread what couldn't be helped. She smiled, and tears ran down her cheeks. "You don't know what you're doing, Alvin, but I'm proud and glad to have your love, and I'll be your wife."

Alvin turned to face the others, and in a loud voice he cried, "She said yes! Judge! Somebody stop the judge from leaving! He's got him one more job to do!" While Peggy went off to find her father and drag him back so he could give her away properly, Verily Cooper fetched the judge.

On the way over to where Alvin waited, the judge put a kindly arm across Verily's back. "My lad, you have a keen mind, a lawyer's mind, and I approve of that. But there's something about you that sets a fellow's teeth on edge."

"If I knew what it was, sir, you may be sure that I'd stop."

"Took me a while to figure it out. And I don't know what you can do about it. What makes folks mad at you right from the start is you sound so damnably English and educated and fine."

Verily grinned, then answered in the vernacular accent he had grown up with, the one he had spent so many years trying to lose. "You mean, sir, that if I talks like a common feller, I'll be more likable?"

The judge whooped with laughter. "That's what I mean, lad, though I don't know as how that accent is much better!"

And with that they reached the spot where the wedding party was assembled. Horace stood beside his daughter, and Arthur Stuart was there as Alvin's best man.

The judge turned to Sheriff Doggly. "Do the banns, my good sir."

Po Doggly at once cried out, "Is there a body here so foolish as to claim there's any impediment to the marriage of this pair of good and godly citizens?" He turned to the judge. "Not a soul as I can see, Judge."

So Alvin and Peggy were married, Horace Guester on one side, Arthur Stuart on the other, all standing there in the open on the grounds of the smithy where Alvin had served his prenticehood. Just up the hill was the springhouse where Peggy had lived in disguise as a schoolteacher; the very springhouse where twenty-two years before, as a five-year-old girl, she had seen the heartfires of a family struggling across the Hatrack River in flood, and in the womb of the mother of that family there was a baby with a heartfire so bright it dazzled her, the like of which she'd never seen before or since. She ran then, ran down this hill, ran to this smithy, got Makepeace Smith and the other men gathered there to race to the river and save the family. All of it began here, within sight of this place. And now she was married to him. Married to the boy whose heartfire shone like the brightest star in her memory, and in all her life since then.

There was dancing that night at Horace's roadhouse, you can bet, and Alvin had to sing his song five more times, and the last verse thrice each time through. And that night he carried his Margaret—his now, and he was hers—in those strong blacksmith's arms up the stairs to the room where Margaret herself had been conceived twenty-eight years before. He was awkward and they both were shy and it didn't help that half the town was charivareeing outside the roadhouse halfway till dawn, but they were man and wife, made one flesh as they had so long been one heart even though she had tried to deny it and he had tried to live without her. Never mind that she had seen his grave in her mind, and herself and their children standing by it, weeping. That scene was possible in every wedding night; and at least there would be children; at least there would be a loving widow to grieve him; at least there would be memory of this night, instead of regretful loneliness. And in the morning, when they awoke, they were not quite so shy, not quite so awkward, and he said such things to her as made her feel more beautiful than anyone who had ever lived before, and more beloved, and I don't know who would dare to say that in that moment it wasn't the pure truth.

Two days later they were ready to light out. They made no secret about the carriage Armor-of-God hired in Wheelwright, ready to take them off the ferry as soon as they crossed the Hio. That would be enough to decoy the stupid ones. As for the clever ones, well, Mike Fink had his own plan, and even Margaret allowed as how it might well work.

Friends came to the roadhouse all that evening to bid goodbye. Alvin and Peggy and Arthur were well known to them all; Armor-of-God had a few friends here, from business traveling; and Verily had made some new friends, having been the spokesman for the winning side in a highly emotional trial. If Mike Fink had local friends, they weren't the sort to show up in Horace Guester's roadhouse; as Mike confided to Verily Cooper, his friends were most of them the very men Alvin's enemies had hired to kill him and take the plow once he got out on the road tomorrow.

When the last soul had left, Horace embraced his daughter and his new son-in-law and the adopted son he had helped to raise, shook hands with Verily, Armor, and Mike, and then went about as he always did, dousing the candles, putting the night log on the fire, checking to make sure all was secure. As he did, Measure helped the travelers, make their way, lightly burdened, quietly down the stairs and out the back, finding the path with only the faintest sliver of moon. Even at that, they walked at first toward the privy, so that anyone casually glancing wouldn't think a thing amiss, unless they noticed the satchel or bag each one carried. Meantime, Measure kept watch, in case someone else was thinking to snatch Alvin that night while he was relieving himself. He kept watch even though Peggy Larner—or was it Goody Smith now? --assured him that not a soul was watching the back of the house.