Free Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III by Orson Scott Card

least, I’m free. Free of my watch aloft for the town of Hatrack, and free of building all my plans around that little boy. And what if I end up free of him forever? What if I find another future that doesn’t even have him in it? That’s the likeliest end of things. Give me time enough, I’ll even forget that scrap of a dream I had, and find my own good road to a peaceful end, instead of bending myself to fit his troubled path.
    The dancing horses pulled the carriage along so brisk that the wind caught and tossed her hair. She closed her eyes and pretended she was flying, a runaway just learning to be free.
    Let him find his path to greatness now without me. Let me have a happy life far from him. Let some other woman stand beside him in his glory. Let another woman kneel a-weeping at his grave.

3
    Lies
    ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Alvin lost half his name when he came to Hatrack River. Back home in the town of Vigor Church, not far from where the Tippy-Canoe poured its waters into the Wobbish, everybody knowed his father was Alvin, miller for the town and the country round about. Alvin Miller. Which made his namesake, his seventh son, Alvin Junior. Now, though, he was going to live in a place where there wasn’t six folks who so much as ever met his pa. No need for names like Miller and Junior. He was just Alvin, plain Alvin, but hearing that lone name made him feel like only half hisself.
    He came to Hatrack River on foot, hundreds of miles across Wobbish and Hio territories. When he set out from home it was with a pair of sturdy broke-in boots on and a pack of supplies on his back. He did five miles that way, before he stopped up at a poor cabin and gave his food to the folk there. After another mile or so he met a poor traveling family, heading on west to the new lands in the Noisy River country. He gave them the tent and blanket in his pack, and because they had a thirteen-year-old boy about
Alvin’s size, he pulled off them new boots and gave them straight out, just like that, socks too. He kept only his clothes and the empty pack on his back.
    Why, them folks were wide-eyed and silly-faced over it, worrying that Alvin’s pa might be mad, him giving stuff away like that, but he allowed as how it was his to give.
    “You sure I won’t be meeting up with your pa with a musket and a possy-come-and-take-us?” asked the poor man.
    “I’m sure you won’t, sir,” said young Alvin, “on account of I’m from the town of Vigor Church, and the folks there won’t see you at all unless you force them.”
    It took them near ten seconds to realize where they’d heard the name of Vigor Church before. “Them’s the folk of the Tippy-Canoe massacre,” they said. “Them’s the folk what got blood on their hands.”
    Alvin just nodded. “So you see they’ll leave you be.”
    “Is it true they make every traveler listen to them tell that terrible gory tale of how they killed all them Reds in cold blood?”
    “Their blood wasn’t cold,” said Alvin, “and they only tell travelers who come right on into town. So just stay on the road, leave them be, ride on through. Once you cross the Wobbish, you’ll be in open land again, where you’ll be glad to meet up with settled folk. Not ten mile on.”
    Well, they didn’t argue no more, nor even ask him how he came not to have to tell the tale hisself. The name of the Massacre of Tippy-Canoe was enough to put a silence on folks like setting in a church, a kind of holy, shameful, reverent attitude. Cause even though most Whites shunned the bloody-handed folk who shed Red men’s blood at Tippy-Canoe, they still knew that if they’d stood in the same place, they’d’ve done the same thing, and it’d be their hands dripping red till they told a stranger about the wretched deed they done. That guilty knowledge didn’t make many travelers too keen on stopping in Vigor Church, or any homes in the upper Wobbish country. Them poor folks just took Alvin’s boots and gear and moved on