“I don't know,” said Becca. “But the story is that we go to the place where the threads come from.”

“What do you do there?”

“We spin.”

Alvin tried to imagine Becca's mother, and her grandmother, and the women before that, all in a line, he tried to imagine how many there'd be, all of them working their spinning wheels, winding out threads from the spindle, yarn all raw and white, which would just go somewhere, go on and disappear somewhere until it broke. Or maybe when it broke they held the whole thing, a whole human life, in their hands, and then tossed it upward until it was caught by a passing wind, and then dropped down and got snagged up in somebody's loom. A life afloat on the wind, then caught and woven into the cloth of humanity; born at some arbitrary time, then struggling to find its way into the fabric, weaving into the strength of it.

And as he imagined this, he also imagined that he understood something about that fabric. About the way it grew stronger the more tightly woven in each thread became. The ones that skipped about over the top of the cloth, dipping into the weft only now and then, they added little to the strength, though much to the color, of the cloth. While some whose color hardly showed at all, they were deeply wound among the threads, holding all together. There was a goodness in those hidden binding threads. Forever from then on, Alvin would see some quiet man or woman, little noticed and hardly thought of by others, who nevertheless went a-weaving through the life of village, town, or city, binding up, holding on, and Alvin would silently salute such folk, and do them homage in his heart, because he knew how their lives kept the cloth strong, the weave tight.

He also remembered the many threads that ended at the point where Ta-Kumsaw's battle was to take place. It was as if Ta-Kumsaw had taken shears to the cloth.

“Ain't there'a way to heal things up?” asked Alvin. “Ain't there a hope of keeping this battle from ever happening, so those threads don't all get broke?”

Becca shook her head. “Even if Isaac refused to go, the battle would take place without him. No, the threads aren't broken by anything Isaac did. They broke the moment some Red man chose a course of action that would surely end in his death in battle; you and Isaac weren't going around spreading death, if that's what worries you. No more than Old Hickory's been killing people. You were just going spreading choices. They didn't have to believe in you. They didn't have to choose to die.”

“But they didn't know that's what they was choosing.”

“They knew,” said Becca. “We always know. We don't admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, Alvin, we see all the life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death.”

“What if something just happens to fall on somebody's head and mashes him?”

“He chose to be in a place where such things happen. And he wasn't looking up.”

“I don't believe it,” said Alvin. “I think folks can always change what's coming, and I think some things happen that ain't nobody ever chose to happen,”

Becca smiled at him, reached out her arm. “Come here, Alvin. Let me hold you close to me. I love your simple faith, child. I want to hold on to that faith, even if I can't believe it.”

So she held him for a time, and her arm around him felt so much like his own mama's, strong and gentle, that he cried a little. In fact he cried a good deal more than he would ever have meant to cry, if he'd meant to cry at all. And he knew better than to ask to see his own thread, even though he imagined his thread would be easy to find– the one thread born in the White man's section of the cloth, but migrating over and becoming green. Surely becoming green, like the Prophet's people did.

One thing he was also sure of, so sure that he didn't even ask, though heaven knows he wasn't shy about asking any question popped into his head: He was sure that Becca knew which thread was Ta-Kumsaw's, and knew as well that his and Ta-Kumsaw's threads were all bound up with each other, for a while at least. As long as Alvin was with him, Ta-Kumsaw'd be alive. Alvin knew that there was two endings to the prophecy: the one in which Alvin died first, leaving Ta-Kumsaw by himself, in which case he'd die too; or the one in which neither one of them died and their threads went on until they disappeared. There might've been a third way it could come out: Alvin might just up and leave Ta-Kumsaw. But then if he did that, he wouldn't be Alvin anymore, so there wasn't no point in considering that as a possibility, cause it wasn't one.

Alvin slept the night on a mat on the library floor, after reading a few pages in a book by a man named Adam Smith. Where Ta-Kumsaw slept, Alvin didn't know or care to ask. What a man does with his wife is no affair for children, Alvin knew; but he wondered if the main reason Ta-Kumsaw had come back here wasn't his wish to see the loom, but the hungering that Becca spoke of. The need to make another daughter to care for Becca's loom. It wasn't a bad idea, in Alvin's mind, to have the cloth of White America in the hands of a Red man's daughter.

In the morning Ta-Kumsaw led him away, back into the forest. They did not speak of Becca, or anything else; it was back to the old way, with Ta-Kumsaw speaking only to get things done. Alvin never heard him speak in his Isaac voice again, so that Alvin began to wonder if he really heard it.

On the north bank of the Hio, near where the Wobbish empties into it, the Red army gathered, more Reds than Alvin knew existed in the whole world. More people than Alvin had ever imagined together in the same place at the same time.

Because such a company was bound to get hungry, the animals also came to them, sensing their need and fulfilling what they all was born for. Did the forest know that all its hopes of withstanding White men's axes depended on Ta-Kumsaw's victory?

No, Alvin decided, the forest was just doing what it always did– making shift to feed its own.

It was raining and the breeze was cool on the morning they set out from the Hio, bound northward. But what was rain to Red men? The messenger had come from the French in Detroit. It was time to join forces, and lure Old Hickory's army north.

Chapter 18 – Detroit

It was a glorious time for Frederic, Comte de Maurepas. Far from living in hell here in Detroit, with none of the amenities of Paris, he found the exhilaration of, for once, being part of something larger than himself. War was afoot, the fort was stirring, the heathen Reds were gathering from the far corners of the wilderness, and soon, under de Maurepas's command, the French would destroy the ragtag American army Old Chestnut had brought north of the Maw-Mee. Old Willow? Whatever they called him.

Of course a part of him was rather unnerved by all this. Frederic had never been a man of action, and now so much action was going on that he could hardly fathom it. It bothered him sometimes that Napoleon was letting the savages fight from behind trees. Surely Europeans, even the barbarous Americans, should be courteous enough not to let the Reds take unfair advantage of their ability to hide in the woods. But never mind. Napoleon was sure it would work out. What could go wrong, really? Everything was working as Napoleon said it would. Even Governor La Fayette, traitorous effete Feuillant dog that he was, seemed enthusiastic about the battle ahead. He had even sent another ship with more troops, which Frederic had seen pull into harbor not ten minutes ago.

“My lord,” said Whoever-it-was, the servant who handled things in the evening. He was announcing somebody, of all things.

“Who?” Who is it visiting at such an ungodly hour?