Oh, Taleswapper had a knack, he did, for as he recited, the very world changed before Alvin’s eyes. The meadows and trees looked like the loudest shout of spring, vivid yellow-green with ten thousand blossoms, and the white of the chapel in the midst of it was no longer gleaming, but instead the dusty, chalky white of old bones. “Binding with briars my joys and desires,” Alvin repeated. “You ain’t got much use for religion.”

“I breathe religion with my every breath,” said the Taleswapper. “I long for visions, I search for the traces of God’s hand. But in this world I see more traces of the other. A trail of glistening slime that burns me when I touch it. God is a bit standoffish these days, Al Junior, but Satan has no fear of getting down in the muck with mankind.”

“Thrower says his church is the house of God.”

Taleswapper, he just sat there and said nothing for the longest time.

Finally Alvin asked him right out: “Have you seen devil traces in that church?”

In the days that Taleswapper had been with them, Alvin had come to know that Taleswapper never exactly lied. But when he didn’t want to get pinned down with the true answer, he’d say a poem. He said one now.

“O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm

“Has found out thy bed, Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love, Does thy life destroy.”

Alvin was impatient with such twisting answers. “If I want to hear something I don’t understand, I can read Isaiah.”

“Music to my ears, my lad, to compare me to the greatest of prophets.”

“He ain’t much of a prophet if nobody can understand a thing he wrote.”

“Or perhaps he meant us all to become prophets.”

“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.” It was something he had heard his father say.

“Everybody ends up dead,” said Taleswapper. “But some who are dead live on in their words.”

“Words never stay straight,” said Alvin. “Now, when I make a thing, then it’s the thing I made. Like when I make a basket. It’s a basket. When it gets tore, then it’s a tored-up basket. But when I say words, they can get all twisted up. Thrower can take those same very words I said and bend them back and make them mean just contrary to what I said.”

“Think of it another way, Alvin. When you make one basket, it can never be more than one basket. But when you say words, they can be repeated over and over, and fill men’s hearts a thousand miles from where you first spoke them. Words can magnify, but things are never more than what they are.”