Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II by Orson Scott Card

didn’t know what to say. Was this a White man joke? White man jokes were very hard to understand.
    “Aren’t you hungry?”
    “Reckon so,” said Lolla-Wossiky again.
    “Well, come on, then!”
    Another White man came up the hill. “Armor-of-God!” he called. “Your good wife wondered where you were.”
    “Just a minute, Reverend Thrower. I think maybe we got us company for supper.”
    “Who is that? Why, Armor-of-God, I daresay that’s a Red.”
    “He says his name’s Lolla-Wossiky. He’s a Shaw-Nee. He’s also drunk as a skunk.”
    Lolla-Wossiky was very surprised. This White man knew he was a Shaw-Nee without asking. From his hair, plucked out except the tall strip down the middle? Other Reds did this. The fringe on his loincloth? White man never saw these things.
    “A Shaw-Nee,” said the new-come White man. “Aren’t they a particularly savage tribe?”
    “Well, now, I don’t know, Reverend Thrower,” said Armor-of-God. “What they are is a particularly
sober
tribe. By which I mean they don’t get so likkered as some of these others. Some folks think that the only safe Red is a whisky-Red, so they see all these sober Shaw-Nee and they think that makes them dangerous.”
    “This one seems not to have that problem.”
    “I know. I tried to find out who gave him his whisky, and he won’t tell me.”
    Reverend Thrower addressed Lolla-Wossiky. “Don’t you know that whisky is the devil’s tool and the downfall of the Red man?”
    “I don’t think he talks English enough to know what you’re talking about, Reverend.”
    “Likker very bad for Red man,” said Lolla-Wossiky.
    “Well, maybe he
does
understand,” said Armor-of-God,chuckling. “Lolla-Wossiky, if you know how bad likker is, how come you stink of cheap whisky like an Irish barroom?”
    “Likker very bad for Red man,” said Lolla-Wossiky, “but Red man thirsty all the time.”
    “There’s a simple scientific explanation for that,” said Reverend Thrower. “Europeans have had alcoholic beverages for so long that they’ve built up a tolerance. Europeans who desperately hunger for alcohol tend to die younger, have fewer children, provide less well for those children they do have. The result is that most Europeans have a resistance to alcohol built into them. But you Reds have never built up that tolerance.”
    “Very damn right,” said Lolla-Wossiky. “True-talking White man, how come White Murderer Harrison not kill you yet?”
    “Well, now, will you listen to that,” said Armor-of-God. “That’s the second time he called Harrison a murderer.”
    “He also swore, which I do not appreciate.”
    “If he’s from Carthage, he learned to talk English from a class of White man that thinks words like ‘damn’ are punctuation, if you catch my drift, Reverend. But listen, Lolla-Wossiky. This man here, he’s Reverend Philadelphia Thrower, and he’s a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ, so mind you don’t use no bad language around him.”
    Lolla-Wossiky hadn’t the faintest idea what a minister was—there was no such thing in Carthage City. The best he could think of was that a minister was like a governor, only nicer.
    “Will you live in this very big house?”
    “Live here?” asked Thrower. “Oh, no. This is the Lord’s house.”
    “Who?”
    “The Lord Jesus Christ.”
    Lolla-Wossiky had heard of Jesus Christ. White man called out that name all the time, mostly when they were angry or lying. “Very angry man,” said Lolla-Wossiky. “He live here?”
    “Jesus Christ is a loving and forgiving Lord,” saidReverend Thrower. “He won’t live here the way a White man lives in a-house. But when good Christians want to worship—to sing hymns and pray and hear the word of the Lord—we’ll come together in this place. It’s a church, or it will be.”
    “Jesus Christ talks here?” Lolla-Wossiky thought it might be interesting to meet this very important White man face to face.
    “Oh, no, not in person. I