The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (10 page)

“There’s parts of you I need, all right,” said Alvin. “The part that wants to use his knack to help get a bunch of innocent or at least mostly innocent people out of Barcy before the killing starts, I need
that
. But the part of you that wants to pick fights with me and distract me from what I’ve got to do, that part can go stick its head up a horse’s butt.”

Calvin just laughed. “I bet the horse would like that even less than me.”

“You’re right,” said Alvin. “I was forgetting that horses got rights, too.”

“Ease up, old Al,” said Calvin. “Don’t you know when a body’s teasing you?”

“I reckon I do,” said Alvin. “You think you’re a quick dog teasing a slow bull. But what you don’t seem to realize is, sometimes the dog ain’t that quick and the bull ain’t that slow.”

“Threatening me?” said Calvin.

“Reminding you that I don’t got all the patience in the world.”

“Don’t even have patience enough for
me
? Your beloved little brother?”

“A man could have eight barrels full of patience for you, Cal, and you’d just have to keep goading him till you saw what happened when it turned out he needed nine.”

“Sometimes I rile people, I admit it,” said Calvin. “But so do you.”

“I reckon I do,” said Alvin, thinking of Jim Bowie.

“So you’ll make a bridge over this Paunchy Train?”

“I thought you spoke French.”

“Paunchy Train is supposed to be
French
?” Calvin laughed. “Oh…oh, now I get it. Pont Chartrain.”

He said it with an exaggerated French accent so his mouth looked all pursed up like he’d just et a persimmon.

Alvin couldn’t help himself. He put on his dumb American act. “Pone Shot Train? I just can’t ever hold my mouth right to speak them hard French words.”

It was like the best of the old times, tossing words back and forth. “That was the best French accent I ever heard from a journeyman blacksmith.”

“Aw shucks, Cal,” said Alvin. “I reckon you done made me want to haul my poke over to Paree.”

“Iffen you wash yourself proper, I’ll take you to meet Bonaparte himself,” said Calvin.

“No thanks,” said Alvin. “I met him once and I’m done with him.”

All at once the playfulness fled from Calvin’s face and Alvin could see his heartfire flare with anger. “Oh, excuse me, I forgot you already did everything long before little Calvin come along.”

“Oh, don’t be a…”

“Don’t be a what? What were you going to call me, big brother?”

“I met him when I was a kid, and I didn’t like him. You met him, and apparently you did. What of it? He was here in America. It was before he overthrew the monarchy. What am I supposed to do, pretend that I didn’t meet him, just so you don’t get provoked? Are you the only one entitled to have met famous people?”

“Oh, just shut up,” said Calvin, and he stalked off in another direction.

Since Calvin was perfectly capable of finding Alvin’s heartfire whenever he wanted, Alvin didn’t fret about it. He just headed home, wishing that Margaret had decided that he needed a different helper. Like, say, Verily Cooper—there was a good man, and he didn’t pick foolish fights. Or Measure. Alvin could have used
any
of his brothers better than Calvin.

But the truth was, Alvin had no idea whether he could sustain a good fog
and
do the thing with the water, not at the same time—not reliably. Promising as Arthur Stuart was, he was still flailing about with makery, and Alvin would be lucky if he could teach Arthur to raise steam from a teapot, let alone a full-fledged fog. So he needed Calvin. A good thick fog wouldn’t be just to hide them on the other side. It would cover the whole city tonight. It would keep people from finding them till they were all across the lake and safely gone.

Margaret was right to send him, and Alvin would just have to swallow hard and not let Calvin make him mad.

Arthur Stuart’s big accomplishment of the day was coming up with fifteen cloth bags that the older children could use to carry food for the journey. Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were supervising the loading of the bags, arguing back and forth about what they’d need. Papa Moose was determined that they should carry spare clothing, while Mama Squirrel wanted nothing but food.

“They’ll get hungry before they get nekkid,” she said.

“But no matter how much we carry with us, we’ll run out of food soon, and if we’re going to have to forage or buy food anyway, we might as well carry spare clothing so the children don’t have to travel in rags.”

“If we can afford to buy food we can afford to buy clothes, and we’ll need the food first.”

“We can pick
food
off trees and glean it out of fields.”

“Well, if you’re talking about stealing, Papa Moose, we can take clothes off clotheslines.”

“If we’re lucky enough to find clothes that fit.”

“There’s not a child in this house who fits the same clothes for six months in a row.”

And on and on it went. Meanwhile, to Arthur Stuart’s amusement, they were unloading each other’s bags almost as fast as they were loading their own. The children seemed to be used to seeing this sort of thing and most of the bags were in another room, where the children were carefully loading them with food they were carrying out of the kitchen. Apparently they were voting with Mama Squirrel.

“Don’t like none of our clothes nohow,” said one of the children to Arthur Stuart. “Druther travel nekkid.”

At that moment a cry from the kitchen sent them all running to see.

Papa Moose lay on the floor, doubled up, holding his crippled foot and crying out with great groans of pain.

“What happened?” said Arthur, amid the clamor of the children.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Mama Squirrel.

Arthur Stuart knelt down by Papa Moose, moving some of the children out of the way as he did. He took the man’s ankle and foot in his hands and began unwinding and unfastening the straps that bound it in place and held on the pad at the heel. Almost at once the groaning stopped—but not because the pain had eased, Arthur Stuart soon realized. Papa Moose had fainted.

No one even heard the knock at the door—if there was one. The first they knew that they had a visitor was when he spoke.

“This is what comes of having a kitchen built right onto the house.”

Arthur Stuart looked up. It was Alvin’s younger brother Calvin.

Calvin shook his head. “Burn himself on the stove?”

“Don’t know,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Hasn’t Alvin taught you anything?”

Arthur Stuart seethed, but stuck to the subject. “It’s something with his foot.”

Calvin knelt down across from Arthur and began to examine Papa Moose. “This looks like a club foot,” said Calvin.

Arthur Stuart looked up at Mama Squirrel, raising his eyebrows to say, Isn’t it wonderful to have a real doctor here to tell us what we already knew.

Mama Squirrel was not, however, in the mood for sarcasm. “Who are you, sir? And get your hands off my husband’s foot.”

Calvin looked up at her and grinned. “I’m Calvin Maker, the brother of a certain journeyman blacksmith who’s been living in your house, I think.”

Now that really did make Arthur Stuart mad. Calling himself a maker, as if that was his profession, when Alvin didn’t make no such claim, and him ten times the maker Calvin would ever be!

But Arthur held his tongue, since there’d be nothing gained by going to war with Calvin.

“I’m getting the lie of the bones in his foot. The muscles have grown up all wrong around the bones.” Calvin palpated the foot some more, then pulled off the thick stockings.

“What are you doing?” demanded Mama Squirrel.

“I can’t believe Alvin’s been in this house so long and didn’t do a blamed thing about your husband’s foot.”

“My husband gets along just fine on his foot the way it is.”

“Well, he’ll get along better now,” said Calvin. “Got everything back in place.” He stood up and offered his hand to her. “It’ll take him some getting used to, but in a few weeks he’ll be walking better than he ever has in his whole life.”

“A few weeks?” said Mama Squirrel, ignoring his hand. “Maybe you’re all proud of your miracle working, but you might have thought to ask if this was a convenient day to go fixing up his foot. We’ve got miles to walk tonight! And for weeks to come.”

“And he was going to do that with a club foot?” said Calvin.

Arthur Stuart knew, from the slight snideness now creeping into Calvin’s tone, that he was irked by Mama Squirrel’s lack of gratitude.

“Some folks,” said Mama Squirrel, “is so proud of their knacks that it just don’t occur to them that other folks might not want them to do their public demonstrations on
them
.”

“Well, then,” said Calvin, “I’m pretty sure I remember how the club foot was. I think I can put it back.”

“No you can’t,” said Arthur Stuart.

Calvin looked at him with cool, amused hostility. “Oh?”

“Because his foot had already been changed before you got here,” said Arthur Stuart. “That’s what made him cry out with pain and fall down. Something moved all the bones around while the foot was still all strapped up. And that was a good five minutes ago.”

“How interesting,” said Calvin.

“So you see,” said Arthur Stuart, “the bones the way you found them when you knelt down here, that ain’t how they was.”

Calvin shook his head sadly. “Arthur Stuart, does Alvin know you’ve been trying to heal this poor man without him even asking?”

“I’ve done no such thing!”

“If you knew how his foot was before, and how it was different when I got here, that says you been doodling around in there,” said Calvin. “Don’t deny it, you’ve always been a bad liar.”

“How do
you
know what I’ve always been.”

“Oh, then I suppose you’re a
good
liar,” said Calvin. “Not a thing I’d have expected a body to be proud of, but there you go.” Calvin went to the door and looked out into the back yard. “Mind if I use your privy? It’s a long time since I left the riverboat as brought me here, and I could use a pissoir.”

Mama Squirrel gestured for him to go ahead. As soon as he was gone, she knelt again beside Papa Moose. “He did it, didn’t he?” she said. “Before he even walked in the door.”

“He likes to make grand entrances,” said Arthur Stuart. “And he loves to show Alvin up, if he can.”

“Daring to cause my husband so much pain. Do you think we don’t know what Alvin is? Do you think we couldn’t have asked him to fix that foot iffen we’d wanted it done?”

“Calvin’s never going to admit he done it,” said Arthur Stuart. “So you might as well work on helping him learn to walk with his foot this way. Have you got the other shoe to this pair?”

“Other shoe? Pair?” Mama Squirrel snorted. “He’s never bought a
pair
of shoes in his life.”

“Well, is this the only shoe he’s got?”

“He has another, for Sundays.”

“Let’s get it on his other foot.”

“They don’t match.”

“One shoe on and one foot bare match a good bit worse,” said Arthur Stuart.

Mama Squirrel sent a couple of children to go look for Papa Moose’s Sunday shoe. Then she turned back to Arthur Stuart. “I don’t reckon you’d know how to wake my husband up.”

“I don’t mess around inside people’s heads
or
feet,” said Arthur Stuart. “Besides, Calvin didn’t do all that good a job. It’s still a mess inside his foot, even if it is shaped mostly right on the outside. I think when Papa Moose wakes up, there’s gonna be a lot of pain.”

“Best let him sleep then,” said Mama Squirrel. “I just. I…ever since I knowed him, I never seen Papa Moose laid out like that. In all these things that’ve been happening, I never been scared till this moment.”

“When Alvin gets himself back here, he’ll make it OK,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Oh, I hope so, I sure do,” said Mama Squirrel.

“We might as well get back to loading up the pokes,” said Arthur.

And in moments, the children were back to loading up with food. The extra clothing, all unloaded now, was left in a pile in the parlor. “For the poor,” said Mama Squirrel.

Arthur wondered if she had some definition of the word
poor
that didn’t include her and her huge hungry family.

Alvin sat on the damp bank near Dead Mary’s house, his bare feet in the water, watching a gator glide by. The gator had given him a passing thought—Alvin saw it in his heartfire, that flash of hunger. But Alvin asked him to search somewhere else, and the gator obligingly moved along.

Well, to put it precisely, Alvin put the idea of the gator getting its guts ripped out into its mind, and associated it with the sight of Alvin, and the gator flat-out skedaddled.

It’s a good thing to be able to scare away gators, thought Alvin. I could go into it fulltime and make a profession of it. They could call me Gator Al, and they’d always ask me how come I never wore gator-skin boots or a gator-skin belt, and I’d say, How can I get me a gator skin, iffen the gators won’t come close to me?

Sounded to him like a better job than his current employment, which right now looked like having the responsibility for saving the lives of hundreds of people without a clue of how to actually do it.