The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (18 page)

“I know what you doing,” said La Tia. “You a house slave, you try make them field slave forget you sleep indoors on a bed, you.”

Old Bart glared at her. “Every day I got them treating me like dirt, they in my face all the time, you think a indoor
bed
make up for that? I hate them more than anybody. Me slapping him stead of killing him, that what
mercy
look like.”

Arthur Stuart nodded. “I got respect for your feelings, sir. But right now I don’t care about justice nor mercy neither. I care about getting five thousand people safe to the Mizzippy. And I don’t need to have the whole country stirred up by a bunch of stories about slaves slapping the children of their former masters.”

“They ain’t gonna tell no slapping story,” said Old Bart. “They gonna tell that we
killed
this white boy and
raped
that white woman, and cut that stupid teacher all up. So as long as they gonna tell it, why not do a
little
of it?”

Ruth gasped.

“You already done all you gonna do,” said Arthur Stuart. “I told you why. So if you raise a hand against anybody else while we’re here, sir, I’ll have to stop you.”

Old Bart smiled patronizingly at Arthur Stuart. “I’d like to see you try.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said Arthur.

Mary tried to defuse the situation. She rose from her chair and approached Ruth Cottoner. “Please give me your hand,” she said.

“Don’t touch me!” cried Ruth. “I won’t give my hand to an invader and a looter!”

“I know something about disease,” said Mary. “I know more than your doctor.”

“In Barcy,” said Arthur Stuart, “everybody came to her to know if they was gonna get better when they was sick.”

“I’ll do no harm,” said Mary. “And I’ll tell you the truth of what I see. Your son will know if I’m lying.”

Slowly the woman raised her hand and put it in Mary’s.

Mary felt the woman’s body as if it became part of her own, and at once knew where the cancer was. Centered in her womb, but spread out, too, eating away at her inside. “It’s bad,” she said. “It started in your womb, but it’s everywhere now. The pain must be terrible.”

Ruth closed her eyes.

“Mama,” said Roy.

Mary turned to Arthur Stuart. “Can you…?”

“Not me,” said Arthur Stuart. “It’s too much for me.”

“But Alvin, don’t you think he—”

“You can ask him,” said Arthur Stuart. “It might be too much for him, too, you know. He ain’t no miracle worker.”

“You have some kind of healer with you?” said Ruth bitterly. “I’ve had healers come before, the charlatans.”

“He ain’t mostly a healer,” said Arthur Stuart. “He only does it kind of, you know, when he runs into somebody who needs it.”

Mary let go of the woman’s hand and walked to the window. Already the people were walking onto the land in their groups of ten households and fifty households. Blacks from the plantation were guiding them to various buildings and sheds, and there were noises of pots and pans, of chopping and chattering coming from the kitchen.

Among the swarming people, it was easy to pick out Alvin. He was as strong as a hero out of legend—Achilles, Hercules—and as wise and good as Prometheus. Mary knew he could heal this woman. And who could then accuse them of stealing, if he paid her back with years and years of life?

Verily Cooper’s thighs always got sore when he rode. Sore on the outside, and sore in the muscles as well. There were people who throve on riding, hour after hour. Verily wasn’t one of them. And he shouldn’t have to be. Lawyers prospered, didn’t they? Lawyers rode in carriages. On trains.

Riding a horse you had to think all the time, and work, too. The horse didn’t do it all, not by any means. You always had to be alert, or the horse would sense that no one was in control and you’d find yourself following a route to whatever the horse happened to smell that seemed interesting.

And then there was the chafing. The only way to keep the saddle from chafing the insides of your thighs was to stand in the stirrups a little, hold yourself steady. But that was tiring on the muscles of your legs. Maybe with time he’d develop more strength and endurance, but most days he didn’t take such long rides on horseback. So it was raise yourself in the stirrups until your thighs ached, and then sit and let your thighs chafe.

Either way your legs burned.

Why should I do this for Alvin? Or for Margaret Larner? What do I actually owe them? Haven’t I given
them
most of the service since I’ve become their friend? What do I get out of this, exactly?

He was ashamed of himself for thinking such disloyal thoughts, but he couldn’t help what entered his head, could he? For a while he’d been a friend and traveling companion to Alvin, but those days were gone. He’d tried to learn makery with the others in Vigor Church, too, but even though his own knack was to see how things fit and change them enough to make them fit exactly right—which, as Alvin said, was one of the key parts of making—he still couldn’t do the things that Alvin could.

He could set a broken bone—which wasn’t a bad knack to have—but he couldn’t heal an open wound. He could make a barrel fit so tight it would never leak, but he couldn’t open a steel lock by melting the metal. And when Alvin left his own makery school to go a-wandering, Verily couldn’t see much reason to stay and continue the exercises.

Yet Alvin asked him to, and so he did. He and Measure, Alvin’s older brother—two fools, that’s what they were. Working to teach others what they hadn’t learned themselves.

And not making much money at lawyering.

I’m a good lawyer, Verily told himself. I’m as good at law as I am at coopery. Maybe better. But I’ll never plead before the Supreme Court or the King’s Bench or any other lofty venue. I’ll never have a case that makes me famous—except defending Alvin, and then it was Alvin who got all the notoriety, not that Verily minded that.

And here his attention had wandered again, and the horse was not on the main trail. Where am I this time? Will I have to backtrack?

Just ahead the road he was on crossed a little stream. Only instead of a ford, as most such roads would have, there was a stout bridge—a covered one, too—only ten feet long, but well above the water, and showing no signs of weakening even though as Verily knew, all the covered bridges on this road had been built by Alvin’s father and older brothers, so no other travelers would lose a beloved son and brother because some insignificant river like the Hatrack happened to be in flood on the very day they had to cross.

So the horse had taken a turn somewhere and now they were headed, not direct west to Carthage and on into Noisy River from there, but northwest to Vigor Church. It would be a little longer getting to Abe Lincoln that way, but now that Verily thought of it, this was the better way. It would give him a place for respite and resupply. He might hear news. And maybe the love of his life would be there, ready to introduce herself and take him away from all these complicated things.

Alvin’s got him a wife and a baby on the way, and what do I have? Sore legs. And no clients.

What I need is to find a lawyer in Noisy River who needs a good courtroom lawyer in his practice. I think I know how to partner with another lawyer. I’ll never be a partner to Alvin Maker. He’s his own best partner, except perhaps for his wife, and as far apart as they always are, it’s hard to call that much of a partnership either.

I’ll take a look at Springfield, Noisy River, and see if it looks like home.

And I won’t go through Vigor Church. The love of my life is
not
there. For good or ill, it’s my love of Alvin Maker that shapes my life, and I was sent to serve him in Springfield. I’ll take no circuitous side trip.

He turned his horse and did not go far before he found the fork in the road where the horse had taken the wrong turning. No, be honest, he told himself. Where
you
took the wrong turning, hoping to flee like Jonah from your duty.

Arthur Stuart watched Alvin close, hoping to learn how to heal this kind of disease. He hadn’t caught the details of how Alvin fixed up Papa Moose’s foot, but he grasped the main lines of it. This woman’s cancer, it was going to be harder. Once Dead Mary had pointed out what was going on in her body, then Arthur had been able to find it, but it was hard to see the boundaries of the cancer, to know where the good flesh left off and the bad began. And there were lots of little spots of it scattered here and there inside her—but there were some he wasn’t sure about, whether they were cancer or not.

So when Alvin came into the house and greeted him and La Tia and Rien and Dead Mary, Arthur Stuart could hardly wait to take him to Mistress Cottoner.

Alvin bowed over her hand, and gravely shook the hand of the boy as well, though Roy was sullen about it.

Then Alvin asked if he might sit beside her and take her hands, “because this goes easier if I’m touching you, though I can do it without if you prefer.”

In answer, she placed her hands in his. And there, sitting in the parlor, with all the noise of the business of camp outside, and some of it inside, too, as people bounded in from time to time, demanding a decision from La Tia or Rien, Alvin set to work changing her inside.

Arthur Stuart tried to follow along, and this time Alvin was moving slowly and methodically. Almost as if he were trying to make it clear for Arthur—and maybe he was. But always the most important details seemed to elude him. He’d see what Alvin was looking at, and he’d feel how he was seeking out the boundary between good flesh and bad. But how Alvin knew when he had it right, that’s what Arthur Stuart just couldn’t fathom.

But some things he
could
see. How, when Alvin broke down the sick flesh, he made it dissolve into the blood to be carried away. How he made sure to connect everything up inside when the cancerous parts were gone. How he left her strong.

“I feel sick,” she murmured.

“But not in pain,” Alvin whispered back.

“No, no pain.”

“I’m almost done. Your body is helping me find all the wrong places. I couldn’t do it without your own body’s help. You know how to heal yourself, not in your mind, but in the flesh and bone and blood. It just needed a little…direction. You see? There’s no miracle here. My knack is no more than finding what your body already wants to do but can’t figure out for itself, and…showing the way.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“The sick feeling will pass when the last of it comes out of you at stool,” he said. “By morning at the latest. Maybe sooner.”

“But I won’t die?”

“Can’t you feel it?” said Alvin softly. “Can’t you feel how right things are inside you now?”

She shook her head. “The pain’s gone, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s something, ain’t it?” said Alvin.

She began to weep.

At once Roy rushed to her, put a hand on her shoulder, and looked in anger at Alvin and Arthur Stuart. “She never cries! You made her cry!”

“She’s crying in relief,” said Arthur Stuart.

“No she’s not,” said Alvin.

“You hurt her!” said Roy.

“She’s crying because she’s afraid.” He looked to Mistress Cottoner. “What are you afraid of, ma’am?”

“I’m afraid that when you go, it’ll come back.”

“I can’t promise you it won’t,” said Alvin. “But I don’t think it will. But if it ever does, you send me a letter. Send it to Alvin the Miller’s son, at Vigor Church in the state of Wobbish.”

“You can’t come back here,” she said.

“Damn right he can’t,” said Roy. “I’ll be bigger then, and I’ll kill him!”

“No you won’t,” said Mistress Cottoner.

“Will so. Stealing all our slaves! Don’t you see, Mother? We’ll be poor!”

“We still have the land,” said his mother. “And you still have your mother. Isn’t that worth something to you?”

Her steady gaze must have said something to the boy that Arthur Stuart just didn’t understand, because the boy burst into tears and ran from the room.

“He’s young,” she said.

“We’ve all been guilty of
that
sin,” said Alvin. “And some never get over it.”

“Not me,” she said. “I was never young.”

Arthur Stuart reckoned there was a whole story behind that, but he didn’t know what it was. If his big sister Peggy had been there,
she
would’ve knowed, and maybe she could have told him later. Or if Taleswapper had ever been here and learned her story and wrote it in his book, then maybe he’d understand. As it was, though, he could only guess what she meant when she said she was never young.

Or what Alvin meant when he answered her, “You’re young
now
.”

“For a few hours, maybe,” she said.

Alvin opened his hands to let hers go. But she moved quickly and caught him by the wrists. “Oh, please,” she said. “Not yet.”

So he sat there a while longer and held her hands in his.

Arthur Stuart couldn’t watch it for long. There was no healing going on now. Alvin wasn’t doing a blame thing with his knack. He was just holding hands with a woman who looked at him like he was God or a long-lost brother or something. It made Arthur Stuart feel like something was wrong. Like his adopted sister, Peggy, was somehow being betrayed by this. Those aren’t your hands to hold, Ruth Cottoner, he wanted to say.

But he said nothing, and went outside, and saw how La Tia was quietly making decisions and keeping things moving without raising her voice. She even laughed sometimes, and got smiles and laughs from those who came to her.

She saw him, and called to him. “Come here, you!” she said. “I don’t got enough Spanish to understand this man!”

So Arthur Stuart got back into the business of camp, and left Alvin alone in the house with a woman who was half in love with him. Well, why shouldn’t she be? He just saved her life. He just looked inside her body and saw what was wrong and fixed it up. You have to love somebody who does that, don’t you?

It was no riverboat they boarded for the Mexico expedition. Steve Austin must have found somebody with mighty deep pockets, because what they had was a three-masted lateen-rigged schooner, good for the coastal trade, and with oar ports like a galley ship because the Gulf of Mexico was so often calm. There were full blown cannon on this ship, and field-pieces to take ashore when they got there. Artillery, by damn!