The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (24 page)

Just before they got within sight of the house, Arthur stopped them. “There’s four grown men in this house, and six women. And no shortage of guns. And no children.”

That was a bad sign, Marie knew. The children most likely had been sent away.

“Good sign,” said La Tia. “They don’t sent away the women. They don’t think we come tonight.”

“Fog as soon as I get inside,” Marie reminded Arthur Stuart.

He squeezed her hand. “Count on me,” he said.

Then he let go and she walked alone down the road and turned up the long drive to the house.

Long before she got to the house she had been spotted and three men were on the porch, holding muskets.

“You crazy, girl?” said the oldest of them. “Don’t you know there’s an army of raping and pillaging runaways coming this way?”

“My papa’s wagon overturned up the road, I need help.”

“Your papa’s out of luck,” said the biggest of the men. “We ain’t leaving this porch for nobody.”

“But he’s hurt, when he try to stand up, he falls down.”

“What’s that accent?” said the youngest man. “You French?”

“My parents are from Nueva Barcelona,” she said.

“Being a Frenchwoman in these parts ain’t such a good idea this week.”

She smiled at them. “Can I change who I am? Oh, you must help me. At least send a couple of servants with me to help right the wagon and bring my father here, can’t you do that?”

“Slaves are all locked up, ready to be marched away in the morning, and we ain’t letting any of
them
out on the road, neither,” said the big man.

“Then I see that Providence brought me to a house with no Christian charity,” she said. She turned her back and started back down the road.

It sort of made sense that when she seemed willing to leave, that was what convinced them. “Ain’t never turned folks in trouble away from my house before,” said the old man.

“Ain’t never been no slave revolt, neither,” said the big man.

“But even during a time of slave revolt,” said the young man, “wagons can still overturn and honest men can still be hurt and need help.”

Marie didn’t like lying to these men. The old man wanted to be kind, and the young man wanted to trust her. The big man was doing no worse than looking after his people. And since his suspicions were all completely justified, it hardly seemed fair that he was the one made to seem uncharitable. Well, it would all be clear soon enough. She hoped that this one bad experience would not put them off helping their neighbor in the future. It would be a shame if their journey did nothing but make the world worse.

“Come back,” shouted the old man.

“No, stay there!” shouted the big man. “We’ll go with you.” And he and the young man bounded down from the porch and started trotting toward her.

This was not the plan. What would she do with them out here? “But we need to bring him water.”

“Plenty of time for that when we’ve got him to the house.”

Now they were beside her, and there was nothing she could do but lead them down the drive.

Suddenly a fog came up. Out of nowhere, and then there was a chill in the air and a fog so thick she couldn’t even see the men beside her.

“What the hell,” said the big man.

“I can’t see my feet on the drive,” said the young man.

Marie, however, said nothing, for the moment the fog came in, she turned around and started walking back toward the house.

In a moment she was out of the fog. She did not glance back to see what it looked like, to have a single thick cloud—she wondered if it was like the Bible story, a pillar of smoke.

The old man wasn’t on the porch.

And then, as she got closer, there he was, with a musket in his hands. “I know devil’s work when I see it, you witch!” he shouted.

He fired the musket.

It was pointed right at her. And the barrel was
not
soft. She thought she must surely die on this spot.

But when the noise of the gunshot died down, she felt nothing, and kept walking toward the porch.

That was when the lead bullet popped out of the barrel of the musket and went maybe two yards and plunked on the ground. It made a pool of lead there, flat as a silver dollar.

“I’m no witch,” she said. “And you are a kind and good man. Do you think anybody will hurt you or the people you love? Nobody will hurt anybody.”

From inside the fog came shouts. “Who’s shooting! Where’s the house?”

Now she did look back. Two thick clouds barely taller than a man were moving swiftly across the lawns, but neither one was headed for the porch, and neither one was holding a straight course, either.

“We heard what you done in those other places, you liar!” shouted the old man.

“You heard lies,” she said. “Think about it. If we killed everybody, who would tell you there was two French women and two slaves that came to the door? That’s what you were watching for, no?”

The old man was no fool. He could listen pretty well.

“We want food,” she said. “And we will
have
food from this house. You have plenty, but we don’t take all. Your neighbors will help you replenish the lack. And you won’t need as much food, anyway.”

“Because you’re gonna take all our slaves, is that it?”

“Take them?” said Marie. “We can’t
take
them. What would we do, put them in our apron pockets? We let them travel with us if they choose to. If they choose to stay with you, then they can stay. They do what they want, like the children of God that they are.”

“Abolitionist bastards,” said the old man.

“Abolitionists, yes. In my case, also a bastard.” She deliberately pronounced the word with a thick French accent. “And you, a man who knows to be kind to strangers, but keeps human beings as property. Even as you do it to the least of these, my brethren.”

“Don’t quote scripture to me,” said the old man. “Steal from us if you want, but don’t pretend to be holy when you do it.”

She was standing on the porch now, facing the old man. She heard the door swing open behind her. She heard the click of a hammer striking the flint. She heard the sizzle of the gunpowder in the pan.

And then the plop of the bullet hitting the porch.

“Damn,” said a woman’s voice.

“You would have murdered me,” said Marie without turning around.

“We shoot trespassers around here.”

“We don’t hurt personne, but you with murder in your heart,” said Marie, and she turned to face the woman. “What is your food, that you could shoot a woman in the back for asking you to share it?” She reached out a hand toward the trembling woman, who cowered against the door. She touched the woman’s shoulder. “You have your health,” said Marie. “That’s good. Treasure it, to be so strong, no disease in you. Live a long life.”

Then she turned to the old man and reached out to him. Took his bare hand in hers. “Oh, you’re a strong man,” she said. “But you’re short of breath, yes?”

“I’m an old man,” he said. “Ain’t hard to guess I’m short of breath.”

“And you have pains in your chest. You try to ignore them, yes? But they come again in a few months, and then a few months. Put your house in order, say your good-byes, you good man. You will see God in only a few weeks time.”

He looked her hard in the eyes. “Why you cursing me?” he said. “What did I ever do to you?”

“I’m not cursing you,” she said. “I have no such power, to kill or not kill. I only touch a person and I know if they are sick and if they will die of it. You are sick. You will die of it. In your sleep. But I know you are a generous man, and many will mourn your death, and your family will remember you with love.”

Tears filled the old man’s eyes. “What kind of thief are you?”

“A hungry one,” she said, “or otherwise I would not steal, not me, not any of us.”

The old man turned and looked down onto the lawn. Marie assumed he was looking at the other two men, or at the clouds that enclosed them, but no. While they were talking, Arthur and La Tia and Mother must have opened the slaves’ quarters and now the house was surrounded by black men and women and children. The clouds no longer surrounded the two white men. Unarmed, they were standing inside the circle.

Arthur Stuart stepped forward and held out his hand. As if he expected a white slaveowner to shake with a black man. “My name is Arthur Stuart,” he said.

The old man hooted. “You trying to tell us you’re the King?”

Arthur shrugged. “I was telling you my name. I’m also telling you that none of the guns in that house is gonna work, and the man waiting just inside the door with a big old piece of boardwood to bat me or Marie in the head, he might as well put it down, because it won’t hurt nobody any more than getting hit with a piece of paper or a dry sponge.”

Marie heard somebody inside the house utter a curse, and a thick heavy piece of wood was flung out the door onto the lawn.

“Please let us come inside,” she said. “My mother and my friends and I. Let us sit down and talk about how to do this without hurting anyone and without leaving you with nothing.”

“I know the best way,” said the old man. “Just go away and leave us be.”

“We have to go somewhere,” said Marie. “We have to eat something. We have to sleep the night.”

“But why us?” he said.

“Why not you?” she answered. “God will bless you ten times for what you share with us today.”

“If I’m going to die as soon as you say, let me leave a good place to my sons and daughters.”

“Without slaves,” said Marie, “this will finally
be
a good place.”

Later, with the family
not
locked up, and everyone safely fed and sleeping, Marie had a chance to talk with Arthur Stuart. “Thank you for giving me the fog when I needed it, instead of waiting till I was in the house.”

“Can’t expect plans to work out when other people don’t know their part,” he said with a grin. “You done great, though.”

She smiled back at him. She
had
done a good job. But she had never before known what it felt like to be
told
so. Not till this trip. Not till Alvin and Arthur Stuart. Oh, they had such powers, such knacks. But the one that impressed her the most was the power to fill her heart the way their kind words did.

A group of reds took Alvin back across the Mizzippy in a canoe—a much better journey this time. They took Alvin downriver a ways, to a place just upstream of the port town of Red Stick. The river took a deep bight there, so Alvin had only a short walk through pretty dry country to get to the town. Meanwhile the reds got away without being seen by any white man. Up north in the United States, reds were a common enough sight, seeing how they were the majority of people in the states of Irrakwa and Cherriky. But they mostly dressed like white folks. And here in the deep south, where the Crown Colonies had more sway, reds didn’t show up much, specially not the ones from across river, who still dressed in the old way. It frightened the white folks to see them, those rare times they showed their faces. Savages, that’s how they looked, and people reached for their guns and began ringing church bells in alarm.

But a lone white man, dressed like what he was, a journeyman blacksmith, and carrying a heavy poke slung on his shoulder, nobody paid no mind to him.

Besides, there was bigger news afoot. The governor’s expedition had just arrived, and suddenly Red Stick was swollen with hundreds of bored militiamen, some of whom had lost their enthusiasm for slogging through back country and fighting runaway slaves. In fact, their enthusiasm waned in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol in their blood, and Colonel Adan wasn’t such a disciplinarian that he didn’t see the wisdom of keeping these men just a little likkered up. So they were in the saloons, with Spanish soldiers attempting to enforce a two-drink limit so they weren’t too drunk to march. Nobody was looking to see the leader of the very group they came to destroy walking all by himself through the streets of town.

It wasn’t much trouble for Alvin to size things up. He was pleased that none of the men from Steve Austin’s company were there. Those were hard men who knew how to kill and didn’t mind doing it. These men, by contrast, were quick to brag and boast about what they were gonna do, and what they
had
done, but the actual doing wasn’t all that attractive to them.

Alvin toyed with the idea of walking right in to Colonel Adan’s stateroom on one of the steamboats and telling him, you show up day after tomorrow right
here
and you can see us cross the river and leave you up to your necks in mud. But there was a good chance Adan would simply have Alvin hanged or shot instead of locking him up, and while Alvin could probably get himself out of it, what was the point? Fighting the Unmaker in gator form had taken a lot of the combativeness out of Alvin. The part of him that looked forward to a good rassle was pretty much used up for the nonce, and so he’d find a quieter way of doing the same job.

So he went into a saloon and leaned against the bar right by the Spanish officer who was supervising. “So you know where them runaways actually
is
?” he asked.

“They don’t tell me,” said the officer, his English thickly accented.

“Well, the thing is, I think I know,” said Alvin. “At least I got a pretty good rumor. But I don’t want to go tell it to Colonel Adan myself, on account of he’s bound to think I look like a soldier and try to jine me up.”

The officer looked at him coldly. “What do we care for this rumor?”

“Don’t that all depend on who’s doing the gossiping? I mean, any of these drunks in here, they can tell you the runaways is on the moon for all it matters, ’cause they don’t know squat. Me, though, I got my rumor from a couple of reds who was smuggling furs across the river upstream, and
they
said they seen a bunch of free blacks not far inland.”

The officer still looked scornful. “Smuggling furs? And they did not kill you?”

“Well, maybe they would have, except there was only two of them, and I’m not a little fellow, and besides, they wanted me to tell you what they seen.”