The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (5 page)

“Well, you done what you could, and we’re done with it,” said Arthur Stuart.

They got back to the house of Squirrel and Moose and poured the water into the cistern. Mixed in with what they already had, the cleaned water improved the quality only a little, but that was fine with Alvin. People kept overreacting. He was just a fellow using his knack.

Back at the house of Dead Mary—or Marie d’Espoir—nobody was following Alvin’s advice. The woman he had saved was outside checking crawfish traps, getting bitten by skeeter after skeeter. She didn’t mind anymore—in a swamp full of gators and cottonmouths, what was a little itching and a few dozen welts?

Meanwhile, the skeeters, engorged with her blood, spread out over the swamp. Some of them ended up in the city, and each person they bit ended up with a virulent dose of yellow fever growing in their blood.

Supper that evening was bedlam, the children moving in and out of the kitchen in shifts with the normal amount of shoving and jostling and complaining. It reminded Alvin of growing up with his brothers and sisters, only because there were so many more children, and of nearly the same age, it was even more confusing. A few quarrels even flared, white-hot in an instant, then promptly silenced by Mama Squirrel flinging a bit of water at the offenders or by Papa Moose speaking a name. The children didn’t seem to fear punishment; it was his disapproval that they dreaded.

The food was plain and poor, but healthy and there was plenty of it. So much, in fact, that both serving pots had soup left in them. Mama Squirrel poured them back into the big cauldron by the fire. “I never made but one batch of soup in all the years we’ve lived here,” she said.

Even the old bread and the half-eaten scraps from the children’s bowls were scraped into the big pot. “As long as I bring the pot to a long hard boil before serving it again, there’s no harm from adding it back into the soup.”

“It’s like life,” said Papa Moose, who was scouring dishes at the sink. “Dust to dust, pot to pot, one big round, it never ends.” Then he winked. “I throw some cayenne peppers in it from time to time, that’s what makes it all edible.”

Then the children were herded upstairs into the dormitories, kissing their parents as they passed. Papa Moose beckoned Alvin to come with him as he followed the children up. It wasn’t quick, following him up the stairs, but not slow, either. He seemed to bob up the stairs on his good foot, the clubbed foot somewhat extended so it stayed out of the way and, perhaps, balanced him a bit. It was wise not to follow too close behind him, or you could find out just how much of a club that foot could be.

They all lay down on mats on the floor—a floor well-limed and clean-swept. But not to sleep. One-hour candles were lighted all around the room, and all the children lay there, pretending to be asleep while Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel made a pantomime of tiptoeing out of the room. Naturally, Alvin glanced back into the room and saw that every single child pulled a book or pamphlet out from under their mat and began to read.

Alvin came back downstairs with Moose and Squirrel, grinning as he went. “It’s a shame none of your children can read,” he said.

Papa Moose held to the banister and half hopped, half slid down the stairs on his good foot. “It’s not as if there were anything worth reading in the world,” he said.

“Though I wish they could read the holy scriptures,” said Mama Squirrel.

“Of course, they might be reading on the sly,” said Alvin.

“Oh, no,” said Papa Moose. “They are
strictly
forbidden to do such a thing.”

“Papa Moose showed our ragged little collection of books to all the children and told them they must
never
borrow those books and carefully return them as soon as they’re done.”

“It’s good to teach children to obey,” said Alvin.

“‘Obedience is better than sacrifice,’” quoted Papa Moose.

They sat down at the kitchen table, where Arthur Stuart was already seated, reading a book. Alvin realized after a moment that it was written in Spanish. “You’re taking this new language of yours pretty serious.”

“Since you know everything there is to know in English,” said Arthur Stuart, “I reckon this is the only way to get one up on you.”

They talked for a while about the children—how they supported them, mostly. They depended a lot on donations from likeminded persons, but since those were in short supply in Barcy, it was always nip and tuck, allowing nothing to go to waste. “Use it up,” intoned Papa Moose, “wear it out, make it do or do without.”

“We have one cow,” said Mama Squirrel, “so we only get enough milk for the little ones, and for a little butter. But even if we had another cow or two, we don’t have any means of feeding them.” She shrugged. “Our children are never noted for being fat.”

After a few minutes the conversation turned to Alvin’s business—whatever it was. “Did Margaret send you here for a report?”

“I have no idea,” said Alvin. “I usually don’t know all that much more about her plans than a knight does in a game of chess.”

“At least you’re not a pawn,” said Papa Moose.

“No, I’m the one she can send jumping around wherever she wants.” He said it with a chuckle, but realized as he spoke that he actually resented it, and more than a little.

“I suppose she doesn’t tell you everything so you don’t go improving on her plan,” said Squirrel. “Moose always thinks he knows better.”

“I’m not always wrong,” said Papa Moose.

“Margaret sees my death down a lot of roads,” said Alvin, “and she knows that I don’t always take her warnings seriously.”

“So instead of giving you warnings, she asks you to help her,” said Squirrel.

Alvin shrugged. “If she ever said so, it would stop working.”

“The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden,” said Papa Moose, “now that snakes can’t talk.”

Alvin grinned. “But just in case she actually sent me here for a purpose, do you have anything to report to her?”

“Meaning,” said Arthur Stuart, looking up from his book, “do you have anything you’d be willing to tell old Alvin here, so he can figure out what’s going on?”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

“There’s all kinds of plots in this city,” said Papa Moose. “The older children eavesdrop for us during the day, as they can, and we have friends who come calling. So we know about a good number of them. There’s a Spanish group trying to revolt and get Barcy annexed by Mexico. And of course the French are always plotting a revolution, though it don’t come to much, since they can’t come to any agreement among the parties.”

“Parties?”

“Them as favor being part of an independent Canada, and them as want to conquer Haiti, and them as want to be an independent city-state on the Mizzippy, and them as wish to restore the royal family to the throne of France, and two different Bonapartist factions that hate each other worst of all.”

“And that don’t even touch the split between Catholics and Huguenots,” said Squirrel. “And between Bretons and Normans and Provençals and Parisians and a weird little group of Poitevin fanatics.”

“That’s the French,” said Moose. “They may not know what’s right, but they know everybody else is wrong.”

“What about the Americans?” asked Alvin. “I hear English on the street more than French or Spanish.”

“That depends on the street,” said Moose. “But you’re right, this city has more English-speakers than any other language. Most of them know they’re just visitors here. The Americans and Yankees and English care about money, mostly. Make their fortune and head back home.”

“The dangerous plotters are the Cavaliers,” said Squirrel. “They’re hungry for more land to put into cotton.”

“To be worked by more and more slaves,” said Alvin.

“And to restore some glory to a king who can’t get his country back,” said Squirrel.

“The Cavaliers are the ones who want to start a fight,” said Papa Moose. “They’re the ones who hope that a revolution here would make the King step in to bail them out—or maybe they’re already sponsored by the king so he’d just use them as an excuse to send in an army. There’s rumors of an army gathering in the Crown Colonies, supposedly to guard the border with the United States but maybe it’s bound for Barcy. It’s one and the same—if the King came in here, in control of the mouth of the Mizzippy…”

Alvin understood. “The United States would have to fight, just to keep the river open.”

“And any war between the U.S. and the Crown Colonies would turn into a war over slavery,” said Papa Moose. “Even though parts of the United States allow slavery, too. Freestate Americans may not care enough to go to war to free the blacks, but if they won the war, I doubt they’d be so stone-hearted as to leave the slaves in chains.”

“Does all this have anything to do with Steve Austin’s expedition to Mexico?” asked Alvin.

They both hooted with laughter. “Austin the Conqueror!” said Papa Moose. “Thinks he can take over Mexico with a couple of hundred Cavaliers and Americans.”

“He thinks dark-skinned people are no match for white,” said Squirrel. “It’s the kind of thing slaveowners can fool themselves into believing, what with black folks cowering to them all day.”

“So you don’t think Austin and his friends amount to anything.”

“I think,” said Papa Moose, “that if they try to invade Mexico, they’ll be killed to the last man.”

Alvin thought back to his encounter with Austin, and, more memorably, with Jim Bowie, one of Austin’s men. A killer, he was. And the world wouldn’t be impoverished if the Mexica killed him, though Alvin couldn’t wish such a cruel death on anyone. Still, given what Alvin knew about Bowie, he wondered if the man would ever let himself be taken by such enemies. For all Alvin knew, Bowie would emerge from the encounter with half the Mexica worshiping him as a particularly bloodthirsty new god.

“Doesn’t sound like there’s much useful for me to do,” said Alvin. “Margaret don’t need me to gather information—she always knows more than I do about what other folks aim to do.”

“It kind of reassures me to have you here,” said Squirrel. “Iffen your Peggy sent you here, stands to reason this is the safest place to be.”

Alvin bowed his head. He would have been angry if he didn’t fear that what she said was so. Hadn’t Margaret watched over him from her childhood on? Back when she was Horace Guester’s daughter Little Peggy, didn’t she use his birth caul to use his own powers to save him from the dealings of the Unmaker? But it galled him to think that she might be sheltering him, and shamed him to think that other folks assumed that it was so.

Arthur Stuart spoke up sharp. “You don’t know Peggy iffen you think that,” he said. “She don’t
send
Alvin, not nowhere. Now and then she
asks
him to go, and when she does, it’s because it’s a place where his knack is needed. She sends him into danger as often as not, and them as think otherwise don’t know Peggy and they don’t know Al.”

Al, thought Alvin. First time the boy ever called him by
that
nickname. But he couldn’t be mad at him for disrespect in the midst of the boy defending him so hot.

Papa Moose chuckled. “I sort of stopped listening at ‘not nowhere.’ I thought Margaret Larner would’ve done a better job of learning you good grammar.”

“Did you understand me or not?” said Arthur Stuart.

“Oh, I understood, all right.”

“Then my grammar was sufficient to the task.”

At that echo of Margaret’s teaching they all laughed—including, after a moment, Arthur Stuart himself.

During the day Alvin busied himself with repairs around the house. With his mind he convinced the termites and borers to leave, and shucked off the mildew on the walls. He found the weak spots in the foundation and with his mind reshaped them till they were strong. When he was done with his doodlebug examining the roof, there wasn’t a leak or a spot where light shone through, and all around the house every window was tight, with not a draft coming in or out. Even the privy was spic and span, though the privy pot itself could still be found with your eyes closed.

All the while he used his makery to heal the house, he used his arms to chop and stack wood and do other outward tasks—turning the cow out to eat such grass as there was, milking it, skimming the milk, cheesing some of it, churning the cream into butter. He had learned to be a useful man, not just a man of one trade. And if, when he was done milking her, the cow was remarkably healthy with udders that gave far more milk than normal from eating the same amount of hay, who was to say it was Alvin did anything to cause it?

Only one part of the household did Alvin leave unhealed: Papa Moose’s foot. You don’t go meddling with a man’s body, not unless he asks. And besides, this man was well known in Barcy. If he suddenly walked like a normal man, what would people think?

Meanwhile, Arthur Stuart ran such errands for the house as a sharp-witted, trusted slave boy might be sent on. And as he went he kept his ears open. People said things in front of slaves. English-speakers especially said things in front of slaves who seemed to speak only Spanish, and Spanish-speakers in front of English-speaking slaves. The French talked in front of anybody.

Barcy was an easy town for a young half-black bilingual spy. Being far more educated and experienced in great affairs than the children of the house of Moose and Squirrel, Arthur Stuart was able to recognize the significance of things that would have sailed right past them.

The tidbits he brought home about this party or that, rebellions and plots and quarrels and reconciliations, they added but little to what Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel already knew about the goings-on in Barcy.

The only information they might not have had was of a different nature: rumors and gossip about them and their house. And this was hardly of a nature that he would be happy to bring home to them.

All their elaborate efforts to abide by the strict letter of the law had paid off well enough. Nobody wasted any breath wondering whether their house was an orphanage or a school for bastard children of mixed races, nor did anyone do more than scoff at the idea that Mama Squirrel was the natural mother of any of the children, let alone all of them. Nobody was much exercised about it one way or another. The law might be filled with provisions to keep black folks ignorant and chained, but it was only enforced when somebody cared enough to complain, and nobody did.

Not because anybody approved, but because they had much darker worries about the house of Moose and Squirrel. The fact that the miracle water a few days ago had appeared in the public fountain nearest that house had been duly noted. So had the traffic in strangers, and nobody was fooled by the fact that it was a boardinghouse—too many of the visitors came and went in only an hour. “How fast can a body sleep, anyway?” said one of the skeptics. “They’re spies, that’s what they are.”

But spies for whom? Some were close to the target, guessing that they were abolitionists or Quakers or New England Puritans, here to subvert the Proper Order of Man, as slavery was euphemistically called in pulpits throughout the slave lands. Others had them as spies for the King or for the Lord Protector or even, in the most fanciful version, for the evil Reds of Lolla-Wossiky across the fog-covered river. It didn’t help that Papa Moose was crippled. His strange dipping-and-rolling walk made him all the more suspicious in their eyes.