The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (7 page)

“It was a waste of my time,” said Arthur Stuart. “And it nearly got you shot by that bear hunter.”

“Old Davy Crockett? I ended up kind of liking that fellow.”

“Peeling the yams wouldn’t stop you from healing those kids upstairs the way you been doing.”

Alvin turned slowly. “How do you know that?” said Alvin. “How do you know what it costs me to do that work?”

“ ’Cause it’s easy for you. You do it like breathing.”

“And when you run up a hill, how easy is it to breathe?”

“Maybe I’d know what healing was like if you ever tried to teach me.”

“You only just started hotting up metal.”

“So I’m ready for the next step. You’re working so hard on healing those children, I know you are. So tell me, show me what to do.”

Alvin closed his eyes. “You don’t think I wish you could?” he said. “But you can’t help if you can’t see what’s going on inside their bodies. And Arthur Stuart, I tell you, you got to be able to see pretty small.”

“How small?”

“Look at the thinnest, smallest hair on your arm,” said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart looked.

“That hair is like a feather.”

Arthur Stuart tried to get his rudimentary doodlebug inside that hair, to get the feel of it like he got the feel of iron. He could almost do it. He couldn’t see the featherness of it, but he could sense that it wasn’t smooth. That was something.

“And each strand of that feather is made of lots of tiny bits. Your whole body is made of tiny pieces, and each one of them is alive, and there’s stuff going on inside those pieces. Stuff I don’t understand yet. But I get a sense of how those pieces are supposed to work, and I kind of…you know…”

“I know,” said Arthur Stuart. “You tell them how you want them to be.”

“Or…sort of show them.”

“I can’t see that small,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Bones are easier,” said Alvin. “Bones are more like metal. Or wood, anyway. Broken bones, I bet you could fix those.”

Immediately Arthur Stuart thought of Papa Moose’s foot. Was that a problem with bones? Was Alvin maybe hinting something to him?

“But the yellow fever,” said Alvin. “I barely know what I’m doing with that, and I think it’s out of your reach so far.”

Arthur Stuart grinned. “So what about yams? Think I could get the dirt off yams?”

“Sure. By scrubbing.”

“What about taking off the skins?”

“By peeling
only
, my friend.”

“Because it’s good for me,” said Arthur Stuart, and not happily.

“Because if you do it any other way, I’ll just put the skins and dirt right back on them.”

Arthur Stuart had no answer to that. He sat down and held a yam in his hand. “All right, which is it? Peel or wash? Cause I ain’t doing both.”

“You asking me?” said Alvin. “You know what a bad cook I am. And I don’t think Squirrel wants me to toss these yams into the permanent soup. I think they’d kind of take over the flavor for the next couple of years.”

“So we’ll roast them,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Suits me,” said Alvin.

And it occurred to Arthur Stuart that Alvin hadn’t grown up watching Old Peg Guester wash and peel taters and yams for twenty or thirty people at a time. All this was new to Alvin. Of course, if Arthur Stuart had his druthers, he’d rather be an expert on healing people with fevers or club feet.

“So I’ll wash them,” he said.

“And meanwhile,” said Alvin, “I’ll keep snapping beans from the back garden, while my doodlebug works on the body of the most recent person to get the fever.”

“Who’s that?”

“You,” said Alvin.

“I’m not sick,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Yes you are,” said Alvin. “Your body’s already fighting it.”

Arthur Stuart thought about that for a minute. He even tried to see inside his own body but it was all just a confused mass of strange textures to him. “Is my body going to win?”

“Who do you think I am, Dead Mary?”

So it was on to snapping beans and scrubbing yams, while Arthur Stuart wondered what had made him sick. Somebody cursed him? He walked into a house that had fever in it a week ago? Dead Mary touched him? Yams?

Where
was
Dead Mary? Hiding in the swamp? Traveling to some safe, familiar place? Or skulking somewhere, hoping not to get killed by those who thought her knack caused the diseases that she warned about?

Or was she already dead? Her body burnt somewhere? Her mother too? Caught by superstitious fools who blamed them for something they had no part in causing?

Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause—and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause—one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne.

So why is it, Arthur Stuart wondered, that Alvin and Margaret and I and so many other decent people manage to bear the unbearable without having to punish anyone at all?

Though come to think of it, Alvin
did
kill the slavecatcher who killed Arthur’s and Peggy’s mother. In a fit of rage he slew the man—and regretted the killing ever since. Alvin hadn’t flailed around at any old victim; he got the right man, for sure. But Alvin, too, had needed someone to blame for the unbearable.

What about me, then? I talk big, I have a mouth like no half-black boy ought to have, my birth being so shameful, the rape of a slave woman by her master. Haven’t I had unbearable things happen? My mother died after carrying me to freedom, my adopted mother was murdered by the catchers who came to take me back to my owner. People tried to bar me from school even in the north. Being nothing but a third-rate prentice maker in the shadow of the greatest maker seen in this world in many lifetimes. So much that I’ve lost, including any hope of a normal life. Who’ll marry me? How will I live when I’m not Alvin’s shadow?

Yet I never want to lash out and punish anybody, except with words, and even then I always pretend that it’s a joke so nobody gets mad.

Maybe that’s how God will get out of it, when he gathers us at his judgment seat and tries to explain why he let so many awful things go on. Maybe he’ll say, “Can’t you take a joke?”

More likely, though, he’ll just tell the truth. “I didn’t do it,” he’ll say. “I’m just the one who has to clean up your mess.” Like a servant. Nobody ever says, How can we make things easier on God? No. We just make messes and expect he’ll come around later and clean it all up.

That night in bed, Arthur Stuart sent out his doodlebug. He searched for Papa Moose’s heartfire and found him easily enough, sleeping lightly while Mama Squirrel kept watch over the children.

Arthur Stuart wasn’t used to examining people’s bodies, and he had trouble keeping his doodlebug inside the boundaries. But he began to get the knack of it, and soon found the club foot. The bone was clearly different from the other tissues—and the bones were a mess, broken into dozens of pieces. No wonder his foot was so crippled.

He might have begun to try to put the pieces back together, but it wasn’t like looking at them with his eyes. He couldn’t grasp the whole shape of each bone fragment. Besides, he didn’t know what the bones in a normal foot were supposed to look like.

He found Papa Moose’s other foot and almost groaned aloud at his own stupidity. The good foot had just as many bones as the bad one. The club foot wasn’t the way it was because the bones were broken. And when Arthur went back and forth between them, comparing the bones, he realized that because Papa Moose’s foot had been twisted up his whole life, none of the bones were the right shape any more to fit together like a normal foot.

So it wouldn’t be a matter of just getting the bones back into place. Each one would have to be reshaped. And no doubt the muscles and ligaments and tendons would all be out of place, too, and the wrong size. And those tissues were very hard to tell apart. It was exhausting work just trying to make sense of them. He fell asleep before he understood much of anything.

The rumor mill went on. The yellow fever only added to it—who’s sick, who’s dead, who fled the city to live on some friend’s plantation until the plague passed.

The most important story, though, was no rumor. The army that the King had been assembling was suddenly ordered back home. Apparently the King’s generals feared the yellow fever more than they feared the military might of Spain.

Which might have been a mistake. The moment the threat of invasion disappeared, the Spanish authorities in Nueva Barcelona began arresting Cavalier agents. Apparently the Spanish had been aware of the plots all along—they heard the same rumors as everyone else—and had only been biding their time before striking.

So it wasn’t just the yellow fever that was decimating the English-speaking population of Nueva Barcelona. Plenty of Americans and Yankees and Englishmen were taking ship out of the city—Americans in steamboats up the river, Yankees and Englishmen in clippers and coastal traders heading out to sea, bound for New England or Jamaica or some other British destination.

Cavaliers weren’t finding it any easier than the French. The Pontchartrain ferry and all the other passages out of the city were being watched, and those who carried royal passports from the Crown Colonies were forbidden to leave. Since the Cavaliers were the largest single English-speaking group, this left a lot of frightened people trapped in Nueva Barcelona as the yellow fever made its insidious way through the population.

Wealthy Spanish citizens headed for Florida. As for the French, they had nowhere to go. The borders had been closed to them from the time Napoleon first invaded Spain.

The result was a city full of fear and anger.

Alvin was shopping in the city, which was getting harder these days, with the fever making farmers more reluctant to bring in their produce. He was looking through as ratty-looking a bunch of melons as he’d ever seen when he became aware of a familiar heartfire making toward him in the crowd. He spoke before turning around. “Jim Bowie,” he said.

Bowie smiled at him—a big, warm smile, which made Alvin check to see if the man’s hand was on his knife. Nowhere near, but that didn’t mean much, as Alvin well knew, having seen the man in action.

“Still here in Barcy,” said Bowie.

“I thought you and your expedition would be long gone.”

“We almost made it before they closed the ports,” said Bowie. “Cuss the King for making such a mess of things.”

Cuss the King? As if Bowie weren’t part of an expedition committed to spreading the power of the King into Mexican lands.

“Well, the fever will pass,” said Alvin. “Always does.”

“We don’t have to wait for that,” said Bowie. “Word’s just come down from the Governor-General of Nueva Barcelona. Steve Austin’s expedition can go ahead. Any Cavaliers who are with us can get passage out on a ship bound for the Mexican coast.”

“I reckon that gave recruitment a big boost.”

“You bet,” said Bowie. “The Spanish hate the Mexica worse than they hate Cavaliers. I reckon it has something to do with the fact that King Arthur never tore the beating hearts out of ten thousand Spanish citizens to offer as a sacrifice to some heathen god.”

“Well, good luck to you.”

“Seeing you in the market here, I got to say, I’d feel a lot better about this expedition iffen you were along.”

So you can find a chance to stab me in the back and get even for my humiliating you? “I’m no soldier,” said Alvin.

“I been thinking about you,” said Bowie.

Oh, I’m sure of that.

“I think an army as had you on their side would have victory in the bag.”

“There’s an awful lot of bloodthirsty Mexica, and only one of me. And keep in mind I’m not much of a shot.”

“You know what I’m talking about. What if all the Mexica weapons went soft or flat-out disappeared, as once happened with my lucky knife?”

“I’d say that was a miracle, caused by an evil god who wanted to see slavery expanded into Mexican lands.”

Bowie stood there blankly for a moment. “So that’s how it is. You’re an abolitionist.”

“You knew that.”

“Well, there’s folks who are just agin slavery and then there’s abolitionists. Sometimes you can offer a man a good bit of gold and he don’t mind so much how many slaves another fellow owns.”

“That would be someone else,” said Alvin. “I don’t have much use for gold. Or expeditions against the Mexica.”

“They’re a terrible people,” said Bowie. “Bloody-handed and murderous.”

“And that’s supposed to make me want to go fight them?”

“A man don’t shrink from a fight.”

“This man does,” said Alvin. “And you would too, if you had a brain.”

“The Mexica won’t stand up to men as knows how to shoot. On top of that, we’re bound to have thousands of reds from other tribes join with us to overthrow the Mexica. They’re tired of having their men sacrificed.”

“But you’d restore slavery. They didn’t like that either.”

“No, we wouldn’t enslave the
reds
.”

“There’s lots of black former slaves in Mexico.”

“But they’re slaves by nature.”

Alvin turned away and picked a half-dozen melons to put in his poke.

Bowie poked him hard in the arm. “Don’t you turn your back on me.”

Alvin said nothing, just offered a couple of dimes to the melon seller, who shook his head.

“Come on now, this is for kids in an orphanage,” said Alvin.

“I know who it’s for,” said the farmer, “and the price of melons today is ten cents each.”

“What, it took so much more work to raise these? They plated with gold inside?”

“Take it or leave it.”

Alvin pulled some more money from his pocket. “I hope you’re proud of profiting from the neediness of helpless children.”

“Nobody helpless in
that
house,” murmured the farmer.

Alvin turned away to find Bowie standing in his way.

“I said don’t turn your back on me,” Bowie murmured.

“I’m facing you now,” said Alvin. “And if you don’t take your hand off your knife, you’ll lose something dear to you—and it ain’t made of steel, no matter how you brag to the ladies.”

“You don’t want me as your enemy,” said Bowie.

“That’s true,” said Alvin. “I want you as a complete stranger.”

“Too late for that,” said Bowie. “It’s friend or foe.”

Alvin walked away with his poke full of melons, but as he went, he hotted up the man’s knife blade. Also the buttons on the front of his pants. In a few moments, the threads around the buttons burned away and Bowie’s pants came open. And when he reached for his knife, the sheath burst into flame. Behind him Alvin could hear the other shoppers laughing and hooting.

That was probably a mistake, he thought. But then, it was a mistake for Bowie to show his face near Alvin again. Why did men like that refuse to accept defeat and keep challenging someone they knew had the better of them?

Arthur Stuart woke up in the middle of the night with his bowels in a state. It felt sloshy, so it wasn’t something that could be relieved by the soundless passing of gas and then pretending to be asleep if Alvin noticed. So, resigned to his fate, he got up and carried his boots downstairs and put them on by the back door and then slogged on out into the sultry night to the privy.

It was about a miserable half-hour in there, but each time he thought he was done, he’d start to get up and his bowels would slosh again and he’d be back down on the seat, groaning his way through another session. Each time of course, thinking he was through, he’d wipe himself, so by the end he felt like his backside was as raw as pounded flank steak. At least the cows are lucky enough to be dead before they get turned into raw meat, he thought.

Finally he was able to get up without hearing more sloshing or feeling more pressure, though that was no guarantee he wouldn’t reach the top of the three flights of stairs and have to go clomping back down. He worried, of course, that maybe this had something to do with yellow fever, that Alvin might not have made him healthy enough, that it was coming back.

Though when he thought about it, he reckoned it probably had more to do with the street vendor who sold him a rolled pie this afternoon that might not have been cooked as much as it ought.

He flung open the privy door and stepped outside.

Someone tugged at his nightshirt. He yelped and jumped away.

“Don’t be afraid!” said Dead Mary. “I’m not a ghost! I know Africans are afraid of ghosts.”

“I’m afraid of people grabbing at my nightshirt when I come out of the privy in the middle of the night,” said Arthur Stuart. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re sick,” she said.

“No joke,” he agreed.

“But you will not die this time,” she said.

“And just when I was beginning to wish I could.”

“So many people are going to die. And so many of them blame me.”

“I know,” said Arthur Stuart. “I went out to warn you, but you and your ma were gone.”

“I saw you go there and I thought, this boy is coming to give warning. So tonight I think, maybe you’re the one who can give us some food. We’re very hungry.”

“Sure, come on in the house,” said Arthur Stuart.

“No no,” she said. “It’s a strange house. Very dangerous.”

Arthur Stuart made a disgusted face at her. “Yeah, so the stories they tell about
you
are lies, but the stories they tell about this house are all true, is that it?”

“The stories they tell about me are
half
true,” said Dead Mary. “And if the stories about this house are half true, I won’t go in, no.”

“This house has no danger for you, at least not from the folks that live there,” said Arthur Stuart. “And now I’ve been standing outside the privy this long, I’m beginning to notice how bad it stinks here. So get your ma and come on inside where the air is breathable. And make it quick or I’ll be out here in the privy again and then who’s going to feed you?”

Dead Mary considered for a moment, then picked up her skirts and scampered off into the wooded darkness near the back of the property. Arthur Stuart took the opportunity to move farther away from the privy and closer to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, he had a candle lighted and Dead Mary and her mother were gobbling slightly stale bread and bland cheese and washing it down with tepid water. Didn’t matter how it tasted, though. They were swallowing it down so fast they probably couldn’t tell bread from cheese.

“How long has it been since you last ate?” said Arthur Stuart.

“Since we hid,” said Dead Mary. “Didn’t have no food in the house though, or we would have took it.”

“All the time flies bite me,” said her mother. “I got no blood now.”

She did have a few welts from skeeter bites, now that Arthur Stuart looked at her. “How you feeling?” he asked her.

“Very hungry,” she said. “But
not
sick, me. That all done. Your master, he make me well.”

“He’s not my master, he’s my brother-in-law.”

Dead Mary looked at him sideways. “So Alvin married an Africaine? Or you have married his sister?”

“I’m adopted,” said Arthur Stuart.

“So you’re free?”

“I’m no man’s slave,” said Arthur Stuart. “But it’s not exactly the same as being free, not when everybody says, You’re too young to do this and you’re too young to do that and you’re too black to go here and you’re too inexperienced to go there.”

“I’m not black,” said Dead Mary, “but I rather be a slave than what I am.”

“Being French ain’t so bad,” said Arthur Stuart.

“I mean one who sees who is sick.”

“I know,” said Arthur Stuart. “I was joking. Course, like Alvin says, if you have to tell folks you was joking, it wasn’t much of a joke, was it?”

“This Alvin,” said Dead Mary. “What is he?”

“My brother-in-law,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Non, non,” said the mother. “How he make me so better?”

Suddenly Arthur was suspicious. They come in the middle of the night and ask questions about Alvin. Perfectly good explanations for all of it—why
not
be curious about Alvin!—but it could also be somebody had set out to trap Arthur Stuart into telling more than he should.

“I expect you can ask him yourself in the morning.”

“Got to be gone by morning,” said Dead Mary. “Before light. People watch this house. They see us, they follow us, they kill us. Hang us for witches, like in New England.”

“They haven’t done that in New England in years,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Your Alvin,” said the mother. “Did he touch this bread?”

Alvin had, in fact, bought the baguettes. So Arthur hesitated a moment before saying, “How should I know?” He knew that the hesitation was more of an answer than his words. And without knowing why, he wanted to snatch the bread back and send them on their way.

As if she had read his desire, or perhaps because she thought her mother had been too obvious, Dead Mary said, “We go now.”

“Inmediatement,” echoed her mother.

“Thank you for the food,” said Dead Mary.

Even as she was thanking him, her mother was putting a couple more baguettes into her apron. Arthur would have stopped her—that was supposed to be part of breakfast in the morning—but he thought of them out in the swamps for days with nothing to eat and little to drink and he held his tongue. He’d go fetch more baguettes in the morning.

He followed them out the door.

“Non,” said the mother.

“You shouldn’t go with us,” said Dead Mary.

“I’m not,” said Arthur Stuart. “I got to go sit in the privy again. So you best move fast, cause I don’t want the ensuing odor to offend your delicate sensibilities.”

“What?” said Dead Mary.

“I’m gonna let fly in the privy right quick, ma’am, so hightail it if you value your nose.”

They hightailed it, and Arthur Stuart went back to groaning over the privy pot.

It began with a few stones thrown against the house late the next night, and a muffled shout that no one inside understood.

Next morning, a group of men marched back and forth in front of the house carrying a coffin, calling out, “Why ain’t nobody sick in there!”