The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI Page 10

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.

  He’d poked himself a couple of times with his knife to draw blood, which was a kind of embarrassing thing to do in the first place. It made him feel like he was just a couple of steps away from a Mexica sacrifice. He let the blood drip into the murky water and then felt it dissipate and vanish.

  He had done this once, on the Yazoo Queen, but not with river water. It was with drinking water, already pure. The blood had nowhere to go, it mixed with the water immediately and Alvin had been able to shape it as he wanted. But how to make something out of an almost infinite body of water, filled with impurities?

  More blood? Open a vein? An artery?

  How about opening a gator’s artery, how about that?

  No, he knew that wouldn’t do at all. The maker is the one who is part of what he makes. If there was one thing he knew, it was that.

  But he’d spent his childhood getting nearly killed by water over and over again, till his Pa was plumb scared to let Alvin have a cool drink from a stream for fear he’d drown or choke.

  Stop thinking, he told himself. This ain’t science, like feeling head bumps or bleeding a patient. This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in case an idea comes along—you want there to be some room for it to fit in.

  So he occupied himself with clearing the water around him. It wasn’t hard—he was good with fluids and solids, at purifying them, asking whatever belonged there to stay, and whatever didn’t to go. The skeeter eggs, the tiny animals, the floating silt, all the creatures large and small, and above all the salt of this briny tidewater—he bid them find somewhere else to go, and they went, till he could look down into the water and under the reflection of the trees spreading overhead he could see his bare feet and the muddy bottom.

  It was an interesting thing, looking into water, seeing two levels at once—the reflection on the surface and what was underneath it.

  He remembered being there in the midst of the whirlwind with Tenskwa-Tawa, and in the walls of solid water he saw not just some reflection or whatever was in the water, but also things deep in time, hidden knowledge. He was too young to make much sense of it at the time, and he wasn’t sure anymore what he actually remembered or merely remembered that he remembered, if you know what I mean.

  He could hear a kind of wordless song, he sat so still. It wasn’t in his own mind, either. It was another song, a familiar one, the song that he had heard so many times in his life as he ran like wind through the woods. The greensong of the life around him, of the trees and moss, the birds and gators and fish and snakes, and the tiny lives and the momentary lives, all of them making a kind of deep harmony together that became a part of him so that he could hear himself as nothing more than a small part of that song.

  And as he listened to the greensong and as he looked down into the water, another drop of blood fell from his hand and began to spread.

  Only this time he let his doodlebug spread out with his blood, following that familiar liquid, keeping it warm, letting it bind with the water as if it was all part of the same music. There were no boundaries to contain it, but he held on to the blood, kept it as a part of himself instead of something lost, as if his heart were still pushing it through his veins.

  Instead of having outside boundaries imposed on the blood, he set his own limits to its flow. This far, he told his blood, and no farther. And because it was still a part of himself, it obeyed.

  At the limits the blood began to form a wall, become solid, become like a very thin sheet of glass. Then, working inward, the blood formed itself into a latticework that drew the water around it into complicated whorls that never ceased moving, but also never left their orbit around the impossibly thin strands of blood.

  The water moved faster and faster, a thousand million tiny whirlwinds around the calm threads, and Alvin reached down with his hands on both sides of the sphere of solidified water and lifted it out of the clear water of Lake Pontchartrain.

  It was heavy—it took all his strength to lift it, and he wished he hadn’t made it so large. It was far heavier than the plowshare he carried in his poke. But it was also strangely inert. Even though he knew the motion of water inside the sphere was incessant, to his hands it felt as still as stone. And as he looked into it, he saw everything at once.

  He saw his own labor to be born, straining to emerge into the world, his mother’s wombwalls pressing against him as he pushed back; he heard her cries and saw her surrounded by the canvas walls of a covered wagon that rocked and slid and pitched and yawed in the current of a river gone to flood. And now he was outside that wagon and he saw a great fallen tree floating like a battering ram straight at the wagon, straight at him, this passionate angry hopeful unborn infant, and then heard a great loud cry and saw a man leap onto the tree and roll it over, over, so it struck only a glancing blow against the wagon and careened off into the rainstorm….

  And now he saw a young girl reach out to the face of a just-born infant who had not yet drawn breath because a caul of flesh covered his whole face like a terrible mask. She pulled the caul back and air rushed into the baby’s mouth and he began to cry. The girl put the caul away as tenderly as if it were the heart of a Mexica sacrifice, and he felt how the baby and the caul remained connected, and he knew that this was Little Peggy, the child five years old when he was born, who was now his wife, with almost nothing of that ancient, dried-up caul left in her keeping, because she had rubbed bits of it between her fingers and turned each bit to dust in order to draw the power of Alvin’s own knack out of it, to use it to save his life.

  But now, he thought. What about now?

  Whether the heavy sphere responded to his question or simply showed him the desire of his heart, he saw himself kneeling in the water at the shore of Pontchartrain, dripping blood heavily into the inland sea, and watching as a crystal path hurtled forward across the lake, six feet wide, as thin as the skiff of ice on a basin left in the window on the night of the first freeze of autumn. And in ones and twos the people began to step out onto this crystal bridge and walk along with the surface of the water holding them up, a dozen, scores, hundreds of them, a great long chain of people. But then he realized that the line was slowing down, stopping, jostling, as more and more of them looked down into the crystal at their feet and began to see the way Alvin was seeing now.

  They would not go forward, so captured were they by the crystal visions in the water. They took too long, too many minutes, as the blood continued to flow out of him.

  And then all of a sudden in the glass he saw himself faint and fall onto the bridge and at once it began to break up and crumble and all the people fell into the water and screamed and splashed and…

  Alvin dropped the crystal sphere and it fell into the water with a splash.

  He thought at first that it had dissolved instantly upon breaking the surface, but when he reached down into the water at his feet, there it was.

  He picked it back up again.

  I thought the things the crystal water showed me would be true, he thought. But that can’t be true. Margaret wouldn’t have sent me here to them if I didn’t have the strength in me to make this bridge hold until the last soul had crossed over.

  He looked at the ball of crystal he held in his hands. I can’t leave this thing here, he thought. But I can’t take it with me, either. It’s too heavy, not with the plow, not with all I’ve got to do.

  “I will carry it, me,” said a soft voice behind him.

  He saw her reflection in the face o
f the crystal, and to his surprise the round surface did not distort her image.

  He wasn’t seeing her on the crystal, he was seeing her in it, and all at once he knew far more about her than he had ever thought he could know about a person. “You’re not French,” he said. “You and your mother are Portugee. She has a knack with sharks. They took her on voyage after voyage because of it, to keep the sea monsters at bay, only one of them used her for something else and she got pregnant with you and so she threw herself from the ship and rode the back of a shark to shore and gave birth to you at the very mouth of the river.”

  “She never told me, her,” said Dead Mary. “Might be so, might not.”

  Alvin rose to his feet, still standing in the water, and turned to hold the sphere out to her. “It’s heavy,” he said.

  “I can bear any burden,” she said, “if I take it freely.” And it was true. Though she staggered a little from the weight, she held the ball to her and didn’t let it fall.

  “Don’t look in it,” said Alvin.

  “It’s in front of my face,” she said. “How can I not look?” And yet she didn’t look. She closed her eyes tightly. “Bad enough to know what I already know about people,” she said. “I don’t want to know all this else.”

  Alvin peeled off his shirt and draped it over the sphere. “I’ll take it now,” he said.

  “No,” said Dead Mary. “You need all the strength you have for tonight’s work.”

  All the children were sitting on the floor in every room on the main floor. The older ones all had a poke to carry, stuffed with every scrap of food in the house. Arthur Stuart admired how they all obeyed Mama Squirrel, without all that much fussing from her or from them.

  What he didn’t know was what they were going to do about Papa Moose. He lay on the kitchen floor, wide awake now, but with his eyes tight shut, saying nothing, making no groan, showing no wince, but still a streak of tears ran from both eyes down into his hair and ears. Arthur Stuart longed to help him, knew that all the little bones were shaped wrong and didn’t fit, pinching here and there, the ligaments and tendons sometimes too short, sometimes too long for the place they were supposed to be. What he didn’t know was how to get them to change into something closer to what was right.