The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI Read online

  “Nothing like that,” said Arthur Stuart. “See, they own the patent on stupid, and every time somebody in the city says something dumb, they get three cents.”

  The girl looked at him with squinty eyes. “They be the richest people in town, then, so I think you lie.”

  “I reckon you owe a dollar a day to whoever has the patent on no-sense-of-humor.”

  “You are not a slave,” said the girl.

  “I’m a slave to fortune,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’m in bondage to the universe, and my only manumission will be death.”

  “You gone to school, you.”

  “I only learned whatever my sister taught me,” said Arthur Stuart truthfully.

  “I have a knack,” said the girl.

  “Good for you,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “This was sick water,” she said, “and now is healthy. Your master healed it.”

  Alvin realized that this conversation had taken far too dangerous a turn. To Arthur he said, “If you’re done offending everybody in the neighborhood by talking face to face with a white girl, and not looking down and saying ma’am, it’s time to haul this water back.”

  “I was not offended,” said the girl. “But if you heal the water, maybe you come home with me and heal my mama.”

  “I’m no healer,” said Alvin.

  “I think what she got,” said the girl, “is the yellow fever.”

  If anybody had thought nobody was paying attention to this conversation, they’d have got their wake-up when she said that. It was like every nose on every face was tied to a string that got pulled when she said “yellow fever.”

  “Did you say yellow fever?” asked an old woman.

  The girl looked at her blankly.

  “She did,” said another woman. “Marie la Morte a dit.”

  “Dead Mary says her ma’s got yellow fever!” called someone.

  And now the strings were pulled in the opposite direction. Every head turned to face away from the girl—Dead Mary was her name, apparently—and then all the feet set to pumping and in a few minutes, Alvin, Arthur, and Dead Mary were the only humans near the fountain. Some folks quit the place so fast their jugs was left behind.

  “I reckon nobody’s going to steal these jars if we don’t leave them here too long,” said Alvin. “Let’s go see your mother.”

  “They will be stole for sure,” said Dead Mary.

  “I’ll stay and watch them,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Sir and ma’am,” said Alvin. “And never look a white person in the eye.”

  “When there’s nobody around, can I just set here and pretend to be human?”

  “Please yourself,” said Alvin.

  It took a while to get to Dead Mary’s house. Down streets until they ran out of streets, and then along paths between shacks, and finally into swampy land till they came to a little shack on stilts. Skeeters were thick as smoke in some spots.

  “How can you live with all these skeeters?” asked Alvin.

  “I breathe them in and cough them out,” said Dead Mary.

  “How come they call you that?” asked Alvin. “Dead Mary, I mean.”

  “Marie la Morte? Cause I know when someone is sick before he know himself. And I know how the sickness will end.”

  “Am I sick?”

  “Not yet, no,” said the girl.

  “What makes you think I can heal your mother?”

  “She will die if somebody does not help, and the yellow fever, personne who live here knows how to cure it.”

  It took Alvin a moment to decide that the French word she said must mean nobody. “I don’t know a thing about yellow fever.”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” said the girl. “Quick hot fever. Then freezing cold. My mother’s eyes turn yellow. She screams with pain in her neck and shoulders and back. And then when she’s not screaming, she looks sad.”

  “Yellow and fevery,” said Alvin. “I reckon the name kind of says it all.” Alvin knew better than to ask what caused the disease. The two leading theories about the cause of disease were punishment for sin and a curse from somebody you offended. Course, if either one was right, it was out of Alvin’s league.

  Alvin was a healer, of a kind—that was just natural for a maker, being sort of included in the knack. But what he was good at healing was broken bones and failing organs. A man tore a muscle or chopped his foot, and Alvin could heal him up good. Or if gangrene set in, Alvin could clean it out, make the good flesh get shut of the bad. With gangrene, too, he knew the pus was full of all kinds of little animals, and he knew which ones didn’t belong in the body. But he couldn’t do like he did with the water and just tell everything alive to break apart—that would kill the person right along with the sickness.

  Diseases that made your nose or bowels run were hard to track down, and Alvin never knew whether they were serious or something that would just get better if you left it alone or slept a lot. The stuff that went on inside a living body was just too complicated, and most of the important things was way too small for Alvin to understand what all was going on.

  If he was a real healer, he could have saved his newborn baby when it was born too young and couldn’t breathe. But he just didn’t understand what was going on inside the lungs. The baby was dead before he figured out a single thing.

  “I’m not going to be able to do much good,” said Alvin. “Healing sick folks is hard.”

  “I touch her lying on her bed, and I see nothing but she dead of yellow fever,” said Dead Mary. “But I touch you by the fountain, I see my mother living.”

  “When did you touch me?” said Alvin. “You didn’t touch me.”

  “I bump you when I draw water,” she said. “I have to be sneaky. Personne lets me touch him now, if he sees me.”

  That was no surprise. Though Alvin figured it was better to know you’re sick and dying in time to say good-bye to your loved ones. But folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.

  Illness or adultery, Alvin figured ignorance worked about as well in both cases. Not knowing just meant it was going to get worse.

  There was a plank leading from a hummock of dry land to the minuscule porch of the house, and Dead Mary fair to danced along it. Alvin couldn’t quite manage that, as he looked down at the thick sucking mud under the plank. But the board didn’t wobble much, and he made it into the house all right.

  It stank inside, but not much worse than the swamp outside. The odor of decay was natural here. Still, it was worse around the woman’s bed. Old woman, Alvin thought at first, the saddest looking woman he had ever seen. Then realized that she wasn’t very old at all. She was ravaged by worse things than age.

  “I’m glad she’s sleeping,” said Dead Mary. “Most times the pain does not let her sleep.”

  Alvin got his doodlebug inside her and found that her liver was half rotted away. Not to mention that blood was seeping everywhere inside her, pooling and rotting under the skin. She was close to death—could have died already, if she’d been willing to let go. Whatever she was holding on for, Alvin couldn’t guess. Maybe love for this girl here. Maybe just a stubborn determination to fight till the last possible moment.

  The cause of all this ruin was impossible for Alvin to find. Too small, or of a nature he didn’t know how to recognize. But that didn’t mean there was nothing he could do. The seeping blood—he could repair the blood vessels, clear away the pooling fluids. This sort of work, reconstructing injured bodies, he’d done that before and he knew how. He worked quickly, moved on, moved on. And soon he knew that he was well ahead of the disease, rebuilding faster than it could tear down.

  Until at last he could get to work on the liver. Livers were mysterious things and all he could do was try to get the sick parts to look more like the healthy parts. And maybe that was enough, because soon enough the woman coughed—with strength now, not feebly—and then sat
up. “J’ai soif,” she said.

  “She’s thirsty,” said the girl.

  “Marie,” the woman said, and then reached for her with a sob. “Ma Marie d’Espoir!”

  Alvin had no idea what she was saying, but the embrace was plain enough, and so were the tears.

  He walked to the doorway, leaving them their privacy. From the position of the sun, he’d been there an hour. A long time to leave Arthur Stuart alone by the well.

  And these skeeters were bound to suck all the blood out of him and turn him into one big itch iffen he didn’t get out of this place.

  He was nearly to the end of the plank when he felt it tremble with someone else’s feet. And then something hit him from behind and he was on the damp grassy mound with Dead Mary lying on top of him covering him with kisses.

  “Vous avez sauvé ma mere!” she cried. “You saved her, you saved her, vous êtes un ange, vous êtes un dieu!”

  “Here now, let up, get off me, I’m a married man,” said Alvin.

  The girl got up. “I’m sorry, but I’m so full of joy.”

  “Well I’m not sure I did anything,” said Alvin. “Your mother may feel better but I didn’t cure whatever caused the fever. She’s still sick, and she still needs to rest and let her body work on whatever’s wrong.”

  Alvin was on his feet now, and he looked back to see the mother standing in the doorway, tears still running down her cheeks.

  “I mean it,” said Alvin. “Send her back to bed. She keeps standing there, the skeeters’ll eat her alive.”

  “I love you,” said the girl. “I love you forever, you good man!”

  Back in the plaza, Arthur Stuart was sitting on top of the four water jars—which he had moved some twenty yards away from the fountain. Which was a good thing, because there must have been a hundred people or more jostling around it now.

  Alvin didn’t worry about the crowd—he was mostly just relieved that they weren’t jostling around some uppity young black man.

  “Took you long enough,” Arthur Stuart whispered.

  “Her mother was real sick,” said Alvin.

  “Yeah, well, word got out that this was the sweetest-tasting water ever served up in Barcy, and now folks are saying it can heal the sick or Jesus turned the water into wine or it’s a sign of the second coming or the devil was cast out of it and I had to tell five different people that our water came from the fountain before it got all hexed or healed or whatever they happen to believe. I was about to throw dirt into it just to make it convincing.”

  “So stop talking and pick up your jars.”

  Arthur Stuart stood up and reached for a jar, but then stopped and puzzled over it. “How do I pick up the second one, while I got the first one on my shoulder?”

  Alvin solved the problem by picking up both the half-filled jars by the lip and putting them on Arthur’s shoulders. Then Alvin picked up the two full ones and hoisted them onto his own shoulders.

  “Well, don’t you make it look easy,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “I can’t help it that I’ve got the grip and the heft of a blacksmith,” said Alvin. “I earned them the hard way—you could do it too, if you wanted.”

  “I haven’t heard you offering to make me no apprentice blacksmith.”

  “Because you’re an apprentice maker, and not doing too bad at it.”

  “Did you heal the woman?”

  “Not really. But I healed some of the damage the disease did.”

  “Meaning she can run a mile without panting, right?”

  “Where she lives, it’s more like splash a couple of dozen yards. That mud looked like it could swallow up whole armies and spit them back out as skeeters.”

  “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.

  3

  Fever

  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 childre
n—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.”