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

  Meanwhile, it was Arthur Stuart who kept his eyes open outside the house. The yellow fever was beginning to spread through the town, but the early cases all showed up in the area around the fountain. It was inevitable that people began to say that the “miracle water” had brought the fever back to Barcy. Many who still had any of it threw it out. But others were just as convinced it was the only cure, which God had sent in advance, knowing that the yellow fever was coming to smite the wicked.

  Arthur Stuart was glad, for the first time he could remember, that white folks around here didn’t pay all that much attention to a half-black young man carrying water with his master. So far nobody had linked him or Alvin to the miracle water. But that didn’t mean somebody might not remember how he sat there in the plaza, waiting for his master to come back from some Swamptown shack where Dead Mary had said her mother might have yellow fever. No, said she did have it. The first victim of this epidemic.

  And it occurred to Arthur that however much danger the house of Moose and Squirrel might be in, Dead Mary would face much worse, and much quicker, now that the yellow fever was back.

  When this thought came to him he was in the market down in the old town, choosing whatever was cheap but still edible. He debated with himself for a moment—what was more urgent, to get food back to Alvin, or go check on the girl?

  What would Alvin choose?

  Well, that made it easy. He always went for the dramatic over the sensible—or rather, he chose whatever would cause him the most inconvenience and danger.

  Arthur had already bought a sack of yams, and not a light one. It not only got heavier as he walked, but it made it so he couldn’t run—nothing was more sure to get him stopped than to be a half-black boy running with a sack of something on his back. Everybody knew that slaves on their masters’ business always moved about as slow as they could get away with, without somebody pronouncing them dead. So when a boy of color was running, it was sure to be a crime in progress.

  So he walked, but quickly, and followed, as best he could find it, the path he’d seen Alvin’s and Dead Mary’s heartfires trace through the swamps. He knew he didn’t see heartfires anywhere near as well as Alvin did, and once they got a few hundred yards off, or mixed in with a lot of other folks, it was hopeless. But Alvin’s heartfire he could follow, it was so bright and strong, and not only that, when he followed Alvin he could see, like a sort of backwash, something of where he was, the terrain he was moving through. And he had traced along with Alvin and Dead Mary all the way to her mother’s house. He had seen her heartfire flicker and grow strong, even if he didn’t understand what Alvin had done.

  Now it took a bit of splashing around and slapping at skeeters before he finally got to the plank bridge leading to Dead Mary’s house. He stood this side of the plank and clapped his hands. “Hello the house!” he called. “Company!” Which was wrong, of course—he was supposed to call out, “Alvin Smith’s servant here!” Or, if the world had not been so ugly, “Alvin Smith’s brother-in-law!” Then again, he didn’t know if Alvin had ever so much as told Dead Mary his name. Maybe names wouldn’t mean a thing here.

  And they didn’t. Because no one was home.

  Or if they were, they weren’t answering.

  He walked swiftly across the bridge and pushed open the door, half fearing that he might find them dead, murdered by fearful people. But he knew that couldn’t be so—iffen some mob blamed Dead Mary for the plague and wanted to kill her for it, they’d have burned down the house around them.

  The house was empty. Cleaned out, too—or else they didn’t own a blame thing. Most likely they had realized their peril and fled. He didn’t need to tell them how Dead Mary was regarded in this town.

  He shouldered his sack of yams and retraced his route back into the city. Staying away from crowded streets and especially from the plaza with the public fountain, he made his way back to the house of Moose and Squirrel, scratching at skeeter bites the whole way.

  He emptied the sack of yams into the bin in the kitchen, an action which Alvin, who was stirring the soup, greeted with a raised eyebrow. Which made Arthur Stuart feel guilty about how few of his errands he had finished.

  “What?” asked Arthur Stuart. “It’s not like I had a lot of money, and besides, I got worried about Dead Mary and her mother, and so I went out to check on them.”

  “I expect they were gone,” said Alvin.

  “You expect right,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “But that’s not why I raised my eyebrow at you.”

  “Too lazy to wave?”

  “You don’t just dump out a sack of yams. They need washing. Or peeling.”

  “Why should I, when you can just talk the dirt right off the skins, or the skins right off the yams?”

  “Because knacks weren’t given to us for frivolous purposes.”

  “Oh, like the time you made me work half a summer making a dugout canoe when you could have made a canoe out of it in five minutes.”

  “It was good for you.”

  “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.

  4

  La Tia

  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. S
teve 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.”