THE CRYSTAL CITY Read online

  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!"

  Since Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were still nursing three children who had been seized by the fever despite Alvin's preventive healing, it was tempting to invite the men inside to see that their claim was a lie. But everyone knew that showing three sick children wouldn't be much of an answer, when in this neighborhood more children were dying than anywhere else in Barcy, while not one child in the house of Moose and Squirrel had been carried out in a box.

  It wasn't because Alvin had confined his ministrations to the children of the orphanage. He had searched out other heartfires in other houses, and had saved many. But it took time, working one by one, and while he saved many, far more died beyond his reach, ones he had not even looked at. There were limits to what he could do.

  No longer did he pretend to run errands or do chores. The baguettes Arthur Stuart had shared with Dead Mary and her mother were the last he bought; and when he slept it was because he could stay awake no longer. He dozed fitfully, waking from nightmares in which children died under his hands. And the worst nightmare of all, a vision of Dead Mary's mother filled with invisible disease, walking about giving people the yellow fever just by bumping into them or speaking to them or whispering in their ear. Tousling the head of a child, she'd move on and the child would drop dead behind her. And each dead person would turn to Alvin and say, "Why did you save her and let her walk around to kill us all?"

  Then he'd wake up and search out more heartfires dimmed by disease and try to repair their ravaged bodies.

  It never occurred to him not to reach first for those nearest to where he was at the moment. But the result was that deaths from the fever increased in direct relationship to one's distance from the orphanage. It was as if God had put a blessing on the place that spilled over to neighboring houses.

  Or, as the marchers outside the house were broadly hinting, it was as if the devil was protecting his own.

  That night there were more stones, and marchers with torches, and drunks who threw bottles that crashed. Children woke up and cried, and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel led them into the back rooms of the house.

  Still Alvin lay on his bed, reaching out with his doodlebug to heal and heal, concentrating now on children, saving all that he could.

  Arthur Stuart dared not interrupt his work-or wake him, if by chance he was asleep. He knew that somehow Alvin blamed himself for the plague-he understood the grim relentlessness of Alvin's labors. This was personal; Alvin was trying to undo some terrible mistake. That much he had hinted at before he went completely silent. And now Alvin was silent, and Arthur Stuart was on his own.

  Arthur had no power to heal anyone. But he had learned some makering, and thought now to use it to protect the house. It was something Squirrel said that triggered his action: "What I'm a-feared of are the torches. What if they try to burn us out?"

  So he reached out to the torch-bearing men and tried to get a sense of the fire. He had worked in metal before, but little else. Wood and cloth were organic and hard to get into, hard for him to feel and know. But soon he found that what was burning was the oil the torches had been soaked in, and that was a fluid that made more sense to his half-blind groping doodlebug.

  He didn't know how fire worked, so he couldn't stop the burning. But he could dissipate the fluid, turn it into gas the way he had turned metal into liquid. And when he had vaporized it, the torch would soon go out.

  One by one, the torches nearest the house began to go dark.

  It wasn't until Papa Moose said, "What's happening? God help us, why are the torches going out?" that Arthur Stuart realized that he might be doing something wrong.

  There was fear in Papa Moose's voice. "The nearest torches are going out."

  Arthur Stuart opened his eyes and looked. Me had blacked out about a dozen of the torches. But now he saw that the remaining torchbearers had backed away from the house, and the street was now littered with the discarded sticks, scattered about like the bones of some long-dead creature.

  "If they ever wanted proof that this
house was a cursy place, this was it," said Mama Squirrel. "Whoever came near, his torch went out."

  Arthur Stuart was sick at heart. He was about to confess what he had done when the crowd began to move away.

  "Safe for tonight," said Papa Moose. "But they'll be back, and more of them, what with one more miracle to report."

  "Arthur Stuart," said Mama Squirrel. "You don't think Alvin would be so foolish as to douse their torches like that, do you?"

  "No ma'am," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Let's get the children back to bed, Mama Squirrel," said Papa Moose. "They'll be glad to know the mob is gone."

  Only after they left the room did Arthur Stuart see through the window the dark shape of one man lingering in the street, not particularly watching the house, but not leaving it, either. From the way the man moved, shambling like a bear, with pent-up energy, he thought he recognized him. Someone he had met recently. Someone on the riverboat. Abe Lincoln? Coz?

  Tentatively he reached out to the heartfire. Not being deft, like Alvin, he didn't know how to merely graze the man, glance at him. One moment he was seeing him as a distant spark, and the next moment he was filled with the man's self-awareness, his body-sense, what he saw and felt and heard, what he hungered for. Filled with hate he was, and rage, and shame. But no words, no names-that wasn't a thing that was easy to find. Peggy could see such things, but not Arthur Stuart, and not Alvin, so far as Arthur knew.

  It was hard to pull himself back out of the fiery heart of the man, but he knew now who it was, for in the midst of all the turmoil, one thing stood out-a constant awareness of the knife at his hip, as if it were the man's best and truest hand, the tool that he relied on before all others. Jim Bowie, without doubt.

  With all that malice in him, there was no doubt Jim Bowie was there for mischief. Arthur Stuart couldn't help but wonder if he still harbored his old grudge from the river. But then, why didn't he remember his fear, as well?

  Maybe he needed a reminder. Arthur Stuart couldn't make the knife disappear as Alvin had, but he could do something. In moments he had the thing het up enough that Bowie was bound to feel it. Yes, there it was-Bowie whirled around and ran full-tilt away from the orphanage.

  What Arthur Stuart couldn't figure out was why, as he ran, Bowie kept a tight hold on the front of his pants, as if he was afraid they'd fall down.

  Alvin was asleep, not knowing where dreams left off and the living nightmare of his failure to save more lives began. But in the midst of his restless slumber he heard a voice calling to him.

  "Healer man!"

  It was a commanding voice, and a strange one. Whoever called him in his sleep, it was not a voice that he had heard before. But it seemed to know him, to speak out of the center of his own heartfire.

  "Wake up, sleeping man!"

  Alvin's eyes opened as if against his will. There was the faintest light of dawn outside the attic, visible only through the window at the end of the long room.

  "Wake up, man who keeps a golden plow in the chimney!"

  In a moment he was out of bed, across the long room, standing with his hand pressed against the brick. The golden plow was still there. But someone knew about it.

  Or no. That must have been a dream. He had fallen asleep after healing a child four streets over. The mother had also been dying, and he meant to heal her afterward. Had he done it, before sleep took him?

  He cast about wildly, then with more focus, searching. There was the child, a boy of perhaps five years. But where the mother should have been, nothing. His body had failed him. The child was alive, but an orphan now. Sick guilt stabbed at him.

  "Take your gold out of the chimney, healer man, and come down to talk to me!"

  This time it could not be a dream. So strong was the voice that he obeyed almost as if it had been his own idea. In a moment, though, he knew that it was not.

  Yet there was no reason not to obey. Someone knew about the golden plow, and so it was not hidden anymore. Time to get it out of the chimney and carry it with him again in his poke.

  It took time and most of his concentration, tired as he was, grieved and guilty as he felt, to get the bricks apart and soften the golden plow to let it fall into his hand. It quivered there, vibrant as always, alert, yet seeming to want nothing. It made his hand tremble as he pulled it through the gap in the bricks and brought it close to him. His heart warmed when the plow came near. Whether it was the plow that caused it, or the emotion of greeting a friend and traveling companion, he didn't know.

  "Come down to me, healer man."

  Who are you? he asked silently. But there was no answer. Whoever called him out of his own heartfire either could not hear his thoughts or did not wish to answer him.

  "Come down and break bread with me."

  Bread. Something about bread. It meant more than mere eating. She wanted more from him than to share a meal.

  She. Whoever called him was a woman. How did he know?

  With his plow in its poke, along with his few other belongings, Alvin went down the stairs. Papa Moose saw him as he passed the third floor, Mama Squirrel as he passed the second, and when he got to the bottom floor they were right behind him.

  "Alvin," said Squirrel. "What are you doing?"

  "Where are you going?" asked Papa Moose.

  "Someone's calling me," he said. "Look after Arthur Stuart till I come back."

  "Whoever's calling you," said Squirrel, "are you sure it's not a trap? Last night they came with torches. Some strange power put the torches out as they came near the house, and now you can be sure the house is watched. They'd love to lure us out."

  "She's calling me as a healer," said Alvin. "To break bread with her."

  Arthur Stuart appeared in the kitchen door. "It's the woman you healed in the swamp," he said. "She came two nights ago, with Dead Mary. I gave them bread, and they asked if you had bought it."

  "There it is," said Squirrel. "Terrible power, what Dead Mary has."

  "Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth. And it's not Dead Mary calling me."

  "What about her mother?" asked Arthur Stuart.

  "I don't think so," said Alvin.

  "Do you think it couldn't be no come-hither, then?" asked Squirrel. "Do you think that you're so powerful such things have no hold on you?"

  "A come-hither," said Alvin. "Yes, I think that's likely."

  "So you mustn't go," said Arthur Stuart. "Good people don't use such spells to draw a man. Or to make the awful sacrifices such a spell must take."

  "I suspect that all it took was the burning of some bread," said Alvin. "And I go or not, as I choose."

  "Isn't that how everyone feels, when they've had a come-hither set on them?" asked Papa Moose. "Don't they all think up good reasons for obeying the summons?"

  "Maybe so," said Alvin, "but I'm going."

  He was out the door.

  Arthur Stuart dogged his heels.

  "Go back inside, Arthur Stuart."

  "No sir," said Arthur. "If you're going to walk into a trap, I'm going to see it, so I can tell the story to folks later, about how even the most powerful man on earth can be dumb as a brick sometimes."

  "She needs me," said Alvin.

  "Like the devil needs the souls of sinners," said Arthur Stuart.

  "She's not commanding me," said Alvin. "She's begging."

  "Don't you see, that's how a compulsion would feel to a good man? When people need you, you come, so when someone wants you to come, they make you think you're needed."

  Alvin stopped and turned to face Arthur Stuart. "I left a child orphaned last night because I couldn't stay awake," he said. "If I'm so weak I can't resist my own body, what makes you think you can talk me into being strong enough to resist this spell?"

  "So you know it isn't safe."

  "I know that I'm going," said Alvin. "And you're not strong enough to stop me."

  He strode on, out into the deserted e
arly-morning street, as Arthur Stuart trotted at his side.

  "I was the one put them torches out," said Arthur Stuart. "No doubt," said Alvin. "It was a blame fool thing to do." "I was a-feared they meant to burn down the house." "They mean to, no doubt of it, but it'll take them a while to work up the courage," said Alvin. "Or to work up the fear.

  Either one, if it gets strong enough, will make them put the house to the torch. You probably did no more than tip them to the side of fear. Put it out of your mind."

  "You have to sleep," said Arthur Stuart, "so put your own troubles out of your mind, too."

  "Don't talk to me like you understand my sins."

  "Don't talk to me like you know what I do and do not understand."

  Alvin chuckled grimly. "Oh, that mouth you've got." "You can't answer what I said, so you're going to talk about my saying it."

  "I ain't talking about nothing. I told you not to come with me."

  "It was Jim Bowie last night," said Arthur Stuart. "Last man who stayed behind when the mob run off."

  "He invited me to join their expedition. Told me if I wasn't their friend, I was their foe."

  "So he's maybe goading on the mob, to try to force you into joining?"

  "A man like that thinks that fear can win loyalty." "Plenty of masters with a lash who can testify it works." "Don't win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room."

  They were moving out of the city of painted buildings and into a different New Orleans, the faded houses and shacks of the persecuted French, and then beyond them into the huts of the free blacks and masterless slaves-a world of cheap and desperate whores, of men who could be hired to kill for a piece of eight, and of practitioners of dark African magics that put bits of living bodies into flames in order to command nature to break her own laws.

  The black folks' way was as different from the knacks of white folks as was the greensong of the reds. Alvin could feel it around him in the heartfires, a kind of desperate courage that if worst came to worst, a person could sacrifice something to the fire and save what was most dear to him.

  "Do you feel it?" he asked Arthur Stuart. "The power around you?"