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

  “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 early-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?”

  “I smell the stink,” said the boy. “Like folks here just spill their privy pots onto the ground.”

  “The soil wagons don’t come here,” said Alvin. “What choice they got?”

  “Don’t feel no power, me,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “And yet you’re talking like the French of this place. ‘Don’t feel no power…me?’”

  “That don’t mean nothing, you know I pick up what I hear.”

  “You’re hearing them, then. All around you.”

  “This be blacktown, massa,” said Arthur Stuart, affecting the voice of a slave. “This be no Veel Francezz.”

  “French slaves run away as sure as Spanish ones, or slaves of Cavaliers.”

  Now black children were coming out of the houses, their mothers after them, tired women with sad eyes. And men who looked dangerous, they began to follow like a parade. Until they came to a woman sitting by a cookfire. Not a fat woman, but not a thin one, either. Voluptuous as the earth, that’s what she was, but when she looked up from the fire she smiled at Alvin like the sun. How old was she? Could have been twenty from the smooth bronze skin. Could have been a hundred from the wise and twinkling eyes.

  “You come to see La Tia,” she said.

  A smaller woman, French by the look of her, came forward from behind the fire. “This be the Queen,” she said. “You bow now.”

  Alvin did not bow. Nothing in La Tia’s face suggested that she wanted him to.

  “On your knees, white man, you want to live,” said the French woman sharply.

  “Hush now, Michele,” said La Tia. “I don’t want no kneeling from this man. I want him to do us a miracle, he don’t have to kneel to me. He come when I call him.”

  “Everybody have to come, you call them,” said Michele.

  “Not this one,” said La Tia. “He come, but I don’t make him. All I do is make him hear me. This one choose to come.”

  “What do you want?”
asked Alvin.

  “They gonna be burning here in Barcy,” said the woman.

  “You know that for sure?” asked Alvin.

  “I hear that. Slaves listen, slaves talk. You know. Like in Camelot.”

  Alvin remembered the capital city of the Crown Colonies, and how rumors traveled through the slave community faster than a boy could run. But how could she know that he had been there?

  “I had your skin on that bread,” she said. “Most gals like me, they don’t see it, so small that skin. But I see it. I got you then. While the fire burn, I got whatever you have in there. I see your treasure.”

  She could see more in his heartfire than Alvin could see in hers. All he could see was the health of her body, and some strong fears, but also an intense sense of purpose. But what the purpose was, he couldn’t know. Once again, his knack was not as much as he needed it to be, and it stung.

  “Don’t you fret, mi hijo,” she said. “I ain’t gonna tell. And no, I don’t mean that thing you got in your poke. That ain’t your treasure. That belongs to its own self. Your treasure is in a woman’s womb, far away and safe.”

  To hear it in words like that, from a stranger, stabbed him in the heart. It brought tears to his eyes, and a weakness, almost a giddiness to his head. Without thinking, he sank to his knees. That was his treasure. All the lives he had failed to save in Barcy, they were that one life, the child who had died those years ago. And his redemption, his only hope, his—yes, his treasure—it was the new child that was so far away, and beyond his reach, in someone else’s charge.

  “Get up,” whispered Arthur Stuart. “Don’t kneel to her.”

  “He don’t kneel to me,” said La Tia. “He kneel to his love, to the saint of love. Not Lord Valentine, no, not him. The saint of a father’s love, St. Joseph, the husband of the Holy Mother. To him he kneeling. That be so, no?”

  Alvin shook his head. “I’m kneeling because I’m broke inside,” he whispered. “And you want this broke man to do something for you, and there’s nothing I can do. The world is sicker every day and I got no power to heal the world.”

  “You got the power I need,” said La Tia. “Maria de los Muertos, she tell me. You make her mother whole, she.”

  “You’re not sick,” said Alvin.

  “The whole of Barcy, she be sick,” said La Tia. “You live in a house about to die from that sick. This blacktown, she about to die. The French people of Barcy, they be about to die. The sick of angry people, the sick of stupid people all afraid. Gotta have somebody to blame. That be you and that crazy Moose and Squirrel. That be me and all us who keep Africa alive, we. That be all them French folk like Maria de los Muertos and her mama. What they gonna do when the mob decides to blame the fever on somebody and burn it out? Where they gonna go?”

  “What do you think I can do? I got no control over the mob.”

  “You know what I want, you.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You maybe don’t know you know, but you got them words burnt in your heart by your mama all them years ago, when you little, you. ‘Let my people go.’”

  “I’m not Pharaoh and this ain’t Egypt.”

  “Is too Egypt and I reckon you ain’t Pharaoh, you Moses.”

  “What do you want, a plague of cockroaches? Barcy already got that, and nobody cares.”

  “I want you to part the sea and let us across on dry land in the dark of night.”

  Alvin shook his head. “Moses did that by the power of God, which I ain’t got. And he had someplace to go, a wilderness to be lost in. Where can you go? All these people. Too many.”

  “Where you send them slaves you set free from the riverboat?”

  That flat out stunned Alvin. There was no way that story could be known here in the south. Was there?

  Alvin turned and looked at Arthur Stuart.

  “I didn’t tell nobody,” said Arthur. “You think I’m crazy?”

  “You think I need somebody tell me?” said La Tia. “I saw it inside you, all on fire, you. Take us across the river.”

  “But you ain’t talking about no two score slaves here, you talking about blacktown and the orphanage and—Frenchtown? You know how many that is?”

  “And all the slaves as want to go,” said La Tia. “In the fog of night. You make the fog come into Barcy from off the river. You let us all gather in the fog, you take us across the river. You got red friends, you take us safe to the other side.”

  “I can’t do it. You think I can hold back the whole Mizzippy? What do you think I am?”

  “I think you a man, he want to know why he alive,” said La Tia. “He want to know what his power be for. Now La Tia tell you, and you don’t want to know after all!”

  “I’m not Moses,” said Alvin. “And you ain’t the Lord.”

  “You want to see a burning bush?” asked La Tia.

  “No!” said Alvin. She might be able to conjure up some kind of fireworks, but he didn’t want to see it. “And it wouldn’t work to cross the river anyway. How would we feed the people on the far bank? It’s swamp there, mud and snakes and gators and skeeters, just like here. Ain’t no manna in the wilderness there. My friends among the reds are far to the north. It can’t be done. Least of all by me.”

  “Most of all by you,” said La Tia.

  They stood there in silence for a moment.

  Arthur Stuart spoke up. “Usted es tia de quien?”

  “I don’t speak no Spanish, boy,” said La Tia. “They call me La Tia cause them Spanish people can’t say my Ibo name.”

  “We don’t say her name neither,” said the smaller woman. “She be our Queen, and she say, Let my people go, so you do it, you.”

  “Hush, child,” said La Tia. “You don’t tell a man like this what to do. He already want to do it. So we help him find his courage. We tell him, go to the dock and there he find him hope this morning. There he find a brother like Moses did, make him brave, give him trouble.”

  “Oh good,” said Alvin. “More trouble.” But he knew that he would do her bidding—go to the dock, at least, and see what her prophecy might mean.

  “Tonight at first dark, there be fog,” said La Tia. “You make fog, everybody know to come.”

  “Come where?” said Alvin. “Don’t do it. We can’t cross the river.”

  “We leave this place one way,” said La Tia, “or we leave it another, we.”

  As they hurried away, with blacks watching them on either hand, Arthur Stuart asked, “She mean what I thought she meant?”

  “They’re going to leave or they’re going to die trying,” said Alvin. “And I can’t say they’re wrong. Something ugly’s building up in this city. They were itching for war before this yellow fever. Steve Austin’s been gathering men who like to fight. And there’s no shortage of others who’ll fight when they’re afraid. They all mean to have some killing, and La Tia’s right. There’s no staying here, not for any of the people they might turn on. If I find a way to get Papa Moose and his family out of Barcy, they’ll turn on the free blacks or the French.”

  “How about a hurricane? You done a flood to stop the slave revolt in Camelot, but I think this time you could do it with wind and rain,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” said Alvin. “A bad blow in this place, and we’d kill the very folks we ought to save.”

  Arthur Stuart looked around him. “Oh,” he said. “I guess they’re all pretty much on low ground.”

  “Reckon so.”

  White faces watched them from the windows of poor shacks in Frenchtown, too. La Tia’s words had gone out already. They were all looking to Alvin to save them, and he didn’t know how.

  Story of my life, thought Alvin. Expectations built up all around me, but I got neither the power nor the wisdom to fulfil any of them. I can make a man’s knife disappear and I can melt the chains off a bunch of slaves but it’s a drop of blood in a bucket of water, you can’t even find it, let alone draw it out again.


  Drop of blood in a bucket of water.

  He remembered how Tenskwa-Tawa made a whirlwind on a lake, put his blood into the waterspout, and saw the future in the walls of it as he and Alvin rose up in the air inside.

  He remembered that it was in the visions inside that column of swirling water that he saw the Crystal City for the first time. Was it something in the distant past, or something in the future? What mattered was not that dream of what might have been. It was the process by which Tenskwa-Tawa shaped the water to the form he wanted, and held it there, seeming to whirl at great speed, but really holding absolutely still.

  Blood in the water, and a whirlwind, and walls as clear and smooth as glass.

  5

  Crystal Ball

  Long before he reached the dock, Alvin began to scan the heartfires of the throngs of people ahead of him. He could not see into them the way Margaret could, knowing things about them, their past, their future. But he could see whose heartfire burned bright, and whose merely smoldered hot and dark; who was strong and who was weak, who fearful and who courageous.

  There were many that he recognized, having been in town for so many weeks. He easily found Steve Austin and Jim Bowie, not together at the moment, and not really much alike. He knew Austin was a dreamer, Bowie a killer. The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that others will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.

  But soon his reflections on Austin and Bowie were stopped cold by a bright familiar heartfire that was just about the last one he expected—or wanted—to find here in Barcy.

  His younger brother Calvin.

  Calvin had been the closest companion of Alvin’s childhood. They had been inseparable, and whatever Alvin did, Calvin had to try. Alvin, for his part, rarely succumbed to the temptation to tease his brother, but instead included him and watched over him.