Keeper of Dreams (80 page)

All in all, they decided, they were well rid of Rack Miller, and a few folks had suspicions that it was that Alvin Smith and his half-Black boy who’d turned the tables on this cheating miller. They even tried to find out where Alvin might be, to offer him the mill in gratitude. Someone had heard tell he came from Vigor Church up in Wobbish, and a letter there did bring results—a letter in reply, from Alvin’s father. “My boy thought you might make such an offer, and he asked me to give you a better suggestion. He says that since a man done such a bad job as miller, maybe you’d be better off with a bear, especially if the bear has him a manservant who can keep the books.”

At first they laughed off the suggestion, but after a while they began to like it, and when they proposed it to Davy and the bear, they cottoned to it, too. The bear got him all the corn he wanted without ever lifting a finger, except to perform a little for folks at harvest time, and in the winter he could sleep in a warm dry place. The years he mated, the place was a little crowded with bearflesh, but the cubs were no trouble and the mama bears, though a little suspicious, were mostly tolerant, especially because Davy was still a match for any of
them
, and could grin them into docility when the need arose.

As for Davy, he kept true books, and fixed the scale so it didn’t ratchet anymore, giving honest weight every time. As time went on, he was so well-liked that folks talked about running him for mayor of Westville. He refused, of course, since he wasn’t his own man. But he allowed as how, if they elected the bear, he’d be glad to serve as the bear’s secretary and interpreter, and that’s what they did. After a year or two of having a bear as mayor, they up and changed the name to Bearsville, and the town prospered. Years later, when Kenituck joined the United States of America, it’s not hard to guess who got elected to Congress from that part of the state, which is how it happened that for seven terms of Congress a bear put its hand on the Bible right along with the other Congressmen, and then proceeded to sleep through every session it attended, while its clerk, one Davy Crockett, cast all its votes for it and gave all its speeches, every one of which ended with the sentence “Or at least that’s how it looks to one old grizzly bear.”

Robert Silverberg contacted me with an invitation. He had an idea for an anthology that would actually make money. What if leading writers of fantasy and science fiction wrote new stories set in their most popular imaginary universes? Presumably, all the fans of all the writers would desperately need to own the book, so everybody would get royalties based on each other’s audience size.

Excellent idea—as long as one of the authors was Stephen King. Or so we discovered eventually.

At that point, however, Silverberg was only inviting me to take part in
the sci-fi book,
Far Horizons
. For that I would revisit the
Ender’s Game
universe and write a new story. I had kept in the back of my mind the vague idea that someday I might go back and write something more about Ender Wiggin, but I was busy filling other contracts and never gave it much thought. Now I had a reason to do it—the advance was amazingly high for a novelet in an anthology—and what I came up with was “Investment Counselor,” one of the stories collected in my little Ender anthology
First Meetings
.

What tantalized me, though, was Silverberg’s fantasy anthology,
Legends
. I wheedled. “I write fantasy, too.” Silverberg hadn’t known that. “I have a series about an American frontier wizard named Alvin Maker.” How interesting. “Too bad you couldn’t squeeze me into the fantasy book.” Hmmm.

Nobody can be more graciously noncommittal than Robert Silver-berg when he doesn’t intend to say yes.

A while later—weeks? months?—Bob contacted me again, with the news that one of the
real
fantasy authors had dropped out, so . . . could I get him a story?

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that whining never pays.

Ever since I was a little kid and could sing the whole Davy Crockett theme song and knew the story of how he
grinned
a bear down out of a tree I’d harbored a secret love for the idea of a man and a bear becoming, in a way, friends. Now, with my Alvin Maker universe, I had a perfect setting. Using characters I already knew well—Alvin and his ward and pupil, Arthur Stuart—I could have them run into Davy Crockett and see what they could make of him.

All I had in mind when I started writing was the meeting in the woods, and even that wasn’t planned. I just let it flow. Once Davy left the scene, though, I had no idea where to go from there. Until it dawned on me that my best character wasn’t really Davy, it was the bear. Once I realized that the bear was the protagonist of the tale, the rest became pure fun to write. I think this just may be the most
fun
of all the stories I’ve ever written, and I wish with all my heart I could someday see it made into a film. I just want to see that bear in Congress.

Alvin watched as Captain Howard welcomed aboard another group of passengers, a prosperous family with five children and three slaves.

“It’s the Nile River of America,” said the captain. “But Cleopatra herself never sailed in such splendor as you folks is going to experience on the
Yazoo Queen
.”

Splendor for the family, thought Alvin. Not likely to be much splendor for the slaves—though, being house servants, they’d fare better than the two dozen runaways chained together in the blazing sun at dockside all afternoon.

Alvin had been keeping an eye on them since he and Arthur Stuart got here to the Carthage City riverport at eleven. Arthur Stuart was all for exploring, and Alvin let him go. The city that billed itself as the Phoenicia of the West had plenty of sights for a boy Arthur’s age, even a half-black boy. Since it was on the north shore of the Hio, there’d be suspicious eyes on him for a runaway. But there was plenty of free Blacks in Carthage City, and Arthur Stuart was no fool. He’d keep an eye out.

There was plenty of slaves in Carthage, too. That was the law, that a black slave from the South remained a slave even in a free state. And the greatest shame of all was those chained-up runaways who got themselves all the way across the Hio to freedom, only to be picked up by Finders and dragged back in chains to the whips and other horrors of bondage. Angry owners who’d make an example of them. No wonder there was so many who killed theirselves, or tried to.

Alvin saw wounds on more than a few in this chained-up group of twenty-five, though many of the wounds could have been made by the slave’s own hand. Finders weren’t much for injuring the property they was getting paid to bring on home. No, those wounds on wrists and bellies were likely a vote for freedom before life itself.

What Alvin was watching for was to know whether the runaways were going to be loaded on this boat or another. Most often runaways were ferried across the river and made to walk home over land—there was too many stories of slaves jumping overboard and sinking to the bottom with their chains on to make Finders keen on river transportation.

But now and then Alvin had caught a whiff of talking from the slaves—not much, since it could get them a bit of lash, and not loud enough for him to make out the words, but the music of the language didn’t sound like English, not northern English, not southern English, not slave English. It wasn’t likely to be any African language. With the British waging full-out war on the slave trade, there weren’t many new slaves making it across the Atlantic these days.

So it might be Spanish they were talking, or French. Either way, they’d most likely be bound for Nueva Barcelona, or New Orleans, as the French still called it.

Which raised some questions in Alvin’s mind. Mostly this one: How could a bunch of Barcelona runaways get themselves to the state of Hio? That would have been a long trek on foot, especially if they didn’t speak English. Alvin’s wife, Peggy, grew up in an Abolitionist home, with her papa, Horace Guester, smuggling runaways across river. Alvin knew something about how good the Underground Railway was. It had fingers reaching all the way down into the new duchies of Mizzippy and Alabam, but Alvin never heard of any Spanish- or French-speaking slaves taking that long dark road to freedom.

“I’m hungry again,” said Arthur Stuart.

Alvin turned to see the boy—no, the young man, he was getting so tall and his voice so low—standing behind him, hands in his pockets, looking at the
Yazoo Queen
.

“I’m a-thinking,” said Alvin, “as how instead of just looking at this boat, we ought to get on it and ride a spell.”

“How far?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“You asking cause you’re hoping it’s a long way or a short one?”

“This one goes clear to Barcy.”

“It does if the fog on the Mizzippy lets it,” said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart made a goofy face at him. “Oh, that’s right, cause around you that fog’s just bound to close right in.”

“It might,” said Alvin. “Me and water never did get along.”

“When you was a little baby, maybe,” said Arthur Stuart. “Fog does what you tell it to do these days.”

“You think,” said Alvin.

“You showed me your own self.”

“I showed you with smoke from a candle,” said Alvin, “and just because I
can
do it don’t mean that every fog or smoke you see is doing what I say.”

“Don’t mean it ain’t, either,” said Arthur Stuart, grinning.

“I’m just waiting to see if this boat’s a slave ship or not,” said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart looked over where Alvin was looking, at the runaways. “Why don’t you just turn them loose?” he asked.

“And where would they go?” said Alvin. “They’re being watched.”

“Not all that careful,” said Arthur Stuart. “Them so-called guards has got jugs that ain’t close to full by now.”

“The Finders still got their sachets. It wouldn’t take long to round them up again, and they’d be in even more trouble.”

“So you ain’t going to do a thing about it?”

“Arthur Stuart, I can’t just pry the manacles off every slave in the South.”

“I seen you melt iron like it was butter,” said Arthur Stuart.

“So a bunch of slaves run away and leave behind puddles of iron that was once their chains,” said Alvin. “What do the authorities think? There was a blacksmith snuck in with a teeny tiny bellows and a ton of coal and lit him a fire that het them chains up? And then he run off after, taking all his coal with him in his pockets?”

Arthur Stuart looked at him defiantly. “So it’s all about keeping you safe.”

“I reckon so,” said Alvin. “You know what a coward I am.”

Last year, Arthur Stuart would have blinked and said he was sorry, but now that his voice had changed the word “sorry” didn’t come so easy to
his lips. “You can’t heal everybody, neither,” he said, “but that don’t stop you from healing
some
.”

“No point in freeing them as can’t stay free,” said Alvin. “And how many of them would run, do you think, and how many drown themselves in the river?”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they know as well as I do, there ain’t no freedom here in Carthage City for a runaway slave. This town may be the biggest on the Hio, but it’s more southern than northern, when it comes to slavery. There’s even buying and selling of slaves here, they say, flesh markets hidden in cellars, and the authorities know about it and don’t do a thing because there’s so much money in it.”

“So there’s nothing you can do.”

“I healed their wrists and ankles where the manacles bite so deep. I cooled them in the sun and cleaned the water they been given to drink so it don’t make them sick.”

Now, finally, Arthur Stuart looked a bit embarrassed—though still defiant. “I never said you wasn’t
nice
,” he said.

“Nice is all I can be,” said Alvin. “In this time and place. That and I don’t plan to give my money to this captain iffen the slaves are going southbound on his boat. I won’t help pay for no slave ship.”

“He won’t even notice the price of our passage.”

“Oh, he’ll notice, all right,” said Alvin. “This Captain Howard is a fellow what can tell how much money you got in your pocket by the smell of it.”

“
You
can’t even do that,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Money’s his knack,” said Alvin. “That’s my guess. He’s got him a pilot to steer the ship, and an engineer to keep that steam engine going, and a carpenter to tend the paddlewheel and such damage as the boat takes passing close to the left bank all the way down the Mizzippy. So why is he captain? It’s about the money. He knows who’s got it, and he knows how to talk it out of them.”

“So how much money’s he going to think
you
got?”

“Enough money to own a big young slave, but not enough money to afford one what doesn’t have such a mouth on him.”

Arthur Stuart glared. “You don’t own me.”

“I told you, Arthur Stuart, I didn’t want you on this trip and I still don’t. I hate taking you south because I have to pretend you’re my property, and I don’t know which is worse, you pretending to be a slave, or me pretending to be the kind of man as would own one.”