Keeper of Dreams (83 page)

“Yet,” said Arthur Stuart.

“I hope you ain’t got some damn fool plan going on in your head that you’re not going to tell me about.”

“Don’t mind telling you. I already got me a turn feeding them and picking up their slop bucket. The predawn turn, which nobody belowdecks is hankering to do.”

“They’re guarded day and night. How you going to start talking to them anyway?”

“Come on now, Alvin, you know there must be at least one of them speaks English, or how would they be able to guide anybody anywhere?”

“Or one of them speaks Spanish, and one of the slaveowners speaks it too, you ever think of that?”

“That’s why I got the Cuba fellow to teach me Spanish.”

That was brag. “I was only gone into town for six hours, Arthur Stuart.”

“Well, he didn’t teach me
all
of it.”

That set Alvin to wondering once again if Arthur Stuart had more of
his knack left than he ever let on. Learn a language in six hours? Of course, there was no guarantee that the Cuban slave knew all that much Spanish, any more than he knew all that much English. But what if Arthur Stuart had him a knack for languages? What if he’d never been a mimic at all, but instead a natural speaker-of-all-tongues? There was tales of such—of men and women who could hear a language and speak it like a native right from the start.

Did Arthur Stuart have such a knack? Now that the boy was becoming a man, was he getting a real grasp of it? For a moment Alvin caught himself being envious. And then he had to laugh at himself—imagine a fellow with
his
knack, envying somebody else. I can make rock flow like water, I can make water as strong as steel and as clear as glass, I can turn iron into living gold, and I’m jealous because I can’t also learn languages the way a cat learns to land on its feet? The sin of ingratitude, just one of many that’s going to get me sent to hell.

“What’re you laughing at?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“Just appreciating that you’re not a mere boy anymore. I trust that if you need any help from me—like somebody catches you talking to them Mexica slaves and starts whipping you—you’ll contrive some way to let me know that you need some help?”

“Sure. And if that knife-wielding killer who’s sleeping in your bed gets troublesome, I expect you’ll find some way to let me know what you want written on your tombstone?” Arthur Stuart grinned at him.

“Knife-wielding killer?” Alvin asked.

“That’s the talk belowdecks. But I reckon you’ll just ask him yourself, and he’ll tell you all about it. That’s how you usually do things, isn’t it?”

Alvin nodded. “I spose I do start out asking pretty direct what I want to know.”

“And so far you mostly haven’t got yourself killed,” said Arthur Stuart.

“My average is pretty good so far,” said Alvin modestly.

“Haven’t always found out what you wanted to know, though,” said Arthur Stuart.

“But I always find out something useful,” said Alvin. “Like, how easy it is to get some folks riled.”

“If I didn’t know you had another, I’d say that
was
your knack.”

“Rilin’ folks.”

“They do get mad at you pretty much when you say hello, sometimes,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Whereas nobody ever gets mad at you.”

“I’m a likable fellow,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Not always,” said Alvin. “You got a bit of brag in you that can be annoying sometimes.”

“Not to my friends,” said Arthur, grinning.

“No,” Alvin conceded. “But it drives your family insane.”

By the time Alvin got to his room, the “knife-wielding killer” had woke up from his nap and was somewhere else. Alvin toyed with sleeping in the very same bed, which had been his first, after all. But that was likely to start a fight, and Alvin just plain didn’t care all that much. He was glad to have a bed at all, come to think of it, and with four bunks in the room to share between two men, there was no call to be provoking anybody over who got to which one first.

Drifting off to sleep, Alvin reached out as he always did, seeking Peggy, making sure from her heartfire that she was all right. And then the baby, growing fine inside her, had a heartbeat now. Not going to end like the first pregnancy, with a baby born too soon so it couldn’t get its breath. Not going to watch it gasp its little life away in a couple of desperate minutes, turning blue and dying in his arms while he frantically searched inside it for some way to fix it so’s it could live. What good is it to be a seventh son of a seventh son if the one person you can’t heal is your own firstborn baby?

Alvin and Peggy clung together for the first days after that, but then over the weeks to follow she began to grow apart from him, to avoid him, until he finally realized that she was keeping him from being with her to make another baby. He talked with her then, about how you couldn’t hide from it, lots of folks lost babies, and half-growed children, too, the thing to do was try again, have another, and another, to comfort you when you thought about the little body in the grave.

“I grew up with two graves before my eyes,” she said, “and knowing how my parents looked at me and saw my dead sisters with the same name as me.”

“Well you was a torch, so you knew more than children ought to
know about what goes on inside folks. Our baby most likely won’t be a torch. All she’ll know is how much we love her and how much we wanted her.”

He wasn’t sure he so much persuaded her to want another baby as she decided to try again just to make him happy. And during this pregnancy, just like last time, she kept gallivanting up and down the country, working for abolition even as she tried to find some way to bring about freedom short of war. While Alvin stayed in Vigor Church or Hatrack River, teaching them as wanted to learn the rudiments of makery.

Until she had an errand for him, like now. Sending him downriver on a steamboat to Nueva Barcelona, when in his secret heart he just wished she’d stay home with him and let him take care of her.

Course, being a torch she knew perfectly well that was what he wished for, it was no secret at all. So she must need to be apart from him more than he needed to be with her, and he could live with that.

Couldn’t stop him from looking for her on the skirts of sleep, and dozing off with her heartfire and the baby’s, so bright in his mind.

He woke in the dark, knowing something was wrong. It was a heart-fire right up close to him; then he heard the soft breath of a stealthy man. With his doodlebug he got inside the man and felt what he was doing—reaching across Alvin toward the poke that was tucked in the crook of his arm.

Robbery? On board a riverboat was a blame foolish time for it, if that was what the man had in mind. Unless he was a good enough swimmer to get to shore carrying a heavy golden plowshare.

The man carried a knife in a sheath at his belt, but his hand wasn’t on it, so he wasn’t looking for trouble.

So Alvin spoke up soft as could be. “If you’re looking for food, the door’s on the other side of the room.”

Oh, the man’s heart gave a jolt at that! And his first instinct was for his hand to fly to that knife—he was quick at it, too, Alvin could see that it didn’t much matter whether his hand was on the knife or not, he was always ready with that blade.

But in a moment the fellow got a hold of hisself, and Alvin could
pretty much guess at his reasoning. It was a dark night, and as far as this fellow knew, Alvin couldn’t see any better than him.

“You was snoring,” said the man. “I was looking to jostle you to get you to roll over.”

Alvin knew that was a flat lie. When Peggy had mentioned a snoring problem to him years ago, he studied out what made people snore and fixed his palate so it didn’t make that noise anymore. He had a rule about not using his knack to benefit himself, but he figured curing his snore was a gift to other people.
He
always slept through it.

Still, he’d let the lie ride. “Why, thank you,” said Alvin. “I sleep pretty light, though, so all it takes is you sayin’ ‘roll over’ and I’ll do it. Or so my wife tells me.”

And then, bold as brass, the fellow as much as confesses what he was doing. “You know, stranger, whatever you got in that sack, you hug it so close to you that somebody might get curious about what’s so valuable.”

“I’ve learned that folks get just as curious when I
don’t
hug it close, and they feel a mite freer about groping in the dark to get a closer look.”

The man chuckled. “So I reckon you ain’t planning to tell me much about it.”

“I always answer a well-mannered question,” said Alvin.

“But since it ain’t good manners to ask about what’s in your sack,” said the man, “I reckon you don’t answer such questions at all.”

“I’m glad to meet a man who knows good manners.”

“Good manners and a knife that don’t break off at the stem, that’s what keeps me at peace with the world.”

“Good manners has always been enough for me,” said Alvin. “Though I admit I would have liked that knife better back when it was still a file.”

With a bound the man was at the door, his knife drawn. “Who are you, and what do you know about me?”

“I don’t know nothing about you, sir,” said Alvin. “But I’m a blacksmith, and I know a file that’s been made over into a knife. More like a sword, if you ask me.”

“I haven’t drawn my knife aboard this boat.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But when I walked in on
you
asleep, it was still daylight enough to see the size and shape of the sheath you keep it in.
Nobody makes a knife that thick at the haft, but it was right proportioned for a file.”

“You can’t tell something like that just from looking,” said the man. “You heard something. Somebody’s been talking.”

“People are always talking, but not about you,” said Alvin. “I know my trade, as I reckon you know yours. My name’s Alvin.”

“Alvin Smith, eh?”

“I count myself lucky to have a name. I’d lay good odds that you’ve got one, too.”

The man chuckled and put his knife away. “Jim Bowie.”

“Don’t sound like a trade name to me.”

“It’s a Scotch word. Means light-haired.”

“Your hair is dark.”

“But I reckon the first Bowie was a blond Viking who liked what he saw while he was busy raping and pillaging in Scotland, and so he stayed.”

“One of his children must have got that Viking spirit again and found his way across another sea.”

“I’m a Viking through and through,” said Bowie. “You guessed right about this knife. I was witness at a duel at a smithy just outside Natchez a few years ago. Things got out of hand when they both missed—I reckon folks came to see blood and didn’t want to be disappointed. One fellow managed to put a bullet through my leg, so I thought I was well out of it, until I saw Major Norris Wright setting on a boy half his size and half his age, and that riled me up. Riled me so bad that I clean forgot I was wounded and bleeding like a slaughtered pig. I went berserk and snatched up a blacksmith’s file and stuck it clean through his heart.”

“You got to be a strong man to do that.”

“Oh, it’s more than that. I didn’t slip it between no ribs. I jammed it right
through
a rib. We Vikings get the strength of giants when we go berserk.”

“Am I right to guess that the knife you carry is that very same file?”

“A cutler in Philadelphia reshaped it for me.”

“Did it by grinding, not forging,” said Alvin.

“That’s right.”

“Your lucky knife.”

“I ain’t dead yet.”

“Reckon that takes a lot of luck, if you got the habit of reaching over sleeping men to get at their poke.”

The smile died on Bowie’s face. “Can’t help it if I’m curious.”

“Oh, I know, I got me the same fault.”

“So now it’s your turn,” said Bowie.

“My turn for what?”

“To tell your story.”

“Me? Oh, all I got’s a common skinning knife, but I’ve done my share of wandering in wild lands and it’s come in handy.”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

“That’s what I’m telling, though.”

“I told you about my knife, so you tell me about your sack.”

“You tell everybody about your knife,” said Alvin, “which makes it so you don’t have to use it so much. But I don’t tell nobody about my sack.”

“That just makes folks more curious,” said Bowie. “And some folks might even get suspicious.”

“From time to time that happens,” said Alvin. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bunk and stood. He had already sized up this Bowie fellow and knew that he’d be at least four inches taller, with longer arms and the massive shoulders of a blacksmith. “But I smile so nice their suspicions just go away.”

Bowie laughed out loud at that. “You’re a big fellow, all right! And you ain’t afeared of nobody.”

“I’m afraid of lots of folks,” said Alvin. “Especially a man can shove a file through a man’s rib and ream out his heart.”

Bowie nodded at that. “Well, now, ain’t that peculiar. Lots of folks been afraid of me in my time. But the more scared they was, the less likely they was to admit it. You’re the first one actually said he was afraid of me. So does that make you the
most
scared? Or the least?”