The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (14 page)

“You look to be a useful man to have as a friend,” said the man with the knife.

“How would you know?” said Calvin. “You haven’t seen me with any of my friends.”

The man stuck out his hand. “Jim Bowie, sir, and
I’d
like to be your friend.”

“Sir, I don’t reckon you have many friends in this world, and neither do I. So let’s not pretend to love each other. You have something you want to use me for, and I’m perfectly willing to consider being used if you can let me see what’s to gain from it, and why it’s a good and noble undertaking.”

“They ain’t no good and noble undertakings. Everybody I know of gets undertaken has to be dead first and doesn’t seem to enjoy it.”

Bowie was grinning.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Bowie?”

“Your company,” said Bowie. “On an expedition. A job your brother turned down on account of I think he was scared.”

“Al ain’t afraid of anything,” said Calvin.

“Anybody isn’t scared of the Mexica might as well shoot out his own brains, cause they ain’t worth keeping.”

“The Mexica?”

“Some of us think it’s time civilization came back to Mexico.”

Civilization…like this? Calvin watched the remaining mobbers cavorting and gamboling in front of the hot glowing embers and laughed.

“A mob’s a mob,” said Bowie. “But the Mexica are evil and need destroying.”

“No doubt they do,” said Calvin. “But why is it
your
job?”

“I got tired of waiting on God.”

Calvin grinned at him. “Maybe we got something to talk about. I never been to Mexico.”

Alvin felt someone nudge him, shake his shoulder.

“Sun coming,” said a woman’s voice.

La Tia, that’s who it was.

“Everybody already pass over,” said another woman. Dead Mary’s mother.

“What’s your name?” Alvin murmured. “I don’t know your name.”

“Rien,” she said.

Dead Mary reached out and took his bleeding hands in hers. “Get up, you wizard you. Get up and cross over the bridge of your blood.”

He tried to rise, with her helping, but at once he felt faint and his legs gave way under him. He fell face forward onto his hands and even his elbows buckled, and his face struck the surface of the crystal bridge. The heavy weight of the plow made the poke slide off his shoulder. It made the whole bridge shimmer with life, and Alvin felt himself suffused with warmth. With peace. It was all done. He could sleep now.

At once the bridge began to give way under him.

“No!” cried La Tia. “Hold up that bridge! You can’t sleep now!” She reached down and lifted the poke from the surface of the bridge. At once the shimmering stopped, and Alvin could concentrate again. No, it wasn’t time to rest, was it?

“The army coming, boy!” La Tia said. “They know they slaves gone now, morning coming and nobody doing they chores. This ain’t no drunken mob today, no. This be soldiers, and we got to cross over!”

It wasn’t just her words filling him with strength, though. He could feel the power of charms she bore. He always saw the small magics of spells and hexes and could stop them if he wanted, so he had gotten used to the idea that they had no effect on him.

But now he was grateful for the strength that flowed into him as she draped a charm around his neck.

“I have to stay here,” he said softly, “or the bridge won’t hold.”

“You had to stay here to make the bridge,” said La Tia. “But don’t you feel your brother put in his blood from the other side?”

Alvin cast his awareness through the whole length of the bridge and now realized that his own heartfire was not alone in it. His was the overwhelming light within the crystal, but there was another heartfire there, too, and not a weak one, either. Arthur Stuart had taken hold of the bridge and had put his own blood into the water to join him.

La Tia and Dead Mary’s mother—Rien, was it?—supported him on either side, while Dead Mary pushed her wheelbarrow out onto the bridge to lead the way. Already the last of the people was out of sight in the fog. But the fog was thinning, and the first rays of dawn were lighting the eastern sky. Arthur Stuart might still be on the job, but Calvin wasn’t.

Behind them Michele, La Tia’s friend and doorkeeper, was laying down charms on the bridge. They did not cause the shimmer that the plow had brought. Rather they felt like salt dropped on ice.

“That burns,” said Alvin. “I can’t have that.”

“Got to keep them enemies back,” said La Tia. “They my fear and fire charms she laying down.”

“This bridge was made to welcome people. The crystal is meant to open their eyes. You can’t put darkness and fear onto it and hope to have it stay.”

“You know what you know,” said La Tia. “You do a thing I never see, so while I stand on your blood, I do what you say.” She called back over her shoulder. “Michele, you pick up all this stuff, you, you make it a ring on the shore, hold them back a little!”

Michele ran back to land and laid the charms in a great semicircle to keep the soldiers at bay as long as possible.

“To them it be like a fire,” said La Tia. “Hate and fear, they make it into a fire.”

Blood still dripped from Alvin’s hands as he walked. Dead Mary set down the barrow and tried to take one hand and bind it up to stop the bleeding, but Alvin pulled away. “Got to keep my blood going into the bridge,” he said. “Arthur can’t hold it up alone.”

“So this thing you make, it don’t stay made?” said Dead Mary.

“First time I done it,” said Alvin, “and I don’t think I done it right. But maybe it can never stay. Maybe you can’t build nothing out of this that lasts.”

“Stop making him talk,” said Rien. “You keep pushing, Marie, you keep showing us the way.”

“I know the way,” said Alvin.

“But what happen to us when you faint, yes? What?”

Alvin had no answer, and Dead Mary continued to push her barrow on ahead.

They weren’t all that far when they heard Michele run up from behind. “Soldiers come, and a lot of other men, very angry. The fire hold them back for now, but they got their own peeps and slinks and they get through soon. We got to run.”

“I can’t,” said Alvin.

But even as he said it, he heard the greensong that had helped the others cross so quickly, and now that he wasn’t concentrating on holding the bridge alone, he could let it into him, let it strengthen and heal him a little. He hushed them. “Hear that?” he said. “Can you hear?”

And after a while, yes, they could. They stopped talking then, and Alvin stopped leaning on them, and soon he and the four women were walking swiftly, faster than they thought they could, with longer strides than any of these women had ever taken. Long before they reached the other side of Pontchartrain they overtook the last of the people, and when Alvin got there, the song grew stronger in their hearts as well, and they stopped straggling and picked up their pace.

It was good that they did, because Alvin felt it like a blow when the first of the soldiers charged onto the bridge. It was his heartfire they were treading on, and where the people’s feet had been light, the soldiers’ boots were heavy, and as they ran along the narrow bridge Alvin heard them fighting the greensong like the cacophony of two marching bands playing wildly different tunes.

It weakened him and slowed him down, just a little at first, but more and more as they drew nearer. Hundreds of them, carrying muskets. At the far end of the bridge, someone was trying to get a horse out onto the crystal—a horse pulling a light piece of field artillery.

“I can’t hold that up,” gasped Alvin.

“Almost there,” called Dead Mary. “I can see the shore!” She started to run.

But there was no fog on this side of Pontchartrain, so seeing the campfires on the far shore did not mean they were truly almost there. Alvin slowed, staggered. Again he had to lean on the women until they were almost dragging him along. Again he felt alone, abandoned by—or perhaps merely oblivious to—the greensong. But with each weakening of his own strength under the burden of the approaching army, he could feel another strength move in under his blood in the skeleton of the bridge. Arthur Stuart was already reaching far beyond his strength, but Alvin had no choice but to rely on his strength until all were safe.

Just when it seemed that the bridge was lengthening infinitely before them, they closed the last hundred, the last fifty, the last dozen steps and staggered onto the shore. Dead Mary had set down her barrow on the bank and now hovered around, eager to help.

There lay Arthur Stuart, prostrate in the sand, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel kneeling beside him, their hands on him, Papa Moose praying, Mama Squirrel singing the first words Alvin had ever heard anyone put to the greensong, words about sap and leaves, flowers and insects, fish and birds and, yes, squirrels all climbing along in the nets of God.

Arthur Stuart’s hands were extended, his wrists bleeding onto the bridge, and his fingers digging down into the face of the crystal. He shouldn’t have been able to do that, to push his skin and bone into Alvin’s crystal bridge, but here it was partly Arthur Stuart’s, and right around his bleeding fingers it was almost entirely his bridge, so it followed his need.

Alvin sank down beside him and rested his hands and head on Arthur’s back. “Arthur, you got to let go now, you got to let go first. When I let go of it the whole weight of it will fall on you, and you can’t bear it, you got to let go first.”

Arthur seemed not to hear him, so deep was he in his trance of concentration.

“Pull his hands out of the bridge,” Alvin said to the others.

But Moose and Squirrel couldn’t do it, and La Tia and Dead Mary couldn’t do it, and Alvin whispered into his ear, “They’re coming and we can’t bear them up, the bridge can’t hold such a harsh load, you got to let go, Arthur Stuart, I can’t hold it any longer and if you try to hold alone it’ll kill you.”

Arthur Stuart finally managed to make an answer, barely audible. “They’ll die.”

“I reckon so,” said Alvin. “Them as can’t swim. They’ll die trying to bring slaves back into slavery. It ain’t your job to keep alive such men as would do that.”

“They’re just soldiers,” said Arthur Stuart.

“And sometimes good men die in a bad cause, when it comes to war.”

Arthur Stuart wept. “If I let go I’m killing them.”

“They chose to come up on a bridge that was built for freedom, with slavery and killing in their hearts.”

“Bear them up, Alvin, or I can’t let go.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Alvin. “I’ll do my best.”

With a final cry of anguish Arthur Stuart tore his blood-covered hands out of the crystal. Alvin felt his heartfire vanish from the substance of the bridge, and in that moment he withdrew his own.

It lingered for a long moment, held by the blood alone.

And then the bridge was gone.

“Bear them up in the water!” cried Arthur Stuart. And then he fell into something between a faint and a deep sleep.

Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel drew him back from the water’s edge and bandaged his wounds, while Dead Mary and her mother did the same for Alvin’s hands and feet.

Alvin barely noticed, though, because he was trying to find the heartfires of the soldiers. He could not save them all. But those with brains enough to let go of their weapons, to pry off their boots, to try to swim, them he could keep afloat. But those who didn’t try, and those that wouldn’t let go of the things that made them soldiers, he hadn’t the strength to help them.

La Tia grasped what he was doing and stepped to the water’s edge, where the bridge had once been. She reared her head back and pinched a powder into her open mouth. Then she looked out over the water and cried out in a voice that could be heard for miles across the lake, a voice as loud as thunder, a voice that made wide ripples race forward across the water.

“Drop your guns, you! Try to swim! Take off your boots! Swim back!”

All heard, and most heeded, and they lived. Three hundred soldiers went out onto that bridge that morning, along with one horse hitched to a fieldpiece. The horse had no way to save itself, but it took Alvin only a moment to sever the harness that held it to that murderous load. The horse came out alive; the fieldpiece stayed behind under the water. All but two score men finally swam to shore, gasping and half drowned but alive. But not one gun and not one boot made it back.

Only then, with the last of their enemies safe who was willing to be saved, Alvin let go of consciousness.

The north shore teemed with thousands of people, of every age and color and several languages. They desperately needed someone to tell them what to do, and where to go if they were to find drinkable water and food to eat. But not one of them proposed awakening Alvin or Arthur Stuart. The man and boy who made a crystal bridge out of blood and water—such power struck them all with awe, and they would not dare.

Back in Barcy, Calvin saw what was happening with Alvin’s heartfire, how deeply he slept, how weak he was.

I could kill him right now. Just open up a hole in his heart and fill his lungs with blood and he’d be dead before anyone else realized what was happening and no one would know it was me, or if they did, they’d never prove it.

But I won’t kill him today, thought Calvin. I’ll never kill him. Even though he kills me all the time, with his judgments and condemnations, his condescensions and his lessons and his utter ignorance of who I am. Because I’m not like Alvin.

He refrains from purposely killing people because he thinks it’s wrong, under some arbitrary law. While I refrain from killing people, not out of obedience, but of my own free will, because I’m merciful to those who hurt me and despitefully use me.

Who’s the Pharisee here? And who’s the one like Jesus? Even though nobody else will ever see it that way, that’s the truth, as God is my witness.

Verily Cooper awoke in the old roadhouse in the town of Hatrack River. It was the place where Alvin Maker was born, and where he returned twelve years later to serve his prenticeship to the blacksmith there.

It was that prenticeship that brought Verily Cooper there. The old smith had died a while ago, and since his wife had died before him, their children were now in possession of a will that gave them “one plow of pure gold, stolen by a prentice named Alvin, son of Alvin Miller of Vigor Church.” Margaret Larner’s father, Horace Guester, had written to Verily as soon as rumors of the will began to spread through town. Verily was the only lawyer old Horace trusted, and so here he was to try to prevent some hare-brained judge from issuing a writ demanding that Alvin produce the plow.

If only the plow didn’t exist.

But it did exist, and the smith had never owned it. Alvin had forged it himself in the Hatrack River smithy. It was Alvin who had somehow turned it to gold, and it was only greed that made the old smith claim that Alvin stole it from him.

It would be an open-and-shut case, if not for the local prejudice that for many years had made Alvin out—at least among those who never knew him—to be six kinds of scoundrel. In vain had Horace insisted to all and sundry that the smith never owned that much gold, that his daughter would never have married a thief, and that everyone knew the smith was a notorious liar and sharp-dealer. It would come to court, and the judge, who had to stand for reelection this fall, might well issue a writ based on popular prejudice rather than law.

And that’s why Verily Cooper, attorney-at-law, was here once again to plead Alvin’s case in court. This time, fortunately, Alvin himself was not incarcerated. He was off somewhere doing his wife Margaret’s bidding—as if he didn’t have work of his own to do.

Not fair, not right. Judge not, lest somebody think you’re jealous of Alvin’s wife, for heaven’s sake.

It was full dark outside. Why in the world had he woken up now? He didn’t particularly need to micturate. There must have been some kind of noise. Some drunk refusing to leave the roadhouse at closing time?

No. Now he heard a stamping of horses and the voice of the stableman as he led a team off to be walked and watered and fed and stabled for the night. It was rare for the coach to push on in the darkness. But when Verily stepped to the window and opened it, sure enough, there it was, lanterns blazing—enough of them that from a distance it might be mistaken for a forest fire.

Curiosity would never let him go to sleep without finding out who had arrived at such an untimely hour.

He was not altogether surprised to find, sitting at the kitchen table, Alvin’s wife Margaret, just settling in to have a bowl of her father’s justly famous chicken stew.

“You,” she said.

“And I’m delighted to see you, as well, Goody Smith.” If she was going to be rude to him, he could reply by giving her the “courtesy” of calling her by her husband’s name instead of her own.

She squinted her eyes at him. “I’m tired and I was surprised to see you up, but you have my apology, Mr. Cooper. Please accept it.”

“I do, Mistress Larner, and you have mine as well.”

“Nothing to apologize for,” she said. “I haven’t been a teacher in years, so I hardly deserve the name Larner any more. And I’m proud to have my husband’s occupation as my title, since his work is all the work that’s left to me.”

Old Horace walked up behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “You’re tired, Little Peggy. Save conversation till morning.”

“He might as well know it now. I expected not to see him till morning, but as long as I’ve woken him, I might as well ruin the rest of his night.”

Of course she had known he was in Hatrack River. Even if Horace hadn’t written to her about his arrival, she would have known, the way she knew anything she cared to, what with her gift as a torch. It always bothered him more than a little, that she knew just by looking at him what lay in his future, but never took the trouble to tell him.

“What is it you want me to know?” said Verily.

“Alvin needs your help.”

“Alvin unchose me as his traveling companion years ago,” said Verily. “But I’m still helping him—that’s why I’m here.”

“Something more urgent than this.”

“Then send somebody else,” said Verily. “If I don’t settle this business with the will and the plow right now, it’s going to come back to haunt him.”

“Right now,” said Margaret, “he’s got about five thousand people who have just escaped from Nueva Barcelona. More than half are runaway slaves or free blacks, and most of the rest are despised French folk, so you can imagine how eager the Spanish are to have them back under their thumb.”

“So I’m going to do what, recruit an army and we’ll all fly down there like passenger pigeons to save them just in the nick of time?”

Horace Guester clucked his tongue. “It’s not impossible, you know.”

“It is to me,” said Verily. “That’s not my knack.”

“Your knack,” said Margaret, “is making things fit together.”

“Sometimes.”

“Alvin can keep these people safe while they travel,” she said. “What he needs most desperately is a place that they can travel
to
.”

“I assume you’ve got a place in mind.”

“Alvin made a friend down in Nueva Barcelona,” said Margaret. “A failed storekeeper from the western reaches of Noisy River. His name is Abraham Lincoln.”

“And he has land?”

“He’s well-liked in his part of the country. He can help you find some land.”

“Free of charge, I hope,” said Verily. “My practice hasn’t been such as to make me a wealthy man. I keep working pro bono for my friends.”

“I don’t know how it will be paid for,” said Margaret. “I only know that if you don’t go to see Mr. Lincoln, there are few paths that lead anywhere but to disaster for Alvin and the people in his care. But if you do go…”

“Let me guess—there
might
be some path that leads to safety.”

“First things first,” said Margaret. “He needs a place that will take in these homeless folk and board them and bed them for a time. There’s no place in the slave lands that will have them, that’s certain.”

Verily sat down at the table and leaned his chin on his hands and stared into her eyes. “I’d rather stay here and get Alvin shut of this will once and for all time. Why don’t
you
go and talk to this Mr. Lincoln?”

She sighed and stared into her bowl. “Mr. Cooper, I have spent five years of my life trying to persuade people to do the things that would avoid a terrible, bloody war. With all my years of talking, do you know what I accomplished?”

“We ain’t had a war yet,” said Verily.

“I postponed the war by a year or two, maybe three,” she said. “And do you know how I did that?”

“How?”

“By sending my husband to Nueva Barcelona.”

“He put off a war?”

“Without knowing what he did, yes, the war was delayed. Because of an outbreak of yellow fever. But then he went on and did this—this impossible escape. This rescue, this liberation of slaves.”

Horace chuckled. “Sounds like he finally got him the spirit of abolition.”

“He’s always had the wish for it,” said Margaret. “Why did he have to pick now to find the will? This escape of slaves—it will lead to war as surely as ever.”

“So he eliminated one cause of war, and then brought about another,” said Verily.

Margaret nodded and took a bite of soup. “This is very good, Papa.”

“Forgive me for thinking like a lawyer,” said Verily Cooper, “but why didn’t you foresee this before you sent him down?”

She was chewing, so Old Horace answered. “She can’t see that clear when it comes to Alvin. Can’t see what all he’s going to choose to do. She can see some things, but not most things, when it comes to him. Which I think is a plain mercy. A man who has a wife can see
everything
he does and thinks and wants and wishes, well, I think he might as well kill himself.”

Horace was joking, and so he laughed, but Margaret didn’t take it as a joke. Verily saw her tears drop into the stew.

“Ho, now,” he said, “that’s already salted well enough, I can swear to that, I had some for supper.”

“Father is right,” she said. “Oh, poor Alvin. I should never have married him.”

Verily had actually had that thought occur to him several times in the past, and since he knew she could see into his heartfire, he didn’t bother trying to lie and reassure her. “Maybe so,” he said, “but as you already know, Alvin’s a free chooser. He chose you the way most folks choose a mate, not seeing the end, but wanting to find his way to it with his hand in yours.”

She placed her hand on his and gave him a weak smile. “You have a lawyer’s way with words,” she said.

“What I said is true,” said Verily. “Alvin chose you because of who you are and how he feels about you, not because he thought you’d always make right choices.”

“How he feels about me,” she said, and shuddered. “What if he finds out that I sent him to Nueva Barcelona knowing that by going there, he’d cause the deaths of hundreds of souls?”

“Why does he have to find out?” said Verily. But he knew the answer already.

“He’ll ask me,” said Margaret. “And I’ll tell him.”

“He caused the plague of yellow fever, is that it?”

“Not on purpose, but yes.”

“And you knew he would.”

“It was the only thing that would stop the war that the King already planned. His invasion of Nueva Barcelona would have forced the United States to invade the Crown Colonies in order to keep the King from sealing off their access to the sea. But the yellow fever prevented the King’s army from approaching the city. By the time the fever is gone, so will be all the King’s agents inside the city. That road to war is closed.”

“So at the cost of those who die of the fever,” said Verily, “you saved the lives of all who would have died in the war.”

She shook her head. “I thought it would. But Alvin reopened the door without realizing it, and the war that will come now is every bit as bloody.”

“But you delayed it a few more years,” said Verily.

“What good is that?”

“It’s two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It’s not a small thing, those years.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Margaret. “But that won’t keep Alvin from hating me for sending him down there to cause hundreds of deaths in order to postpone hundreds of thousands of others.”

“Hush now,” said Horace. “He’s not going to hate you.”

But Verily wasn’t sure. Alvin wasn’t one to appreciate being manipulated into committing what he would see, no doubt, as a terrible sin. “Why couldn’t you just tell the man and let him decide for himself?”

She shook her head. “Because every path that included me telling him led to him doing something else to prevent the war—and all those things would have failed, and most of those paths ended with him dead.”

She burst into tears. “I know too much! Oh! God help me, I’m so tired of knowing so much!”

Horace was sitting beside her in a moment, his arm around her shoulder. He looked at Verily, who was about to try to offer comfort. “She’s tired, and you were wakened out of your sleep,” said Horace. “Go to bed, as she will too. Tomorrow is time enough for talk.”

As usual, Horace knew just the right thing for everyone to do to be content. Verily got up from the table. “I’ll go and do what you asked,” he said to Margaret. “You can count on me to help find a place for Alvin’s people.”

She nodded slightly, her face still hidden in her hands.

That was all the good-night he was going to get, and so he headed back along the hall toward his room. At first he was filled with irritation at having to set aside his plan to free Alvin from the smith’s litigious heirs. But by the time he got to his room he had already let go of that. It wasn’t his case any more. He had other work now, but it hadn’t yet begun. And so, when he lay back down in his bed, it took him little time to sleep, for at the moment he had no worries.

In the morning, he didn’t see Margaret after all. There was a note waiting for him on the floor of his room, giving the name of Abraham Lincoln’s town and how to get there.

At breakfast the old innkeeper looked grave. “I’m worried about the baby,” said Horace. “She started throwing up last night. She’s worn herself out and she’s sick as a dog. She’s asleep now, but if she loses this baby too, I swear I don’t know but what she’ll lose her mind.”

“So I should go on without talking to her?”

“Everything you need to know is on that paper.”

“I doubt
that
,” said Verily.

“All right then,” said Horace with a wan smile. “Everything she
thinks
you need to know.”

Verily Cooper matched his smile, then went back to his room to get his things together for the long westward ride. If he’d only stayed in Vigor Church instead of coming here to Hatrack River, he’d have only one-third the journey now. Sometimes it felt to him as though he’d spent most of his life traveling, and never quite got to anywhere that mattered.

Then again, that might be as good a description of what life was supposed to be as anyone ever thought of. The only real destination was death, and our lives consisted of finding the most circuitous and pleasant path to get there.

He was on horseback and on his way hours before noon, so the sun was still at his back. It would be nice when they finally got the railroad through clear to the Mizzippy. If they laid enough tracks, a man wouldn’t even need to keep a horse. But for now it was either ride the horse or struggle to keep the horse from going crazy on a flatboat or a steamboat and he wasn’t inclined to try either.

He thought, as he rode, about how Alvin and Margaret were the two most powerful, gifted, blessed people on this continent, without question, and yet Margaret was desperately sad and frightened all the time, and Alvin wandered about half-lost and melancholy, and not for the first time Verily thought it was a good thing to be a man of relatively ordinary gifts.