The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (17 page)

She had never seen a baby whose heartfire told such a dire story. The brightest heartfire she had ever seen—but when she cast her eyes into the paths of his future, there were none at all. No paths. No future. This child was going to die, and before he ever made a single choice.

Except…there was one thing she could do. One tiny dim pathway leading out of all the dark futures, but that one opened out into hundreds, into thousands of glorious futures. And in that one narrow gate, the one that led to everything for this child, she saw herself, Little Peggy Guester, five years old, reach out and take a caul of flesh from the baby’s face. So she did it, and all the deaths fell away, and all the lives became possible.

I gave him life. In that room.

But just the once. She took the caul and saved it, and later brought it up here into the attic, to her room, and hid it in a box. And as the baby grew up into a little boy, and then a bigger boy, she used tiny pinches of the caul to access his own knack, which he was too young and inexperienced to understand.

Not that Peggy knew much better. She learned as she went. Learned to do her work of saving his life. For when she removed the caul from his face, thousands of bright futures opened up for him. But on every one of those paths, he died young. And each time she saved him from one of those deaths, another death opened up for him farther down the road.

Alvin the miller’s son had an enemy.

But he also had a friend who watched over him. And gradually, as more and more paths showed him reaching adulthood, she began to see something else. A prim and austere woman, a schoolteacher, who loved him and married him and kept him safe.

There in that attic room, holding one of the last shreds of the caul in her hand, she realized that the prim, austere schoolteacher was herself.

I do love him, she thought. And I’m his wife. I have his baby inside me.

But I can’t keep him safe.

In fact, I harm him as much as anyone now. I have no more of his caul. And it wouldn’t matter if I did. He deeply understands his knack. He knows more about the way the whole universe works than I ever will; even when I look inside him, I can’t understand what and how he sees.

So instead of watching over him, I use him. I found my own purpose in life, to fight slavery but also prevent the terrible war that I see in everyone’s heartfire. I have gone everywhere and done everything, while he floundered, unsure of what he ought to do.

And why was he unsure?

Because I have never told him.

I know the great work he is supposed to do. But I can’t tell him, because once he sets his foot on that road, there is no saving him. He will die, and die brutally, at the hands of men who hate him, betrayed by some that he loved. A bitter, sad death, with his great work unfinished. And without her even there beside him. In some paths he is alone; in others, he has friends with him. Some of those friends die, some live. But none can save him. In fact, it’s his death that saves them.

But why? Why should he die? This is a man who could stop bullets by melting them in the air. He could simply walk through a wall and leave the room where they corner him. He could drop them all through the floor. He could blind them all, or fill them with unreasoning panic to make them run away.

And yet on every path, he does none of those things. He accepts the death they bring him. And I can’t bear it. How could Alvin, so full of life and joy, ever choose to embrace death when he always has it in his power to live?

She knelt in the little attic window where, as a five-year-old, she had stood to watch Alvin’s family ride away into the west, to the place where they built a mill that became the foundation of the town of Vigor Church. And she realized: If Alvin wishes he could die, I can’t pretend that it has nothing to do with me.

A man with a wife and children doesn’t want to die. Not if he loves them, and they love him. Not if he has hope for the future. If I just love him enough, I could save him. I’ve always known that.

Yet what have I done? I sent him to Nueva Barcelona. Knowing that if he went, he would indirectly cause the deaths of hundreds of people. Save thousands, yes, but hundreds would still be felled, and it won’t help that it was my responsibility. In fact, it will hurt. Because he’ll cease to trust me. He’ll think I love something else more than him. That I will expend his trust in a greater cause.

But it isn’t true, Alvin. I love you more than anything.

I just didn’t love you the way you wanted to be loved. I loved you like that little five-year-old girl, keeping you safe. Helping turn you away from terrible futures. Giving you the freedom to make all the good choices you’ve made as a grown man.

And then taking away your freedom by not telling you all that I knew about the consequences of your actions. She could hear him telling her: A man isn’t free if he doesn’t know all that could be known about his choice.

But if I told you, Alvin, you wouldn’t have done the things that had to be done. You would have tried to intervene and save everybody. And I saw those paths. It wouldn’t have worked. You would have failed, and quite probably would have died right then, with your great work undone.

Instead you’ve turned it into something wonderful. I didn’t see these paths. When you use your power you always open doors into the future that didn’t exist before. So I didn’t see that bridge you made across the water, I didn’t see these five thousand heartfires you brought with you out of the city and into the wilderness. So it worked out well, don’t you see?

Except that he’ll say, “If my power opens doors to paths you didn’t see, why didn’t you trust me to find my own way in Barcy?”

Or maybe he won’t say it. There are paths where he doesn’t say that.

She reached down and laid her hands on her own belly, above the womb where her baby’s heart was beating. A healthy baby, with a heartfire as bright and strong as she could have reasonably hoped for.

But nothing like Alvin’s heartfire had been. An ordinary child.

Which is all she could have hoped for. An ordinary child—talented in this, having a knack with that, but all within the realms of the expected. This little boy will have no enemy pursuing him every day of his life. And instead of watching him every waking minute as I watched Alvin for so many years, I can be a natural mother to him. And to his brothers and sisters, God willing.

God and Alvin willing, that is. Because he may never come to me again. When he knows how I used him, how I deceived him, what I caused him, unknowingly, to do. How I did not trust him to make his own choices.

She sat down with her back to the window and cried softly into her apron.

And as she wept, she wondered: Did my mother weep like this, when my two older sisters died, each one just a baby? No, I know what those tears are like. Even though my first baby didn’t live long enough for me to get to know him, I laid that little body in the ground and I know at least something of what she went through, laying her babies in their graves.

Nor do I weep the way my mother
would
have wept, if she had known about my father and his love for Mistress Modesty. I kept that secret from her because I saw the terrible consequences of her learning the truth, how it would destroy them both.

No, the way I weep now is the way my father would have wept, if he had known that his betrayal of my mother was sure to be discovered, and he could do nothing to prevent it. My sin was not adultery, to be sure. I’ve been faithful to Alvin that way. But it was a betrayal nonetheless, a violation of the deep trust between a man and the woman he has taken to be half his soul, and to be half of hers.

Bitter tears of anticipated shame.

And with that thought, the tears dried up. I weep for myself. It’s myself I’m pitying here.

Well, I won’t do it. I’ll bear the consequences of what I did. And I’ll try to make the best of what is left between us. And maybe this baby will heal us.

Maybe.

She hated all the maybes. For on this matter, as so many others, the fog that blocked so many of Alvin’s futures from her view obscured what would happen. She could know exactly what would happen in the whole life of some shepherd she passed in her carriage, but her husband, the person whose future mattered most to her, remained so dangerously exposed and yet tantalizingly hidden.

All her hopes were in the hidden parts of his heartfire. Because the paths that were not hidden gave her no cause for hope. There’d be no happiness for her on any of those roads. Because a life without Alvin in it held no hope of joy for her.

Calvin stood on the dock and watched the riverboats pull out, one by one. Colonel Adan had done his planning well. The steamboats pulled out on schedule, and there was no danger of collision.

Unfortunately, there were also men determined to get out of this city whether they were part of the official expedition or not. So in the midst of the attempt to order the steamboats into a convoy for the passage upstream, two big rowboats swung out into the river, with six men pulling at the oars of each and another dozen or so under arms, many of them foolishly standing up and huzzahing their own bravado.

Calvin laughed aloud to see them. What fools. So eager for death, and so sure to find it.

Sooner, in fact, than Calvin himself anticipated. Though in retrospect, it seemed almost inevitable. Too much order always seemed to bore God or Fate or Providence or whoever decided such things. There was always a little chaos just to liven things up.

Sure enough, one of the rowboats, with its pilot yelling for a steamboat to get out of the way, tried to insert itself between the big riverboats. But steamboats don’t stop quickly, and half-drunken rowers don’t maneuver well when they try to cross the wake of a steamboat. The captain of the steamboat saw the danger, and some of the Spanish soldiers on board fired at the rowers.

That provoked the armed men in the other rowboat to stand up and fire a volley at the Spanish soldiers. Not a shot hit home, for the obvious reason that so many muskets firing in the same direction at once had such a recoil that the boat rocked over and capsized. Some of the men came up sputtering. Some came up screaming. Some didn’t come up—apparently unable to remove their boots in the water or get rid of all the lead balls they carried in their ammunition pouches.

How short life is for fools, thought Calvin. They go out on the water with no thought about how to get ashore if the boat should fail them.

Meanwhile, panicked at the warning shots the Spanish had fired, and some of them thinking that a Spanish cannonball had sunk the other rowboat, the rowers on the first boat tried to change direction. Trouble was, they hadn’t agreed on which direction to change to, and so the oars interfered with each other and the rowboat was swept by the current right back into the bows of the big riverboat.

The collision broke half the oars and turned some of them into spears that pierced the bodies of their erstwhile masters. Some of the men jumped into the water; those that didn’t were borne under when the steamboat pushed the rowboat over.

It was bedlam on the docks, with some people trying to help the swimmers ashore, and a couple even diving in to help save some of the drowning men. Smaller rowboats quickly put out to help with the rescue. But most of the people were laughing and hooting and catcalling, having a grand old time at the expense of those fools. And while he didn’t do any of the catcalling, Calvin had to admit he was one of the laughers.

Alvin would probably have tried to use his knack somehow to save the fools who couldn’t swim. Maybe dissolve their boots or something. Or grow them gills—he could probably do it, just to show off.

But even if Calvin had been able to think of something like that quick enough, and even if he had enough control to do anything useful at such a distance, he wouldn’t have tried. The world was no poorer for the loss of a few such fools. Indeed, it was downright generous of these “brave” drunk nitwits to improve the breeding population of Barcy by removing themselves from it.

All fools on the river today, thought Calvin. Because the ones following such careful plans were going to end up looking just as stupid as these clowns, when Alvin was done with them. They probably wouldn’t be dead—it
was
Alvin, after all—but what they most certainly would
not
be was successful.

Which was probably about how the expedition to Mexico would turn out, too, Calvin cheerfully recognized. These arrogant men, thinking that because they were white they could easily defeat the Mexica. They would probably fail, too. And because it was the Mexica they were facing, and not Alvin Maker, a good number of Steve Austin’s boys would probably end up dead.

But not Calvin. He might go along with the plans of fools as long as they looked useful, or at least entertaining. But he would never turn his life over to someone else’s plan. His own plans were the only plans he ever followed.

Not like Alvin, letting his wife tell him what to do. Speaking of fools.

It took some doing, but they found the nicest dresses in the whole company that would fit them, and decked out Dead Mary and her mother, Rien, so they could pass for slaveowners. Slightly shabby, perhaps, but it wasn’t completely impossible that they would have a mammy slave like La Tia seemed to be and a sturdy young man like Arthur Stuart.

It’s not like strangers would be rare in this country, either. Ten years ago the only white folks here was trappers or fugitives. But when most of the reds who didn’t want to live white crossed over the Mizzippy, it opened up this land to settlement. Around here, if your house had been standing for five years, you were an old-timer. So nobody’d be too surprised to see two ladies of a family they didn’t know—or so they hoped.

Alvin refused to go to the door of the plantation house with them. “What good does it do for you to see how I’d do it? I’m a white man, and not a word I say would be useful to you after. I’ll be watching in case anything goes wrong, but you’ve got to do it yourselves.”

La Tia and Arthur Stuart waited just off the porch as Dead Mary and Rien stepped up to clap hands and call someone to the door. Soon it was opened by an elderly black man.

“Good evening,” he said gravely.

“Good evening,” said Dead Mary. She was doing the talking because her French accent was not so pronounced as Rien’s. And because she could do a better job of faking high-class conversation. “Sir, my mother and I would like to speak to the master of the house, if we may.”

“Master of the house away,” said the old man. “Mistress of the house poorly. But the young master, he here.”

“Could you fetch him for us, then?”

“Would you like to come and rest inside, where it’s shady?” asked the old man.

“No thank you,” said Mary. She had no intention of getting out of sight of Arthur Stuart or La Tia.

Soon the old man returned, and brought with him a young man who could not have been much over fourteen years old. Behind him hovered a white man of middle age. Not the master of the house, and not a slave, so who was he?

Mary addressed the young man. “My name is Marie Moore,” she said. They had agreed an English last name would be better for her, suggesting that her father had simply married a Frenchwoman. “My mother is shy about speaking English.”

It was the middle-aged man who leapt to answer. “Parleyvous français, madame?”

“Mr. Tutor,” said the boy, “they come to see
me
.”

“
Came
, young master,” said Mr. Tutor.

“This is not my lesson right this very moment, if you please.” So the boy was faking being high class just as much as Mary. He turned back to her with an irked look on his face, but quickly changed it to an expression of dignity. “What do you wish? If you wish to have water or a bite to eat, the kitchen’s around back.”

This was not a good sign, that he was treating them like beggars, when he should take them for slave-owning gentry like himself.

Fortunately, Mr. Tutor saw the gaffe at once. “Young master, you can’t ask ladies to go around back as if they were servants or beggars!” To Mary and Rien he said, “Please excuse his lapse. He has never met a visitor at the door before, and so—”

“They’re not ladies,” said the boy. “Look at their dresses. I’ve seen better dresses on slaves.”

“Master Roy, you are being impolite, I fear.”

“Mr. Tutor, you forget your place,” said Roy. He turned back to Mary. “I don’t know what you want, but we got nothing to contribute to any cause, and if I were you I’d be careful, cause the story is that a whole passel of folks crossed over Pontchartrain last night. Rumor’s been spreading all over and they say they’re a lot of runaway slaves. We’ve got ours locked down today just in case they get some bad ideas, but you’ll never keep those two under control if they get ideas.”

Mary smiled and put on her archest high-class voice. “There’s danger about, and yet you do not invite two ladies inside because our dresses are not new enough to suit you. Your mother will be pleased when all the neighbor ladies hear how we were turned away at your door because the young master of the house was so proud.” She turned her back on him and started down the stairs. “Come along, Mother, this is not a polite house.”

“
Young
master!” said Mr. Tutor, in great distress.

“You always think I do wrong, but I tell you I
know
they’re a bunch of liars, it’s my
knack
.”

Mary turned around. “You say that you have a knack for discerning a lie?”

“I always know,” said Roy. “And you and your mother got liar written all over you. That’s rude to say, I know it, but Father has me go with him when we buy horses or slaves or anything expensive, because I can always tell him when the man is lying when he says, This is as low as I’ll go, or, This horse is right healthy.”

“You must be quite a help to your father,” said Mary.

“I am,” said the boy proudly.

“But not all lies are alike. My mother and I have fallen on hard times, but we still pretend to be ladies of substance because that allows us to uphold our dignity. But I would be surprised if we were the first ladies to come to this house planning to deceive you about our rank in the world.”

The boy grinned sheepishly. “Well, you got that aright. When her friends come to call, the lies come thicker and faster than hail in a storm.”

“Sometimes you should let a harmless lie stand, sir, without naming it so, for the sake of good manners.”

“I could not have said that better,” said Mr. Tutor. “The young master is still so
young
.”

“They can
see
that I’m young,” said Roy, irritated again. To Mary and Rien he said, “Why don’t you ladies come on inside, then, and we’ll see about maybe something to drink, like…lemonade?”

“Lemonade would be lovely,” said Mary. “But before we accept your kind invitation, we heard that your name is Roy, but not your family name.”

“Why, we took our name from what we grow. Roy Cottoner, and my father is Abner Cottoner, after some general in the Bible.”

“And in French,” said Mary, “
your
first name means ‘king.’”

“I know that,” said Roy, sounding irritated again. He was quite an irritable boy.

They followed him into the house. Mary had no idea if they were doing things properly—should Mother go first, or should she?—but they figured Roy wouldn’t know, and besides, they were already tagged as impostors, so it wouldn’t hurt if they got a few things wrong.

“Master Cottoner,” said Mary.

Roy turned around.

“Our servants are thirsty. Is there…”

He laughed. “Oh, them. Old Bart, our houseboy, he’ll show them around back to the cistern.”

Sure enough, the elderly black man was already closing the front door behind him as he headed out to where Arthur Stuart and La Tia were waiting. Mary wished she had more confidence in Arthur Stuart’s knack. But Alvin seemed to have confidence in him, so how could Mary refuse to trust in his abilities?

Roy led them into a parlor and invited them to sit down. He turned to Mr. Tutor. “Go tell Petunia we need lemonade.”

Mr. Tutor looked mortally offended. “I am not a servant in this house, sir.”

“Well what do you think, I should go tell them myself?”

Mary suspected, from what she knew of manners, that that was indeed what he ought to do, but Mr. Tutor merely narrowed his eyes and went off to obey. Mary was just as happy to have him out of the room.

She watched as Roy took a pose in the archway. It looked studied and unnatural, and she suspected that he was imitating the way he’d seen his father stand when company came. On a full-grown man, the stance would have seemed languid and comfortable.

“Master Cottoner,” said Mary. “We have, as you guessed, come to ask for aid.”

“Father isn’t here,” said Roy. “I got no money.”

“It happens that we don’t need money. What we need is permission to bring a large group of people onto your land, and feed them from your larder, and let them sleep the night.”

Roy’s eyes narrowed, and he dropped his pose. “So you
are
from those people who crossed Pontchartrain.”

“We are indeed,” said Mary. “There are five thousand of us, and we’d rather have your help offered freely. But if we have to, we’ll just take what we need. We have hundreds of hungry children among us, and we don’t mean for them to go hungry.”

“You get out of my house,” said Roy. “You just get out of here.”

For the first time, Mother spoke. “You are young,” she said. “But it is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.”

“My father’ll shoot you down like dogs when he gets home.”

“Roy!” A woman’s voice came from the hall, and a frail-looking woman came into view behind him, wan and bedraggled from sleep, a robe drawn around her shoulders. “Roy, in my house we will be polite.”

“They’re a bunch of runaways from Barcy, Mama! They’re threatening to take food and such from us.”

“That’s no reason not to be polite,” said the woman. “I am Ruth Cottoner, mistress of this house. Please forgive my ill-mannered son.”

“You shouldn’t apologize for me, Mama, not to thieves and liars!”

“If I weren’t so ill, I’d have reared him better,” said Ruth sadly.

Then she pulled up a musket that she had been holding behind her leg. She aimed it straight at Rien and before Mary could even scream, she pulled the trigger.

The gunpowder fizzled and sparked, and a double handful of smallshot dribbled out the end of the barrel.

“How odd,” said Ruth. “My husband said it was loaded and ready to fire.”

Arthur Stuart appeared behind her. “It was,” he said. “But sometimes guns just don’t do what you tell them.”

She turned around to face him, and now for the first time there was fear on her face. “Whose slave are you! What are you doing in my house!”

“I’m no man’s slave,” said Arthur Stuart, “nor any woman’s neither. I’m just a fellow who doesn’t take kindly to folks pointing muskets at my friends.”

La Tia appeared behind him. “Ma’am,” she said, “you lay down that foolish gun and sit.” La Tia was carrying a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and six glasses. “We gonna have a talk, us.”

“You leave my mother alone!” shouted Roy. And he made as if to shove at La Tia. But Arthur Stuart was already there and caught his wrists and held him.

“You will die for laying a hand on my son,” said Ruth.

“We’ll all die someday,” said Arthur Stuart. “Now you heard the lady. Set.”

“You have invaded my home.”

“This ain’t no home,” said Arthur Stuart. “This is a prison, where sixty black people are held captive against their will. You are one of the captors, and for this crime you surely deserve terrible punishment, ma’am. But we ain’t here to punish nobody, so maybe you best be keeping your thoughts of punishing us to yourself. Now
set
.”

She sat. Arthur propelled Roy to another chair and made sure he, too, sat down.

La Tia put the tray on the small serving table and began to fill the glasses with lemonade. “Just so you know,” said La Tia, “we notice that some fool has lock all the black folk into their cabins. In the heat of the day, that be so mean to do.”

“So I let them all out,” said Arthur. “They’re drinking their fill at the pump right now, but pretty soon they’ll be helping our company find places to camp on your lawns and in your barns, and setting out a supper to feed five thousand. It’s like being in the Bible, don’t you think?”

“We don’t have food enough for so many!” said Ruth.

“If you don’t, we’ll impose on the hospitality of some of your neighbors.”

“My husband will be back any time! Very soon!”

“We’ll be watching for him,” said Arthur. “I don’t think you need to fret—we won’t let him accidentally hurt somebody.”

Mary couldn’t help but admire how cool he was, as if he was enjoying this. And yet there was no malice in it.

“He’ll raise the county and have you all hanged!” said Roy.

“Even the women and children?” asked Arthur Stuart mildly. “That’s a dangerous precedent. Fortunately, we
aren’t
killers, so we won’t hang
you
.”

“I bet Mr. Tutor’s already run for help,” said Roy smugly.

“I take it Mr. Tutor is that soft-bodied white man who has read more books than he understood.”

Roy nodded.

“He’s standing out in the yard with his pants down around his ankles, while some of the illiterate black folks are reading to him from the Bible. It seems they heard him make a big deal about how black folks couldn’t be taught to read because their brains wasn’t big enough or they got baked in the sun or some such theory, and they’re proving him wrong at this moment.”

“You were busy out there,” said Rien.

“I’m a sick and dying woman,” said Ruth. “It’s cruel of you to do this to me in the last weeks of my life.”

Arthur looked at her and smiled. “And how many weeks of freedom were you going to give any of your slaves, before they died?”

“We treat our servants well, thank you!” said Ruth.

As if in answer to her, Old Bart came into the room. He didn’t walk slowly now. His stride was bold and quick, and he walked up to Ruth and spat in her lap. At once Roy leapt up from his chair, but Old Bart turned to him and slapped him so hard across the face that he fell to the floor.

“No!” cried Mary, and her mother also cried out, “Non!”

“We don’t hit nobody,” said La Tia softly. “And no spitting, neither.”

Old Bart turned to her. “The folks out back, they all wanted to do it, but I said, Let me do it just the once for all of us. And they chose me for the job. You know this boy already done had his way with two of the girls, and one of them not even got her womanlies yet.”

“That’s a lie!” shouted Roy.

“My son is not capable of—”

“Don’t you try to tell black folks what white folks is capable of,” said Arthur Stuart. “But we’re done with all that now. We ain’t come here, sir, to bring vengeance or justice. Just freedom.”

“You bring me freedom, and then say I can’t use it?” said Old Bart.