The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (6 page)

There were more than a few who believed like gospel the story that Moose and Squirrel trained their houseful of children as pickpockets and cutpurses, sneakthieves and nightburglars. They were full of talk about how there was coin and silverware and jewelry and strange golden artifacts hidden all in the walls and crawlspaces of the house, or under the privy, or even buried in the ground, though it would take six kinds of fool to try to bury anything in Barcy, the land being so low and wet that anything buried in it was likely to drift away in underground currents or bob to the surface like the corpse of a drowned man.

Most of the stories, though, were darker still—tales of children being taken into the house for dark rites that required the eyes or tongues or hearts or private parts of little children, the younger the better, and black only when white wasn’t available. With such vile sacrifices they conjured up the devil, or the gods of the Mexica, or African gods, or ancient hobgoblins of European myth. They sent succubi and incubi abroad in Barcy—as if it took magic to make folks in Barcy get humpty thoughts. They cursed any citizens of Barcy as interfered with anyone from that house, so those wandering children was best left alone—lessen you wanted your soup to always boil over, or a plague of flies or skeeters, or some sickness to fall upon you, or your cow to die, or your house to sink into the ground as happened from time to time.

Most folks didn’t quite believe these tales, Arthur Stuart guessed, and them as did believe was too scared to do anything about it, not by themselves, not in a way that their identity might be discovered and vengeance taken. Still, it was a dangerous situation, and even though Mama Squirrel joked about some of the rumors, Arthur Stuart reckoned they didn’t have any idea of how important their house was in the dark mythology of Nueva Barcelona.

It was a sure thing they never heard such talk directly. While he was still introducing himself as being the servant of a man staying at the house of Moose and Squirrel, people would be real cooperative but say nothing in his presence about that house. That was no help, so he soon started telling folks the equally true story that he was the servant of an American trader who came down the Mizzippy last week, and then it didn’t take much to get folks talking about strange things in Barcy, or dangers to avoid. And it wasn’t just slave chat. White folks told all the same stories of Moose and Squirrel.

“Don’t you think it’s dangerous?” Arthur Stuart asked Alvin one night, as they were both in bed and going to sleep. “I mean, anything bad goes wrong, and folks are gonna blame these good people for it. Do they know what folks think of them?”

“I expect they do, but as with many warnings and ill portents, they get used to them and stop taking them serious till all of a sudden it’s too late,” said Alvin. “It’s how cats stalk their prey, if you’ve noticed. They don’t hide. They move up so slow and hold still so long that their prey gets used to them and thinks, well, it hasn’t harmed me
so
far. And then all at once they pounce, no warning at all. Except there’s been
plenty
of warning, iffen that poor bird or mouse had had the brains to just get up and move.”

“So you see it my way. They gotta get out of here,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Oh, sure,” said Alvin. “They think so, too. The only difference of opinion is about
when
this great migration ought to occur. And how they’re supposed to get some fifty children of every race out of town without nobody taking notice of just how far they’ve flouted the race laws. And what about money? Think they’ve got the passage for a riverboat north? Think they can swim Lake Pontchartrain and fetch up in some friendly plantation that’ll be oh so happy to let a whole passel of free black children stay the night in their barn?”

Arthur was annoyed that Alvin made it sound like he was dumb to have wanted them to git. “I didn’t say it’d be easy.”

“I know,” said Alvin. “I was exasperated at my own self. Because you know what I think? I think Peggy sent me here for exactly that purpose. To get them out of here. Only I didn’t guess it till you thought of it.”

“Three things,” said Arthur Stuart.

“I’m listening.”

“First. It’s about time you realized what a brilliant asset I am on this trip.”

“Shiny as a gallstone,” said Alvin.

“Second. There’s no chance this is what Peggy sent you for. Because if
that
was what she had in mind, she would’ve told you. And then you could have told them that she’d given warning, and they’d do whatever it took. As it is, they’re just gonna fight you every step of the way, since they don’t think you and me is so almighty smart that we can see how things are in Barcy better than they can.”

Alvin grinned. “Hey, you’re getting to be almost worth how much it costs to feed you.”

“Good thing, ’cause I got no plan to eat less.”

“Well, it’ll still take you ten years to make up for how much I’ve wasted on you up to now when you wasn’t worth a hair on a pig’s butt.”

“So this ain’t what Peggy wants us to do,” said Arthur Stuart, “and we can be pretty sure Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel don’t want us to do it. So the way I see it, that makes it just about our number one priority.”

“I’ll talk to them.”

“That always works.”

“It’s a start.”

“And then you’ll sing to them? ’Cause that might do more toward getting them to move out.”

“So what’s the third thing?” asked Alvin. “You said three things.”

Arthur had to think for a second. Oh, yes. He wanted to ask Alvin why he hadn’t done anything about Papa Moose’s foot. But now it seemed pretty silly to ask. Because it wasn’t as if Alvin hadn’t noticed Moose’s club foot. He’d have to be blind not to notice it. And it’s not as if Alvin didn’t know what he could or couldn’t heal.

And besides, there was something else.

Wasn’t Arthur supposed to be a prentice maker?

“Just my suggestion about singing to them,” said Arthur.

Alvin grinned. “So you changed your mind about the third thing.”

“For now,” said Arthur Stuart. “I already used up all my brains thinking up how you ought to talk to Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel.”

But there wasn’t a chance to talk to Moose and Squirrel about it, because next morning five of the children were sick, screaming with pain, shaking with chills, burning up with fever. By nightfall there were six more, and the first ones had yellow eyes.

There wasn’t any school now. The schoolroom became the sick ward, the benches all stacked up against the wall. None of the other children were allowed into the room. Instead they were sent outside to play among the skeeters. They could still hear the screaming out there. They could hear it in their minds even when nobody was making a sound.

Meanwhile, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were up and down two flights of stairs with water, poultices, salves, and teas. A couple of the herbs in the tea seemed to be a little help, and of course the water helped keep the fever down. But Alvin knew that even with the ones that had a rash, the salves and poultices did no good at all.

Of course he and Arthur Stuart helped—chasing up and down stairs with things so Papa Moose didn’t have to, running errands in town, keeping food in the house, tending the fire, hauling the chamber pots to and from the sickroom. Moose and Squirrel didn’t allow them to come inside, though, for fear of contagion.

That didn’t stop Alvin from spending most of his concentration on the sick children. Having seen the disease at the end of its course in Dead Mary’s mother, he knew what to look for, and kept repairing the damage the disease was doing, including keeping the fever down enough that it didn’t harm them.

He also studied the sick children, trying to find out what caused the disease. He could see the tiny disease-fighting creatures in their blood, but he couldn’t see what they were hunting down the way he could with gangrene or some other sicknesses. So he couldn’t find any way to help them get rid of the cause of the disease. Still, he could see that it helped to keep the fever down and the seepage of blood under control. With Alvin tending to their bodies, the disease ran its course, but quickly, and never became dangerous.

And in the healthy children, whom he examined one by one, he found that most of them were already producing the disease-fighters, and he took such preventive action as he could.

What interested him, though, was the handful of children who did not get sick. Were they stronger? Luckier? What did they have in common?

Over the days of sickness in the house, Alvin checked on each of the ones who wasn’t ill. They were of different races, and both sexes. Some were older, some younger. They did tend to be the ones who read the most—he always found them curled up in some corner of the house, always indoors with a book in their hands, now that Papa Moose wasn’t patrolling to make sure none of them could be caught reading. But how could reading keep them from getting sick? Bookish people died all the time. In fact, they tended to be more frail, more easily carried off by disease.

Meanwhile, it was Arthur Stuart who kept his eyes open outside the house. The yellow fever was beginning to spread through the town, but the early cases all showed up in the area around the fountain. It was inevitable that people began to say that the “miracle water” had brought the fever back to Barcy. Many who still had any of it threw it out. But others were just as convinced it was the only cure, which God had sent in advance, knowing that the yellow fever was coming to smite the wicked.

Arthur Stuart was glad, for the first time he could remember, that white folks around here didn’t pay all that much attention to a half-black young man carrying water with his master. So far nobody had linked him or Alvin to the miracle water. But that didn’t mean somebody might not remember how he sat there in the plaza, waiting for his master to come back from some Swamptown shack where Dead Mary had said her mother might have yellow fever. No, said she
did
have it. The first victim of this epidemic.

And it occurred to Arthur that however much danger the house of Moose and Squirrel might be in, Dead Mary would face much worse, and much quicker, now that the yellow fever was back.

When this thought came to him he was in the market down in the old town, choosing whatever was cheap but still edible. He debated with himself for a moment—what was more urgent, to get food back to Alvin, or go check on the girl?

What would Alvin choose?

Well, that made it easy. He always went for the dramatic over the sensible—or rather, he chose whatever would cause him the most inconvenience and danger.

Arthur had already bought a sack of yams, and not a light one. It not only got heavier as he walked, but it made it so he couldn’t run—nothing was more sure to get him stopped than to be a half-black boy running with a sack of something on his back. Everybody knew that slaves on their masters’ business always moved about as slow as they could get away with, without somebody pronouncing them dead. So when a boy of color was running, it was sure to be a crime in progress.

So he walked, but quickly, and followed, as best he could find it, the path he’d seen Alvin’s and Dead Mary’s heartfires trace through the swamps. He knew he didn’t see heartfires anywhere near as well as Alvin did, and once they got a few hundred yards off, or mixed in with a lot of other folks, it was hopeless. But Alvin’s heartfire he could follow, it was so bright and strong, and not only that, when he followed Alvin he could see, like a sort of backwash, something of where he was, the terrain he was moving through. And he had traced along with Alvin and Dead Mary all the way to her mother’s house. He had seen her heartfire flicker and grow strong, even if he didn’t understand what Alvin had done.

Now it took a bit of splashing around and slapping at skeeters before he finally got to the plank bridge leading to Dead Mary’s house. He stood this side of the plank and clapped his hands. “Hello the house!” he called. “Company!” Which was wrong, of course—he was supposed to call out, “Alvin Smith’s servant here!” Or, if the world had not been so ugly, “Alvin Smith’s brother-in-law!” Then again, he didn’t know if Alvin had ever so much as told Dead Mary his name. Maybe names wouldn’t mean a thing here.

And they didn’t. Because no one was home.

Or if they were, they weren’t answering.

He walked swiftly across the bridge and pushed open the door, half fearing that he might find them dead, murdered by fearful people. But he knew that couldn’t be so—iffen some mob blamed Dead Mary for the plague and wanted to kill her for it, they’d have burned down the house around them.

The house was empty. Cleaned out, too—or else they didn’t own a blame thing. Most likely they had realized their peril and fled. He didn’t need to tell
them
how Dead Mary was regarded in this town.

He shouldered his sack of yams and retraced his route back into the city. Staying away from crowded streets and especially from the plaza with the public fountain, he made his way back to the house of Moose and Squirrel, scratching at skeeter bites the whole way.

He emptied the sack of yams into the bin in the kitchen, an action which Alvin, who was stirring the soup, greeted with a raised eyebrow. Which made Arthur Stuart feel guilty about how few of his errands he had finished.

“What?” asked Arthur Stuart. “It’s not like I had a lot of money, and besides, I got worried about Dead Mary and her mother, and so I went out to check on them.”

“I expect they were gone,” said Alvin.

“You expect right,” said Arthur Stuart.

“But that’s not why I raised my eyebrow at you.”

“Too lazy to wave?”

“You don’t just dump out a sack of yams. They need washing. Or peeling.”

“Why should I, when you can just talk the dirt right off the skins, or the skins right off the yams?”

“Because knacks weren’t given to us for frivolous purposes.”

“Oh, like the time you made me work half a summer making a dugout canoe when you could have made a canoe out of it in five minutes.”

“It was good for you.”