The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (26 page)

His alarm made them look again, and some of the men nearest to him got a look at what was coming. Now, a man
can
outrun a gator on dry land, but not in thick mud, so Arthur Stuart figured his contribution would be to dry the river bottom around the boats. But it was awfully far away from him and he couldn’t be too precise. Still, it seemed to help, and he was relieved that all the men got back to the boats in time. The men onboard the boats reached down and helped haul them up, and the last few had gator jaws gaping wide right under them as they rose into the air, but not so much as a foot was lost, and only a few empty boots.

The gators remained in place, snapping and climbing over each other, trying to get up on deck. Arthur Stuart didn’t think it was fair that the gators should get killed just because he told them there was food to be had. Besides, he had something against the muskets on board those boats. So he sauntered closer to the boats and used his doodlebug to find the guns and bend their barrels as fast as he could. They were bound to try the cannons next, but they were so thick-barreled that he found it was easier to melt the fronts just enough to narrow the bore, keeping the gunners from ramming the shot down.

So the men were fighting off the gators using their muskets as clubs. Which struck Arthur Stuart as more of an even match.

With that, he headed back upriver toward the dam, following his own trail of dry ground.

By the time he got back, most of the people were already across. Running twenty or thirty abreast, with the greensong still lingering in their ears, they all ran or jogged across, and kept moving on the other side to clear the way for the ones following after. Arthur went around the flow of people and up onto the bank and in no time he was standing beside Alvin.

“Thanks for taking that ball out of my gut,” he said.

“Next time try something more subtle than standing out in the open and yelling,” said Alvin. “I’m not trying to boss you around, I just think that’s good advice.”

“And thanks for getting the gators to turn away from me.”

“I figgered you didn’t really want them coming to
you
,” said Alvin. “And that was nice of you to keep the men from shooting the gators. Not that there’s any particular improvement in the world because of having gators in it, but I’ve never thought it was fair to get animals killed just because they believed a lie I told them.”

“It wasn’t a lie,” said Arthur Stuart. “Plenty of meat on that boat.”

“Only a couple of gators have got over the side since you started running back,” said Alvin, “and the soldiers managed to throw them back. But I reckon they’ll be glad enough when the water starts to flow again.”

“Which is when?” said Arthur Stuart.

“Well, I don’t see any heartfires up here on the bank aside from yours and mine,” said Alvin. “And Dead Mary, seeing as how she just can’t seem to stay away from wherever you are.”

“Wherever
I
am!” said Arthur Stuart. But when he turned, he saw Dead Mary was indeed clambering back up onto the bank. “Everybody’s gone,” she said.

“Well, I’ll just sit tight here till they all get up on the other bank,” said Alvin. “Including, I must suggest, the two of you.”

“But I can’t leave you here alone!” said Arthur Stuart.

“And I can’t worry about you when it’s time to take down this dam,” said Alvin. “Now for once in your life, will you just do it my way and
git
? It’s wearing me down holding this river back and you’re making it take longer the longer you take trying to argue with me.”

“I guess I might as well obey the fellow just saved my life,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Double-saved it,” said Alvin, “so you owe me another obedience later.”

Arthur Stuart took Dead Mary by the hand and they skittered down the bank and ran across in front of the dam. They moved fast enough that they weren’t far behind the last of the people, and all the way as they ran Arthur Stuart looked for the heartfires of any that might have strayed. But the captains and majors and colonels had all done their job, and not one soul had been left behind.

Papa Moose extended a hand to help Dead Mary up, and La Tia laughed in delight as Arthur Stuart flat-out ran right up the steep embankment without looking for the more gentle slope that most folks had used.

There at the head of the bluff stood Tenskwa-Tawa. It was Arthur Stuart’s first sight of him, and his first thought was, he doesn’t look like all that much. And his second thought was, he looks like a mighty angel standing there holding back the river with a sheet of crystal partly made from the blood of his own hand.

Tenskwa-Tawa waved the torch he held in his other hand. Then, when he saw that Alvin, far away on the other side, had thrown down his torch and started to run, Tenskwa-Tawa dropped the torch and reached out with that hand as if drawing something toward him.

On the far bank, Arthur Stuart could not see with his eyes, but he could follow Alvin’s heartfire and observe with his doodlebug as Alvin ran down the embankment, holding his end of the dam in his hand.

He pulled the dam away from the far bank, and the water burst through behind him. Alvin ran as Arthur Stuart had never seen him run before, but the water was faster, leaping out through the newly opened gap and swirling around the edge of the dam that was now curving behind Alvin as he ran.

“Throw it to me!” cried Tenskwa-Tawa.

Whether Alvin heard with his ears or understood some other way, he obeyed, pitching his end of the dam like it was a stone or a javelin. No way would it have gone as far as it needed to, but Arthur Stuart could see how Tenskwa-Tawa drew it with that one extended hand, even though it was still half a mile away. He drew it toward him faster than Alvin could run, fast enough to outpace the water that rushed to fill the riverbed. Until finally both ends of the dam were in Tenskwa-Tawa’s hands, and Alvin was running through a narrow passage between the two walls of the dam as the pent-up river continued to hurl itself through the widening gap.

Arthur Stuart let himself take one look downriver. Again with his doodlebug rather than with his eyes, he saw the first fingers of water flow around the boats, lifting them, starting them moving downstream. But the water came faster and faster, and the boats began to spin in the eddying flood as they hurtled away, completely out of control.

Alvin reached the bank and, as Arthur had done, ran directly up, straight to where Tenskwa-Tawa was standing, and even then he didn’t stop, just hurled himself right into the waiting embrace of the Red Prophet, flinging them both to the ground. The ends of the crystal dam flew out of Tenskwa-Tawa’s grasp and almost at once the crystal broke up and collapsed and the shards dissolved and became part of the river again. And Alvin and Tenskwa-Tawa lay there in the grass, hugging each other and laughing in delight at what they had done together, taming the Mizzippy and bringing these people to freedom.

La Tia was the only person bold enough at that moment to walk up to men who had just made such a miracle and say, “What you doing acting like little boys? We give merci beaucoup to God, us.”

Alvin rolled onto his back and looked up at her. “It’s picking which God that gets tricky,” he said.

“Maybe you Christians right about God,” said La Tia, “maybe me right, maybe him right, maybe nobody know nothing, but God, he take the merci beaucoup all the same.”

She had seen Tenskwa-Tawa before, standing there holding the dam as everyone climbed the riverbank, but apparently she hadn’t had a good look at him. Because now, as he sprang to his feet—far more energetically than his years should have allowed—a look of recognition came to her. “You,” she said.

Tenskwa-Tawa nodded. “Me,” he said.

“I see you in the ball,” she said.

“What ball?” asked Alvin.

“The ball you make, the ball she carry.” La Tia pointed toward Dead Mary, who did indeed have a burden slung over her shoulders. “I see him all the time in that thing. He talking to me.”

Tenskwa-Tawa nodded. “And I thank you for helping,” he said. “I didn’t know you were with this company.”

“I didn’t know you the Red Prophet.”

“So you two met?” asked Alvin.

“He been hotting up under the earth, far away,” said La Tia. “He ask my help, wake up the earth there. Help the hot stuff find a way up. I think I figure out how.”

“Then I’m as glad to see you here in the flesh as a man can be,” said Tenskwa-Tawa.

“Many a man be glad to see my flesh,” said La Tia, “but it don’t do them no good.”

Tenskwa-Tawa smiled, which for him was like a gale of laughter.

And Arthur Stuart thought, not for the first time, that these really powerful people were like a little club, they all knew each other and people like him were always having to stand just outside.

Verily Cooper’s knack wasn’t just fitting barrel staves together to make a tight keg. He could see how most things were supposed to fit, and where the irregularities were that made it so they didn’t. Most things—and most people. He could see who was friends and who was enemies, where pride or envy made a rift that few could see. The difference was that when two barrel staves didn’t fit, he could get inside them and almost without thinking—and certainly without effort—change them till they did fit.

It wasn’t quite so easy with people. You had to talk them round, or figure out a way to change what they wanted or what they believed about the world. Still, it was a good knack for a lawyer to have. He could size people up pretty readily, not as individuals, but how they fit together as families and communities.

Riding into the town of Springfield in Noisy River, Verily got a feel for the place right away.

The people that he met stopped and looked at him—what could a stranger expect, here on the frontier? Or at least what passed for frontier now. With the Mizzippy closed to white settlement, the land here was filling up fast. Verily saw the signs of it every time he traveled through this part of the west. And Springfield was a pretty lively place—lots of buildings that looked new, and some being built on the outskirts of town, not to mention the normal number of temporary shanties folks threw up for summer till they had more time to build something just before the weather got cold.

But these folks didn’t just stop and look at him—they smiled, or waved, or even called out a “howdy do” or a “good afternoon” or a “welcome stranger.” Little kids would follow along after him and while they were normal children—that is, a few of them could not resist throwing clods of dirt at his horse or his clothes (depending on whether Verily figured they hit their target or missed it)—none of them threw rocks or mud, so there wasn’t any meanness in it.

The town center was a nice one, too. There was a town square with a courthouse in it, and a church facing it in each direction. Verily wasn’t a bit surprised that the Baptists had to face the back of the courthouse, while the Episcopalians got the front view. The Presbyterians had the north side and the Lutherans had the south. And if Catholics or Puritans or Quakers showed up, they’d probably have to build their churches outside the town. Verily enjoyed the cheerful hypocrisy of American freedom of religion. No church got to be the established one, but you sure knew which ones were way more
dis
established than others.

It was the courthouse, though, where Verily figured he’d have the best luck finding out the whereabouts of Abraham Lincoln, erstwhile storekeeper and river trader.

The clerk knew a lawyer when he saw one, and greeted Verily with an alert smile.

“I was hoping you could help me locate a citizen of this town,” said Verily.

“Serving papers on somebody?” asked the clerk cheerfully.

So much for thinking I look like a lawyer, thought Verily. “No sir,” said Verily. “Just a conversation with a friend of a friend.”

“Then that ain’t legal business, is it?”

Verily almost laughed. He knew what type of fellow this was right off. The kind who had memorized the rule book and knew his list of duties and took pleasure in refusing to do anything that wasn’t on the list.

“You know,” said Verily, “it’s not. And I’ve got no business wasting your time. So what I’ll do is, I’ll remain here in this public space where any citizen of the United States is permitted to be, and I’ll greet every person who enters this courthouse and ask
them
to help me locate this citizen. And when they ask me why I don’t just ask the clerk at the desk, I’ll tell them that I wouldn’t want to waste that busy gentleman’s time.”

The man’s smile got a little frosty. “Are you threatening me?”

“Threatening you with what?” said Verily. “I’m determined to locate a citizen of this fair town for reasons that are between me and him and a mutual friend, doing no harm to him or anyone else. And since this building is at the very center of town—a fine building it is, too, I might add, as good a courthouse as I’ve seen in any county seat of comparable size in Hio or Wobbish or New England, for that matter—I can think of no likelier place to encounter someone who can help me find Mr. Abraham Lincoln.”

There. He’d got the name out. Now to see if the man could resist the temptation to show off what he knew.

He could not. “Old Abe? Well, now, why didn’t you say it was Old Abe from the start?”

“Old? The man I’m looking for can’t be thirty yet.”

“Well, that’s him, then. Tall and lanky, ugly as sin but sweet as sugar pie?”

“I’ve heard rumors about his height,” said Verily, “but the rest of your description awaits personal verification.”

“Well he’ll be in the general store, now that he’s out of the store business himself. Or in Hiram’s tavern. But you know what? Just go out on the street and listen for laughter, follow the sound of it, and wherever it’s coming from, there’s Abe Lincoln, cause either he’s causing the laughter or doing the laughing himself.”

“Why thank you, sir,” said Verily. “But now I fear I’ve taken too much of your time, and not on proper legal business at all, so I’ll step on out of here before I get you in some kind of trouble.”

“Oh, no trouble,” said the clerk. “Any friend of Abe’s is a friend of everybody’s.”

Verily bade him farewell and stepped back out into the afternoon sunshine.

Abe Lincoln sounds for all the world like the town drunk—or a ne’er-do-well, in any case. Failed at a store. No job to do so he can be found in a tavern or a general store. And this is the one I’ve been sent to find?

Though a drunk or ne’er-do-well would probably not get such a warm description from someone as precise and well ordered as that clerk.

To his surprise, when he stopped two men coming out of a barber shop—sporting that new clean-shaven look that required a man to spend ten cents a day getting his beard removed—and asked them if they knew the current whereabouts of Abraham Lincoln, they both held up a hand to hush him, listened, and sure enough, the sound of a distant gale of laughter could be heard.

“Sounds like he’s over at Cheaper’s store,” said one man.

“Just straight on down the street,” said the other, “kitty-corner from here.”

So Verily followed the sound of laughter and sure enough, when he walked into the cool darkness of the store’s interior, there were a half a dozen men and a couple of ladies, sitting here and there, while leaning up against the wall was about the ugliest man Verily Cooper had ever seen, who wasn’t actually injured in some way. Tall, though, just like they said, a giraffe among men.

Lincoln was in the middle of a story. “So Coz says to me, Abe, isn’t the front of the raft supposed to point downriver? And I says to Coz, And so it is. And he says to me, No, Abe,
that’s
the front. And he pointed
up
stream, which made no sense at all. Well, now, that kind of illogic always riles me, not a lot, just a little, and I says, Now Coz, that was the front of the raft this morning, I agree, but wasn’t it us decided which end of the raft was front? And therefore are we not entitled to change our minds and designate a new front, as circumstances change?”

Now Verily hardly knew what the story was about, and he certainly did not know this Coz fellow Abe was talking about. But when the people in that store laughed—which they did about every six words, on average—he couldn’t help but join in. It wasn’t just what Lincoln said, it was how he said it, such a dry manner, and willing to make himself the fool of the story, but a fool with a sort of deeper wit about him.

What was most interesting to Verily, though, was the way Lincoln
fit
with the other folks in that room. There was not a soul there who had even the slightest friction between him and Lincoln. They all fit with him like a bosom friend. And yet he couldn’t be best friends with every one of them. A man doesn’t have time to make more than a couple of friends so close and dear that they don’t envy you when you do well or scorn you when you do badly or become irritated with you for any number of little habits you have.

It went way beyond being likable. Verily had met a few who had something of a knack for that—you find them rather thick on the ground in the lawyering profession—and he found that no matter how good their knack was, when you weren’t with them, you were really angry at being taken in, and even when you were in that spell, some of that anger remained with you. Verily would sense it, but it wasn’t there. No, these people weren’t being hoodwinked, and Lincoln wasn’t doing it by some sort of hidden power. He was just telling stories, and they were enjoying both the tale and the teller.

It didn’t take Verily Cooper much time to notice all this—it
was
his knack, after all. The story continued and Lincoln showed no sign of noticing that Verily Cooper was there.

“Now Coz, he thinks about this—so he’s holding really still, because you know when Coz is thinking, it kind of uses up his whole body, unless he has gas—and finally he says to me, Abe, I used to think that way myself, only I found that no matter what you
call
it, you got to put your legs into the
top
of your trousers first.”

It took some of them a couple of moments to get the joke, but the thing is, they all
knew
they were going to get it and that the joke wasn’t meant to exclude them. Verily found himself liking Lincoln, not just the instinctive liking that came by reflex, but also the liking that comes when you’ve understood something about a fellow and you admire the thing you understood. Abraham Lincoln doesn’t put himself above anybody, but he doesn’t lower himself to do it.

“But here we are ignoring our visitor,” said Lincoln. “A new fellow, and a lawyer, would be my guess, and so eager to shop at Cheaper’s that he hasn’t looked for a room or brushed down his clothes.”

“Or stabled my horse,” said Verily. “But I have urgent business that couldn’t wait for such niceties.”

“And yet you came to Cheaper’s and listened to my story about Coz and me on the river. You must come from a town even smaller than Springfield, if my tale caused you enough wonder to keep you from your business.”

“No sir,” said Verily Cooper. “Because you’re Abraham Lincoln, and my business is to talk to
you
.”

“Please don’t tell me I’ve got another creditor I didn’t know about.”

There was still laughter from the others, but it was rueful—and a bit wary. They didn’t want ill things to happen to Mr. Lincoln.

In fact, one of the ladies spoke up. “If your client thinks that Mr. Lincoln won’t pay his debts, he can rest assured, Old Abe never leaves a debt unpaid.”

“Which I mostly accomplish by never borrowing,” said Lincoln.

“Never borrowing for your
self
, you mean,” said the lady. A lady considerably older than Lincoln, but Verily ruled out the possibility that she was related to him. No, she had probably come here simply to buy something.

“Mr. Lincoln, my name is Verily Cooper, and we have a friend in common—Alvin Smith, whom I believe you met on a trip down the Mizzippy not more than a couple of weeks ago.”

“A good man,” said Lincoln—but added nothing more.

“What,” said one of the men. “No story about this Smith fellow?”

Lincoln grinned. “Why, you know I don’t tell stories on other folks, only on myself.” He strode toward Verily and offered a hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Cooper. Though I got to fess that’s a strange name for a lawyer.”

“I was raised to be a cooper,” said Verily, “and when the lawyering business is slow, I can always support myself by making a keg or two.”

“Whereas my family could never get over the shire they came from back in England,” said Lincoln. “Which, judging from your speech, is where you’re from.”

“I am, but a citizen of this country now,” said Verily. “We’re none of us very far from the boats that brought our people over.”

“Well, I’m eager to talk to you,” said Lincoln, “but I’m the clerk of this store right now, working for Mr. and Mrs. Cheaper, and I’ve been keeping these poor customers waiting for their purchases while I listened to myself talk. Can you wait your business for a half hour?”

Verily could, and did. In fact, he used the half hour to get his horse stabled and fed, and when he returned, there were no customers in the shop. Lincoln did not look so jovial now.

“Mr. Cooper,” he said, “there ain’t been time for
good
news to get from Barcy to here, but I heard some bad stories about yellow fever breaking out there. I hope you’re not here to tell me that Alvin or his young friend with the royal name has took sick.”

“Best of health, as far as I know,” said Verily.

“Also there’s a strange tale came upriver on a steamboat and got included in the daily lie collection known as the
Springfield Democrat
. About all the slaves in Barcy walking on water and the Spanish Army coming upriver to fetch them back. I got to say, some folks—the ones foolish enough to believe a tale like that—are now worried that Spain is going to invade Springfield, and I’ve been trying to get Mr. Cheaper to order some Spanish grammars to get us ready for the occupation, but he won’t do it.”

“And you guessed that Alvin had something to do with this exodus.”

“I hoped,” said Lincoln. “Because if a man’s going to get in trouble, it ought to be in a good cause, and Alvin has that air about him, that whatever he does, somebody’s going to be mad at him for doing it.”

“I came here because he needs some help, and you’re the only person we could think of who might be able to handle it.”

“Well, I’ll help him if I can. I owe him something, you know.”

“That’s not why we’re asking,” said Verily. “This isn’t a debt, because whatever you think you might owe him, what he’s asking is way bigger.”

“What could be bigger than saving my life?”

“The lives of five or six thousand French folks and former slaves, who have no place of safety to which they can repair in their time of trouble.”