The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (27 page)

“I can put up three of them in my room over the tavern, but not one more, and that’s if they don’t mind getting stepped on if somebody has to get up in the night to use the privy.”

“They’re coming up the river and they need a place that will take them in and protect them. Alvin’s wife, Margaret Larner—you may have heard of her…”

“Highly thought of among abolitionists,” said Lincoln, “though not by those who think the only way to free the slaves is by war.”

“Margaret is, as you may also have heard, a torch.”

“That doesn’t get mentioned even in the pro-slavery press, and you’d think they’d make a big deal of it.”

“She retired from the public use of her knack,” said Verily. “But she still sees what she sees, and what she saw was this: The only way this expedition of runaway slaves and Frenchmen is going to find any peace or safety is with your help.”

Lincoln’s bony face suddenly looked sad. “Mr. Cooper, I hope your friend is ready for disappointment.”

“You won’t do it?”

“Oh, I’ll do whatever I can. But you got to understand something. Everything I turn my hand to fails. I mean everything. I think I’ve got a knack for failure, because I manage it no matter what I undertake to do.”

“I don’t know,” said Verily. “You tell a good story.”

“Well, that’s not something a man can make a living at.”

“I do,” said Verily.

“Telling stories? Forgive me for saying it, but you don’t look like the humorous type.”

“I didn’t say my stories were funny, but it wouldn’t hurt a bit in my profession if I had a little more humor from time to time.”

“You’re saying that lawyers are storytellers?”

“That’s our main job. We take a set of facts, and we tell a story that includes them all and doesn’t leave out or contradict a one of them. The other fellow’s lawyer then takes the same facts and tells a different story. And the jury believes one story or they believe the other.”

Lincoln laughed. “Why, you make your profession sound almost as useless as loafing around in a general store telling silly stories to help folks pass the time of day.”

“Do you really believe that’s all you do?” asked Verily.

“I think the evidence of your own eyes should confirm that story, sir,” said Lincoln.

“My eyes see what your eyes can’t,” said Verily Cooper. “This town is a happy place—one of the happiest towns, house for house and man for man, that I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s a good place to live, and it’s good neighbors make it that way, I always say,” said Lincoln.

“A town’s like a living thing,” said Verily. “It all fits together like a body—not an attractive body, because there’s a head of this and a head of that, and all kinds of arms and legs and fingers, but you get my analogy, I’m sure.”

“Everybody’s got his place,” said Lincoln.

“Ah, but most towns have people who can’t find their place, or aren’t happy with it, or are trying to take a place that they’re not suited for, or hurt somebody who belongs there just as much as they do. But from the feel of this town I’d say there’s not too much of that.”

“We got our skunks, like any other town. When they get their tail up, folks know to duck for cover.”

“This town has a heart,” said Verily.

“I’m glad you could see that,” said Lincoln.

“And the heart is you.”

Lincoln laughed. “Oh, I didn’t see that coming. You
do
have a sense of humor after all, Mr. Cooper.”

Verily just smiled. “Mr. Lincoln, I think if you set yourself to figuring out where these five or six thousand souls might find refuge, you’d not only come up with a good answer, but you’d be the very man best suited to persuading folks to let them go there.”

Lincoln looked off into the distance. “I’m a terrible salesman,” he finally said. “I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it.”

“But how are you at pleading for the downtrodden? Especially when every word you’d say about them would be true?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Cooper, the downtrodden get less popular as their numbers increase. A man approached by one beggar is likely to give him a penny. A man approached by five beggars in one day won’t give a thing to the last one. And a man approached by five beggars at once will run away and claim he was being robbed.”

“Which is why we need to have a refuge for these folks before anybody can see with their own eyes how many they are.”

“Oh, I know how many five thousand is. It’s about four times the population of Springfield, and about equal to the population of this whole county.”

“So there’s not room for them here,” said Verily.

“Or any other town along the Mizzippy. And I reckon if they’re being carried on boats up the river, you’ll want a place for them that’s near a landing.”

“Not on boats,” said Verily.

“Walking? If they can make their way to Noisy River, with the militia of every slave-owning county roused against them, they don’t need any help from
me
.”

“They’re not walking up the east bank of the river.”

Lincoln grinned. “Oh, now, you’re telling me that Alvin got them reds to let his people pass through.”

“Pass through, but not linger.”

“No, I reckon not,” said Lincoln. “You let in five thousand one day, you’ll have to let in ten thousand the next.”

“Mr. Lincoln,” said Verily, “I know you don’t think you can do the job, but Margaret Larner thinks you can, and from what I’ve seen of you, I think you can, and all that is lacking at the moment is your agreement to try.”

“Knowing that I’m likely to fail,” said Lincoln.

“I can’t fail worse
with
your help than I’m bound to fail without it,” said Verily.

“You know that Coz will want to help, and he’s even more of a blockhead than I am.”

“I’d be happy to have the help of Coz, whoever that might be, as long as I can rely on you.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Lincoln.

“There’s something you want in return?”

“Oh, I’ll do it anyway,” said Lincoln, “or try my best, I should say. But since you and I will be together for a while, and likely to have many an hour on the road together, what would you think of using your time to start teaching me the principles of law?”

“You don’t talk law,” said Verily Cooper, “you
read
law.”

“You read law after you’ve decided that a lawyer’s what you want to be,” said Lincoln. “But before you decide, then you talk law so you find out just what it is you’re getting yourself in for, and whether you want to spend your life doing it.”

“I don’t think you’ll spend your
whole
life doing any one thing,” said Verily. “I don’t think that’s in you, if I know anything about a man. But I think if you set your mind to lawyering, you’d be a good one. And not least because there’s no chance under heaven that you will ever, for a single moment,
look
like a lawyer.”

“You don’t think that’s a drawback?”

“I think that for a long while, every lawyer who comes up against you in court will think you’re a country bumpkin and he won’t have to work at all to beat you.”

“But I am a country bumpkin.”

“And I’m a kegmaker. A kegmaker who wins most of his cases in court.”

Lincoln laughed. “So you’re saying that by simply being myself, as I am, not pretending to be anything else, I’ll fool those highfalutin lawyers better than if I tried to lie to them.”

“You can’t help what other people choose to believe about you, before they have all the evidence in hand.”

Lincoln reached out his hand. “I’m with you, then, till we find a place for this tribe that Alvin’s recruited. Though I have to say, he ain’t gonna need some camp on the outskirts of a town. Lessen he’s figuring to split those folks up among twenty towns or more, nobody’s going to want them.”

“Splitting them up might be necessary,” said Verily. “But it might also be dangerous. You know there’ll be slave catchers here as soon as it becomes known where they are.”

“So you need them all to be in a place where slave catchers won’t be able to cart them all back south one at a time.”

“A place that will afford protection, yes,” said Verily.

“A completely abolitionist county, then, is what you need. With its own judge, not a circuit rider, so you know how he’s going to rule on every slavery issue.”

“A strong enthusiasm for habeus corpus would be an advantage, yes.”

“A county where every justice of the peace can be relied on not to cooperate with the catchers.”

“Is there such a county?” asked Verily.

“Not yet,” said Lincoln, and he grinned.

It was all as well planned as a church party, and Arthur Stuart plain admired how they done it. All the stories about reds that folks told these days was about savages living a natural life picking fruit off the trees and calling to deer and they’d come right up and the red man would clunk them on the head. Or else stories about savages murdering and raping and scalping and capturing white folks and keeping them as slaves till they got away or till some soldiers find them and they refuse to go home. Or about how if you give a red man likker he’ll get as drunk as a skunk in five minutes flat and spend the rest of his life devoted to getting more.

Of course, Arthur Stuart knew in the back of his mind that this sort of thing couldn’t be the complete story. Alvin’s time with the reds had been back before Arthur Stuart was born, but he knew Alvin was friends with the mystical Red Prophet, and he knew Alvin had known and traveled with Ta-Kumsaw, and had even got himself known as a renegado because of the time he spent with the reds during the war.

And Arthur had seen plenty of red men, from time to time—but they were Irrakwa or Cherriky and they wore business suits just like everybody else and stood for Congress and supervised railroad construction and ran banks and did all kinds of other jobs so there wasn’t no difference between them and white folks except the color of their skin and how fat they got when they grew up, because some of them reds could get huge.

Alvin got kind of sad sometimes, after meeting one of them. “A good man, as men go,” he said to Arthur Stuart once. “Prosperous and clever. But what he gave up to get rich.”

Arthur Stuart figured what Alvin was talking about was the greensong. He sort of had the idea that maybe red men were supposed to live inside the greensong all the livelong day, and that’s what that Irrakwa railroad man had give up.

But when you thought about the red men living out beyond the Mizzippy, you sort of thought they’d be living the old way, hunting and fishing and living in wigwams. So it plain irritated Arthur Stuart at first to find out that they built log cabins and laid out their towns in streets, and that they planted acre after acre in maize and beans.

“This don’t feel like no greensong to me,” Arthur Stuart said to Dead Mary. “This just feels like a town.”

Dead Mary laughed at him for that. “Why shouldn’t red folk have towns? Big cities, too? You think only white people know what a city is?”

And when it came to feeding all these six thousand runaways, why, the red men was as organized as a church picnic. There was fifty tables set up, and each colonel and major would bring their fifty households and they’d pass along the tables and pile up food on baskets and carry them off to the pastures that had been designated as their campsites and it was so smooth that everybody got their breakfast before the sun even got hot. And all the while, there was red women hauling more food to the tables—corn bread and flat bread and bean mash and cider and apples and pawpaws and big bunches of grapes.

The grapes he just had to ask about. “Iffen red folks got grapes, how come they didn’t invent wine?”

“They didn’t have grapes,” Alvin told him, “till they learned how to grow them from white folks.”

“So what are they doing, making wine now?”

“Their cider and their wine have so little alcohol that you’d have to pee it all out long before you got drunk,” said Alvin. “Tenskwa-Tawa sees to that. But it’s the safest way to store water that got no disease in it, and besides, he wants to build up the reds’ tolerance for it, so his people don’t get enslaved by alcohol the way he was and so many others were.”

“Hard to think of that man being slave to anything,” said Arthur Stuart.

“But he was,” said Alvin. “Slave to likker and slave to rage and hate. But now he’s at peace with everybody that wants to, and he spends his life reading and studying and learning everything he can about everything.”

“So red folks got books?”

“He gets them from our side of the Mizzippy,” said Alvin. “And from Canada and Mexico. He travels widely, the way his brother used to do. That’s why he speaks English so well. And French and Spanish and about thirty red languages, too. He says that someday the barrier won’t hold, and white folks and red folks will have to mix, and he wants his people to be ready so they can do it without losing the greensong the way the Cherriky and Irrakwa did.”

All that morning, Tenskwa-Tawa was holed up with La Tia and about a dozen old red men and women, and when Arthur asked what they were doing, Alvin told him to mind his own business.

But at noon—when they started in on yet another meal, this time with meat in it—mostly smoked turkey, which the reds seemed to herd like sheep—Alvin was invited in to the big hall where the red council and La Tia were meeting, and in a few minutes he came back out and fetched Arthur Stuart inside.

It was a cool, dark place, with a fire in the middle and a hole in the roof, even though the reds knew perfectly well how to make a chimney, as every cabin in town proved. So it must have something to do with keeping up the old ways. The reds sat right on the ground, on blankets, but they had a chair for La Tia, just like the one she sat in back in Barcy. So she was the tallest thing in the room, like one lone pine standing up in the middle of a stand of beeches.

“Sit with us, Arthur Stuart,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “We have a mission for you, if you’re willing.”

This was about the last thing Arthur Stuart expected. A mission for him? He’d expected to follow along with Alvin as he led the company north along the river. The days he’d spent as a second-rate maker barely keeping the fog around the camp had convinced him that he was
not
ready to go out makering on his own. Nothing terrible had happened, but it could have, and he had never been more than barely in control. He was proud that he’d done OK, and perfectly relieved if he never had to do it again.

“I’ll do my part,” said Arthur Stuart, “but you do know that I’m not a maker, I hope.”

“It’s not makery they need you for,” said Alvin. “Or at least not mostly. It’s your own knack with languages, and the fact that you’re smart and dependable and…you.”

That made no sense to Arthur Stuart, but he was willing to listen—no, he was eager to hear what it was that they actually needed
him
for, himself.

Tenskwa-Tawa laid out for him what was going on in Mexico, about how the volcano was going to blow up, especially now that La Tia was on the case. “I already planned to send some of my own people to give warning to the Mexica, and they will still go,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “Already some of them are there. But there’s a complication. A group of white men is heading for Mexico City and they will surely be killed, either by the Mexica or by the volcano.”

“Or both,” said La Tia. “Some men has to die two times to get the point.”

“So we need you for two things,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “You have to go warn the white men and help them get out, if they’re willing.”

Arthur Stuart laughed. “You gonna send a half-black boy my age to warn
white
men to get out?”

“My brother Calvin’s with them,” said Alvin.

“But he don’t like me.”

“But he’ll know you came from me,” said Alvin. “And it’s up to him to persuade the others.”

“So this is about saving Calvin’s life,” said Arthur Stuart dubiously. He knew perfectly well that his sister Margaret had no high opinion of Calvin and Arthur Stuart kind of suspected that if Calvin died it might ease her mind. But Alvin wouldn’t feel that way, of course. He still thought of Calvin as nothing worse than a foolish little brother who would grow up someday and became a decent man.

“And all the others,” said Alvin, “if they’re smart enough to be saved.”

“But how am I going to get there in time to warn them?”

“Two things,” said Alvin. “First, you’ll run with the greensong.”

“But it’s desert between here and there.”

“The greensong doesn’t depend on the color green, really,” said Alvin. “It comes from life, and you’ll see, the desert is packed with living things. They’re just thirstier, is all.”

“But I can’t do the greensong alone.”

La Tia spoke up. “I give you a charm like I made before, only better.”

“And I’ll run with you the first hour or so, to get you started. Arthur Stuart, you’ve passed the threshold, don’t you realize it? You’re the first one to do it, but you’re a man who wasn’t born to be a maker, but he’s learned makery all the same.”

“Not as good as you. Nowhere near.”

“Maybe not,” said Alvin, “but good enough—and the greensong’s not makery anyway. I learned it as surely as you will, and you get better at feeling it the more you do it. You’ll see.”

“And somehow I’ll find the way?”

“The closer you get to Mexico, the more folks will know how to point out the road.”

“And if somebody decides my heart would make a dandy sacrifice?”

“Then you’ll use the powers you’ve learned to get away. I don’t just want you to deliver the message, I want you to come back safe and sound.”

“Oh,” said Arthur Stuart, realizing. “You want me to bring these white men with me.”

“I want you to bring them as far as it takes to make them safe,” said Alvin, “but on no account is that to be here with us. Get them to the coast and put them on a boat—as many as will come—and then you come on back.”

“I don’t think a soul’s gonna listen to me,” said Arthur Stuart. “When did Calvin ever listen to
you
?”

“Calvin will do what he wants,” said Alvin. “But I won’t let him die because he didn’t know something I could have told him.”

“I just hope I get there before the volcano blows,” said Arthur Stuart. “What if I get lost?”

“Don’t you worry,” said La Tia. “You be carrying the volcano with you.”

The other part of the errand? “How can I do
that
?”

Tenskwa-Tawa answered. “We have awakened the giant under the earth,” he said. “It flows now hotter and hotter. But what we couldn’t do was control the moment when it erupted. Or where. But La Tia, she knows the old African ways of calling to the earth. She’s made two charms. They won’t work until they’re burned. But where they’re burned, and what you say when you burn them, you’ll have to memorize that and teach it to my people who are there.”

“Why two charms?” asked Arthur.

“The one she call smoke from the ground,” said La Tia. “The other one, she call the hot red blood out of the earth.”

“My people,” said Tenskwa-Tawa, “will tell the Mexica people what day the smoke will first appear, and when it happens, they’ll believe. We want to give them plenty of time to leave. The idea isn’t to kill Mexicas. The idea is to show them that a greater power rejects their lies about what God wants them to do.”

“We’re trying to break the power of the priests who sacrifice human beings,” said Alvin.

“Three days after the first charm,” said Tenskwa-Tawa, “they’ll use the second one.”

“And the volcano blows up.”

“We don’t know how bad it will be,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “We can’t control what the giant does, once it’s awake.”

“What about the reds who work the charm?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“We hope that they’ll get away in time,” said Tenskwa-Tawa.

“I don’t know how fast she work,” said La Tia. “I never make this kind before.”

“How do you know it’ll work at all, then?” said Arthur Stuart.

It seemed a practical question to him, but La Tia shot him a glare. “I be La Tia, me,” she said. “Other people charms, they maybe don’t work.”

Arthur Stuart grinned at her. “I hope I grow up to be perfect like you.”

She apparently didn’t detect the irony in his words. “You be so lucky,” she said.

Arthur Stuart spent the next hour studying the charm to learn how it was put together—“in case she come apart on the road,” La Tia said—and learning the words and the motions.

“What if I don’t do it exactly right?” said Arthur Stuart. “What if I forget some bit? Will it just work a little slower, or will it not work at all?”

La Tia glared at him again. “Don’t forget any. Then we never find out how much she go wrong when stupid boy forget.”

So even after she was satisfied that he knew what to do, Arthur Stuart went off by himself, to a stand of trees near the river, to go through it all again.

That’s where he was when Dead Mary found him. But he was asleep by then, exhausted from all that he’d been doing for days. The greensong helped him and everyone else stay vigorous all through the night and into the morning, but the need for sleep had caught up with him and there was no denying it.

Arthur Stuart felt a hand on his shoulder and sat bolt upright. He was confused to see that it was Dead Mary who was kneeling beside him, because she had also been in his dream.

“Alvin sent me to look for you,” said Dead Mary. “Sorry to wake you up.”

Arthur shook his head. “That’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“What’s that you were lying on?”

Arthur Stuart looked down and was horrified to see that he had rolled over on the smaller charm and bent it. He said a swear word, apologized for it, and when Dead Mary said it was all right, he thanked her and said it again. “She’s gonna kill me if I don’t get this back together right.”

“La Tia?” said Dead Mary. “Sometimes I think she might kill someone for practice. The power she has!”

“I’m just glad she’s on our side,” said Arthur Stuart.

“She is for now.”

“Same could be said for you,” said Arthur. “When we get to safety, what then? Where will everybody go?”

“Where
can
we go?” said Dead Mary. “All these runaway slaves, where will they be safe? And my people, the French—we don’t speak the way they do in Paris, you think they’ll want us in Canada? We will be strangers wherever we go. Maybe we stay in the United States. Maybe we stay with Alvin.”

“Alvin wanders all the time,” said Arthur Stuart. “He hardly sleeps in the same bed twice.”

“Then maybe we wander.”

Oh right, Alvin was bound to want her along on his journeys. “He’s married, you know.”

She looked at him like he was crazy. “I know that, ignorant boy.”