The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (4 page)

He reckoned that Mama Squirrel’s law against killing animals didn’t apply this far from her house, and besides, what she didn’t know wouldn’t offend her. So he spent a few minutes working on the water, breaking down all the tiny creatures into bits so small they couldn’t do no harm. Not that he broke them one by one—that would have taken half his life. He just talked to them, silently, showing them in his mind what he wanted them to do. Break themselves apart. Spill their inner parts into the water. He explained it was to keep folks from coming to harm by drinking. He wasn’t sure just what these tiny creatures actually understood. What mattered was that they did Alvin’s will. Even the skeeter eggs.

As if the skeeters understood that he’d just wiped out their progeny, they made him pay in blood for having cleaned the water. Well, he’d live with that, itch welts and all. He didn’t use his knack to make himself comfy.

“I know you’re doing something,” said Arthur Stuart. “But I can’t tell what.”

“I’m fetching water for Mama Squirrel,” said Alvin.

“You’re standing there looking at the fountain like you was seeing a vision. Either that or trying real hard not to break wind.”

“Hard to tell those things apart,” said Alvin. “It gives visionaries a bad name.”

“Get bad enough gas, though, and you can start a church,” said Arthur Stuart.

They filled the jugs, taking their turns along with the other folks, some of whom looked at them curiously, the rest just minding their own business. One of the lookers, a young woman not much older than Arthur Stuart, bumped into Alvin as she reached to fill a jar. Then, her jar full, she walked up to Arthur with a bit of a swagger and, in a French accent, said, “Person rich enough to own a slave got no right to draw from this fountain. There is cisterns uptown for them with the money.”

“We’re not drawing for ourselves,” said Arthur Stuart, mildly enough. “We’re hauling this for Mama Squirrel’s house.”

The girl spat in the dust. “Hexy house.”

An older woman joined in. “You pretty bad trained, boy,” she said. “You talk to a white girl and never say ma’am.”

“Sorry ma’am,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Where we come from,” said Alvin, “polite folks talk to the master.”

The woman glared at him and moved away.

The teenage girl, though, was still curious. “That Mama Squirrel, is it true she has babies of all colors?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Alvin. “Seems she has some children that tan real dark in the sun, and some that just freckle.”

“Personne know where they get the money to live,” said the girl. “Some folks say they teach them kids to steal, send them into the city at night. Dark faces, you can’t see them so good.”

“Nothing like that,” said Arthur Stuart. “See, they own the patent on stupid, and every time somebody in the city says something dumb, they get three cents.”

The girl looked at him with squinty eyes. “They be the richest people in town, then, so I think you lie.”

“I reckon you owe a dollar a day to whoever has the patent on no-sense-of-humor.”

“You are not a slave,” said the girl.

“I’m a slave to fortune,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’m in bondage to the universe, and my only manumission will be death.”

“You gone to school, you.”

“I only learned whatever my sister taught me,” said Arthur Stuart truthfully.

“I have a knack,” said the girl.

“Good for you,” said Arthur Stuart.

“This was sick water,” she said, “and now is healthy. Your master healed it.”

Alvin realized that this conversation had taken far too dangerous a turn. To Arthur he said, “If you’re done offending everybody in the neighborhood by talking face to face with a white girl, and not looking down and saying ma’am, it’s time to haul this water back.”

“I was not offended,” said the girl. “But if you heal the water, maybe you come home with me and heal my mama.”

“I’m no healer,” said Alvin.

“I think what she got,” said the girl, “is the yellow fever.”

If anybody had thought nobody was paying attention to this conversation, they’d have got their wake-up when she said
that
. It was like every nose on every face was tied to a string that got pulled when she said “yellow fever.”

“Did you say yellow fever?” asked an old woman.

The girl looked at her blankly.

“She did,” said another woman. “Marie la Morte a dit.”

“Dead Mary says her ma’s got yellow fever!” called someone.

And now the strings were pulled in the opposite direction. Every head turned to face away from the girl—Dead Mary was her name, apparently—and then all the feet set to pumping and in a few minutes, Alvin, Arthur, and Dead Mary were the only humans near the fountain. Some folks quit the place so fast their jugs was left behind.

“I reckon nobody’s going to steal these jars if we don’t leave them here too long,” said Alvin. “Let’s go see your mother.”

“They will be stole for sure,” said Dead Mary.

“I’ll stay and watch them,” said Arthur Stuart.

“Sir and ma’am,” said Alvin. “And never look a white person in the eye.”

“When there’s nobody around, can I just set here and pretend to be human?”

“Please yourself,” said Alvin.

It took a while to get to Dead Mary’s house. Down streets until they ran out of streets, and then along paths between shacks, and finally into swampy land till they came to a little shack on stilts. Skeeters were thick as smoke in some spots.

“How can you live with all these skeeters?” asked Alvin.

“I breathe them in and cough them out,” said Dead Mary.

“How come they call you that?” asked Alvin. “Dead Mary, I mean.”

“Marie la Morte? Cause I know when someone is sick before he know himself. And I know how the sickness will end.”

“Am I sick?”

“Not yet, no,” said the girl.

“What makes you think I can heal your mother?”

“She will die if somebody does not help, and the yellow fever, personne who live here knows how to cure it.”

It took Alvin a moment to decide that the French word she said must mean
nobody
. “I don’t know a thing about yellow fever.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” said the girl. “Quick hot fever. Then freezing cold. My mother’s eyes turn yellow. She screams with pain in her neck and shoulders and back. And then when she’s not screaming, she looks sad.”

“Yellow and fevery,” said Alvin. “I reckon the name kind of says it all.” Alvin knew better than to ask what caused the disease. The two leading theories about the cause of disease were punishment for sin and a curse from somebody you offended. Course, if either one was right, it was out of Alvin’s league.

Alvin was a healer, of a kind—that was just natural for a maker, being sort of included in the knack. But what he was good at healing was broken bones and failing organs. A man tore a muscle or chopped his foot, and Alvin could heal him up good. Or if gangrene set in, Alvin could clean it out, make the good flesh get shut of the bad. With gangrene, too, he knew the pus was full of all kinds of little animals, and he knew which ones didn’t belong in the body. But he couldn’t do like he did with the water and just tell everything alive to break apart—that would kill the person right along with the sickness.

Diseases that made your nose or bowels run were hard to track down, and Alvin never knew whether they were serious or something that would just get better if you left it alone or slept a lot. The stuff that went on inside a living body was just too complicated, and most of the important things was way too small for Alvin to understand what all was going on.

If he was a
real
healer, he could have saved his newborn baby when it was born too young and couldn’t breathe. But he just didn’t understand what was going on inside the lungs. The baby was dead before he figured out a single thing.

“I’m not going to be able to do much good,” said Alvin. “Healing sick folks is hard.”

“I touch her lying on her bed, and I see nothing but she dead of yellow fever,” said Dead Mary. “But I touch you by the fountain, I see my mother living.”

“When did you touch me?” said Alvin. “You didn’t touch me.”

“I bump you when I draw water,” she said. “I have to be sneaky. Personne lets me touch him now, if he sees me.”

That was no surprise. Though Alvin figured it was better to know you’re sick and dying in time to say good-bye to your loved ones. But folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true.

Illness or adultery, Alvin figured ignorance worked about as well in both cases. Not knowing just meant it was going to get worse.

There was a plank leading from a hummock of dry land to the minuscule porch of the house, and Dead Mary fair to danced along it. Alvin couldn’t quite manage that, as he looked down at the thick sucking mud under the plank. But the board didn’t wobble much, and he made it into the house all right.

It stank inside, but not much worse than the swamp outside. The odor of decay was natural here. Still, it was worse around the woman’s bed. Old woman, Alvin thought at first, the saddest looking woman he had ever seen. Then realized that she wasn’t very old at all. She was ravaged by worse things than age.

“I’m glad she’s sleeping,” said Dead Mary. “Most times the pain does not let her sleep.”

Alvin got his doodlebug inside her and found that her liver was half rotted away. Not to mention that blood was seeping everywhere inside her, pooling and rotting under the skin. She was close to death—could have died already, if she’d been willing to let go. Whatever she was holding on for, Alvin couldn’t guess. Maybe love for this girl here. Maybe just a stubborn determination to fight till the last possible moment.

The cause of all this ruin was impossible for Alvin to find. Too small, or of a nature he didn’t know how to recognize. But that didn’t mean there was nothing he could do. The seeping blood—he could repair the blood vessels, clear away the pooling fluids. This sort of work, reconstructing injured bodies, he’d done that before and he knew how. He worked quickly, moved on, moved on. And soon he knew that he was well ahead of the disease, rebuilding faster than it could tear down.

Until at last he could get to work on the liver. Livers were mysterious things and all he could do was try to get the sick parts to look more like the healthy parts. And maybe that was enough, because soon enough the woman coughed—with strength now, not feebly—and then sat up. “J’ai soif,” she said.

“She’s thirsty,” said the girl.

“Marie,” the woman said, and then reached for her with a sob. “Ma Marie d’Espoir!”

Alvin had no idea what she was saying, but the embrace was plain enough, and so were the tears.

He walked to the doorway, leaving them their privacy. From the position of the sun, he’d been there an hour. A long time to leave Arthur Stuart alone by the well.

And these skeeters were bound to suck all the blood out of him and turn him into one big itch iffen he didn’t get out of this place.

He was nearly to the end of the plank when he felt it tremble with someone else’s feet. And then something hit him from behind and he was on the damp grassy mound with Dead Mary lying on top of him covering him with kisses.

“Vous avez sauvé ma mere!” she cried. “You saved her, you saved her, vous êtes un ange, vous êtes un dieu!”

“Here now, let up, get off me, I’m a married man,” said Alvin.

The girl got up. “I’m sorry, but I’m so full of joy.”

“Well I’m not sure I did anything,” said Alvin. “Your mother may
feel
better but I didn’t cure whatever caused the fever. She’s still sick, and she still needs to rest and let her body work on whatever’s wrong.”

Alvin was on his feet now, and he looked back to see the mother standing in the doorway, tears still running down her cheeks.

“I mean it,” said Alvin. “Send her back to bed. She keeps standing there, the skeeters’ll eat her alive.”

“I love you,” said the girl. “I love you forever, you good man!”

Back in the plaza, Arthur Stuart was sitting on top of the four water jars—which he had moved some twenty yards away from the fountain. Which was a good thing, because there must have been a hundred people or more jostling around it now.

Alvin didn’t worry about the crowd—he was mostly just relieved that they weren’t jostling around some uppity young black man.

“Took you long enough,” Arthur Stuart whispered.

“Her mother was real sick,” said Alvin.

“Yeah, well, word got out that this was the sweetest-tasting water ever served up in Barcy, and now folks are saying it can heal the sick or Jesus turned the water into wine or it’s a sign of the second coming or the devil was cast out of it and I had to tell five different people that
our
water came from the fountain
before
it got all hexed or healed or whatever they happen to believe. I was about to throw dirt into it just to make it convincing.”

“So stop talking and pick up your jars.”

Arthur Stuart stood up and reached for a jar, but then stopped and puzzled over it. “How do I pick up the second one, while I got the first one on my shoulder?”

Alvin solved the problem by picking up both the half-filled jars by the lip and putting them on Arthur’s shoulders. Then Alvin picked up the two full ones and hoisted them onto his own shoulders.

“Well, don’t
you
make it look easy,” said Arthur Stuart.

“I can’t help it that I’ve got the grip and the heft of a blacksmith,” said Alvin. “I earned them the hard way—you could do it too, if you wanted.”

“I haven’t heard you offering to make me no apprentice blacksmith.”

“Because you’re an apprentice maker, and not doing too bad at it.”

“Did you heal the woman?”

“Not really. But I healed some of the damage the disease did.”

“Meaning she can run a mile without panting, right?”

“Where
she
lives, it’s more like
splash
a couple of dozen yards. That mud looked like it could swallow up whole armies and spit them back out as skeeters.”