Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (23 page)

Instead he said, “What good wind blows you here, my little Napoleon?”

“Your gout,” said the lad.

Oh, no. Another cure. Cures found by fools usually did more harm than good. But the gout was a curse, and . . . let’s see what he has.

“An Englishman,” said Little Napoleon. “Or, to speak more accurately, an American. My spies have watched him—”

“
Your
spies? These are different spies from the spies I pay?”

“The spies you assigned to me for supervision, Uncle.”

“Ah, those spies. They do still remember they work for me, don’t they?”

“Remember it so well that instead of simply following orders and watching for enemies, they have also watched for someone who might help you.”

“Englishmen in Europe are all spies. Someday after some notable achievement when I’m very very popular I will round them all up and guillotine them. Monsieur Guillotin—now
that
was a useful fellow. Has he invented anything else lately?”

“He’s working on a steam-powered wagon, Uncle.”

“They already exist. We call them locomotives, and we’re laying track all over Europe.”

“Ah, but
he
is working on one that doesn’t have to run on rails.”

“Why not a steam-powered balloon? I can’t understand why that has never worked. The engine would propel the craft, and the steam, instead of being wastefully discharged into the atmosphere, would fill the balloon and keep the craft aloft.”

“I believe the problem, Uncle, is that if you carry enough fuel to travel more than twenty or thirty feet, the whole thing weighs too much to get off the ground.”

“That’s why inventors exist, isn’t it? To solve problems like that. Any fool could come up with the basic idea—
I
came up with it, didn’t I? And when it comes to such matters I’m plainly a fool, as most men are.” Bonaparte had long since learned that such modest remarks always got repeated by onlookers in the court and did much to endear him to the people. “It’s Monsieur Guillotin’s job to . . . well, never mind, the machine that bears his name is enough of a contribution to mankind. Swift, sure, and painless executions—a boon to the unworthiest of humans. A very Christian invention, showing kindness to the least of Jesus’ brethren.” The priests would repeat that one, and from the pulpit, too.

“About this Calvin Miller,” said Little Napoleon.

“And my gout.”

“I’ve seen him drain a swollen limb just by standing on the street staring at a beggar’s pussing wound.”

“A pussing wound isn’t the gout.”

“The beggar had his trousers ripped open to show the wound, and this American stood there looking for all the world as if he were dozing off, and then suddenly the skin erupted with pus and all of it drained out, and then the wound closed without a single stitch. Neither he nor any man touched the leg. It was quite a demonstration of remarkable healing powers.”

“You saw this yourself?”

“With my own eyes. But only the once. I can hardly go about secretly, Uncle. I look too much like your esteemed self.”

No doubt Little Napoleon imagined that this was flattery. Instead it sent a faint wave of nausea through Bonaparte. But he let nothing show in his face.

“You now have this healer under arrest?”

“Of course. Waiting for your pleasure.”

“Let him sweat.”

Little Napoleon cocked his head a moment, studying Bonaparte, probably trying to figure out what plan his uncle had for the healer, and why he didn’t want to see him right away. The one thing he would never think of, Bonaparte was quite sure, was the truth: that Bonaparte hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about a healer who actually had power. It made him uneasy thinking about it. And he remembered the young white boy who had come with the Red general, Ta-Kumsaw, to visit him in Fort Detroit. Could this American be the same one?

Why should he even make such a connection? And why would that boy in Detroit matter, after all these years? Bonaparte was uncertain about what it all meant, but it felt to him as if forces were at work, as if this American in the Bastille were someone of great importance to him. Or perhaps not to him. To someone, anyway.

Bonaparte’s leg throbbed. Another episode of gout was starting. “Go away now,” he said to Little Napoleon.

“Do you want information from the American?” asked Little Napoleon.

“No,” said Bonaparte. “Leave him alone. And while you’re at it, leave
me
alone, too.”

Alvin had a steady stream of visitors in the courthouse jail. It seemed like they all had the same idea. They’d sidle right up to the bars, beckon him close, and whisper (as if the deputy didn’t know right well what they was talking about), “Don’t you have some way to slip on out of here, Alvin?”

What, they believed he hadn’t thought of it? Such a simple matter, to soften the stone and pull one of the bars out. Or, for that matter, he could make the metal of a bar flow away from the stone it was embedded in. Or dissolve the bar entirely. Or push against the stone and press on through, walking through the wall into freedom. Such things would be easy enough for Alvin. As a child he had played with stone and found softness and weakness in it; as a prentice blacksmith, he had come to understand iron from the heart out. Hadn’t he crawled into the forgefire and turned an iron plowshare to living gold?

Now, locked in this prison, he thought of leaving, thought of it all the time. Thought of hightailing it off into the woods, with or without Arthur Stuart—the boy was happy here, so why take him away? Thought of the sun on his back, the wind in his face, the greensong of the forest now so faint to him through stone and iron that he could hardly hear it.

But he told himself what he told those friendly folk who meant so well. “I need to be shut of this whole affair before I go off. So I mean to stand trial here, get myself acquitted, and then go on without fear of somebody tracking me down and telling the same lies on me again.”

And then they always did the same thing. Having failed to persuade him to escape, they’d eye his knapsack and whisper, “Is it in there?”

And the boldest of them would say what they were all wishing. “Can I see it?”

His answer was always the same. He’d ask about the weather. ‘Think it’s a hard winter coming on?” Some picked up slower than others, but after a while they all realized he wasn’t going to answer a blame thing about the golden plow or the contents of his knapsack, not a word one way or the other. Then they’d make some chat or take up his used dishes, them as brought food, but it never took long and soon they was on their way out of the courthouse to tell their friends and family that Alvin was looking sad kind of but he still wasn’t saying a thing about that gold plow that Makepeace claimed was his own gold treasure stolen by the boy back in his prentice days.

One day Sheriff Doggly brought in a fellow that Alvin recognized, sort of, but couldn’t remember why or who. “That’s the one,” said the stranger. “Got no respect for any man’s knack except his own.” Then Alvin recollected well enough—it was the dowser who picked the spot for Alvin to dig a well for Makepeace Smith. The spot where Alvin dug right down to a sheet of thick hard rock, without finding a drop of water first. No doubt Makepeace meant to use him as a witness that Alvin’s well wasn’t in the spot the dowser chose. Well, that was true enough, no disputing it. The dowser fellow wasn’t going to testify to anything that Alvin wouldn’t have admitted freely his own self. So let them plot their plots. Alvin had the truth with him, and that was bound to be enough, with twelve jurors of Hatrack River folk.

The visits that really cheered him were Arthur’s. Two or three times a day, the boy would blow in from the square like a leaf getting tucked into an open door by a gust of wind. “You just got to meet that feller John Binder,” he’d say. “Ropemaker. Some folks is joking how if they decide to hang you, he’ll be the one as makes the rope, but he just shuts ’em right up, you should hear him, Alvin. ‘No rope of mine is going to hang no Maker,’ he says. So even though you never met him I count him as a friend. But I tell you, they say his ropes
never
unravel, never even
fray,
no matter where you cut em. Ain’t that some knack?”

And later in the same day, he’d be on about someone else. “I was out looking for Alfreda Matthews, Sophie’s cousin, she’s the one lives in that shack down by the river, only the river’s a long windy thing and I couldn’t find her and in fact it was getting on toward dark and I couldn’t rightly find myself, and then here I am face to face with this Captain Alexander, he’s a ship’s captain only who knows what he’s doing so far from the sea? But he lives around here doing tinkering and odd fixing, and Vilate Franker says he must have done some terrible crime to have to hide from the sea, or maybe there was some great sea beast that swallowed up his ship and left only him alive and now he daresn’t go back to sea for fear the beast—she calls it La Vaya Than, which Goody Trader says is Spanish for ‘Ain’t this a damn lie,’ do you know Goody Trader?”

“Met her,” says Alvin. “She brung me some horehound drops. Nastiest candy I ever ate, but I reckon for them as loves horehound they were good enough. Strange lady. Squatted right outside the door here pondering for the longest time until she finally gets up and says ‘Humf, you’re the first man I ever met what didn’t need
nothing
and here you are in jail.’ ”

“They say that’s her knack, knowing what a body needs even when he don’t know himself,” said Arthur. “Though I
will
say that Vilate Franker says that Goody Trader is a humbug just like the alligator boy in the freak show in Dekane, which you wouldn’t take me to see cause
you
said if he was real, it was cruel to gawk at him, and—”

“I remember what I said, Arthur Stuart. You don’t have to gossip to me about me.”

“Anyway, what was I talking about?”

“Lost in the woods looking for old drunken Freda.”

“And I bumped into that sea captain, anyway, and he looks me in the eye and he says, ‘Follow me,’ and I go after him about ten paces and he sets me right in the middle of a deer track and he says, ‘You just go along this way and when you reach the river again, you go upstream about three rods.’ And you know what? I did what he said and you know what?”

“You found Freda.”

“Alfreda Matthews, and she was stone drunk of course but I splashed her face with some water and I done what you said folks ought to do, I emptied her jug out and boy howdy, she was spitting mad, I like to had to out-dance the devil just to keep from getting hit by them rocks she threw!”

“Poor lady,” said Alvin. “But it won’t do no good as long as there’s folks to give her another jug.”

“Can’t you do like you did with that Red Prophet?”

Alvin looked at him sharp. “What do you think you know about
that
”

“Just what your own mama told me back in Vigor Church, about how you took a drunken one-eyed Red and made a prophet out of him.”

Alvin shook his head. “No sir, she got it wrong. He was a prophet all along. And he wasn’t a drunk the way Freda’s a drunk. He took the likker into him to drown out the terrible black noise of death. That’s what I fixed, and then he didn’t need that likker no more. But Freda—there’s something else in her that hungers for it, and I don’t understand it yet.”

“I told her to come to you though, so I reckon you oughta know and that’s why I told you she’s a-coming to get healed.”

Alvin shook his head.

“Did I do wrong?”

“No, you done right,” said Alvin. “But there’s nothing I can do for her beyond what she oughta do for herself. She knows the likker’s eating her up, stealing her life away from her. But I’ll talk to her and help her if I can.”

“They say she can tell you when rain’s coming. If she’s sober.”

“Then how would anybody know she has such a knack?” asked Alvin.

Arthur just laughed and laughed. “I reckon she must have been sober
once,
anyway. And it was raining!”

When Arthur Stuart left, Alvin pondered the tales he told. Some of Arthur’s chat was just gossip. There was some powerful
gossips in Hatrack River these days, and the way Alvin figured it, the two biggest gossips was Vilate Franker, who Alvin had met and knew she was living inside a bunch of lying hexes, and Goody Trader, who he didn’t really know yet except for what he gleaned from her visit. Her real name was either Chastity or Charity—Vilate said it was Chastity, but other folks said the other. She went by Goody, short for Goodwife, seeing how she’d been married three times and kept all them husbands happy till they croaked, accidental every time, though again Vilate managed to give Arthur the impression that they wasn’t truly accidental. Them two women was at war all the time, that much was plain—hardly a word one said as wasn’t contradicted flat out by the other. Now, neither one of these ladies invented gossip, nor was it so that Hatrack River didn’t have rumors and tales before the two of them moved here. But it was plain that Arthur was visiting both of them every day, and both of them was filling him full of taies until Alvin could hardly make sense of it and it was a sure thing that Arthur didn’t really understand the half of what he’d been told.

Alvin knew for himself that Vilate was deceptive and spiteful. But Goody might be just the same or worse, only she was better at it so Alvin couldn’t see it so plain. Hard to tell. And that business with Goody Trader saying Alvin didn’t need nothing—well, what was
that
?

But behind all the gossip and quarreling, there was something else that struck Alvin as pretty strange. Mighty knacks was thick underfoot in Hatrack River. Most towns might have somebody with something of a knack that you might notice. Most knacks, though, was pretty plain. A knack for soup. A knack for noticing animal tracks. Useful, but nothing to write a letter to your daddy about. A lot of folks had no idea what their own knack was, because it was so easy for them and not all that remarkable in the eyes of other folks. But here in Hatrack River, the knacks was downright astonishing. This sea captain who could help you find your way even when you didn’t know you was lost. And Freda—Alvin pooh-poohed it to Arthur Stuart,
but there was folks in town as swore she didn’t just
predict
rain, if you sobered her up in a dry season she could
bring
it. And Melyn, a Welsh girl who can harp and sing so you forget everything while she’s doing it, forget it all and just sit there with a stupid smile on your face because you’re so happy—she came and played for Alvin and he could feel how the sound that flowed from her could reach inside him like a doodlebug scooting through the earth, reach inside and find all the knots and loosen them up and just make him feel good.