The Crystal City Page 0,14

and he was on the damp grassy mound with Dead Mary lying on top of him covering him with kisses.

"Vous avez sauve ma mere!" she cried. "You saved her, you saved her, vous etes un ange, vous etes 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."

"Well, you done what you could, and we're done with it," said Arthur Stuart.

They got back to the house of Squirrel and Moose and poured the water into the cistern. Mixed in with what they already had, the cleaned water improved the quality only a little, but that was fine with Alvin. People kept overreacting. He was just a fellow using his knack.

Back at the house of Dead Mary-or Marie d'Espoir-nobody was following Alvin's advice. The woman he had saved was outside checking crawfish traps, getting bitten by skeeter after skeeter. She didn't mind anymore-in a swamp full of gators and cottonmouths, what was a little itching and a few dozen welts?

Meanwhile, the skeeters, engorged with her blood, spread out over the swamp. Some of them ended up in the city, and each person they bit ended up with a virulent dose of yellow fever growing in their blood.

Chapter 3

Fever

SUPPER THAT EVENING was bedlam, the children moving in and out of the kitchen in shifts with the normal amount of shoving and jostling and complaining. It reminded Alvin of growing up with his brothers and sisters, only because there were so many more children, and of nearly the same age, it was even more confusing. A few quarrels even flared, white-hot in an instant, then promptly silenced by Mama Squirrel flinging a bit of water at the offenders or by Papa Moose speaking a name. The children didn't seem to fear punishment; it was his disapproval that they dreaded.

The food