The Crystal City Page 0,26

"I got no blood now."

She did have a few welts from skeeter bites, now that Arthur Stuart looked at her. "How you feeling?" he asked her.

"Very hungry," she said. "But not sick, me. That all done. Your master, he make me well."

"He's not my master, he's my brother-in-law."

Dead Mary looked at him sideways. "So Alvin married an Africaine? Or you have married his sister?"

"I'm adopted," said Arthur Stuart.

"So you're free?"

"I'm no man's slave," said Arthur Stuart. "But it's not exactly the same as being free, not when everybody says, You're too young to do this and you're too young to do that and you're too black to go here and you're too inexperienced to go there."

"I'm not black," said Dead Mary, "but I rather be a slave than what I am."

"Being French ain't so bad," said Arthur Stuart.

"I mean one who sees who is sick."

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I was joking. Course, like Alvin says, if you have to tell folks you was joking, it wasn't much of a joke, was it?"

"This Alvin," said Dead Mary. "What is he?"

"My brother-in-law," said Arthur Stuart.

"Non, non," said the mother. "How he make me so better?"

Suddenly Arthur was suspicious. They come in the middle of the night and ask questions about Alvin. Perfectly good explanations for all of it-why not be curious about Alvin!- but it could also be somebody had set out to trap Arthur Stuart into telling more than he should.

"I expect you can ask him yourself in the morning."

"Got to be gone by morning," said Dead Mary. "Before light. People watch this house. They see us, they follow us, they kill us. Hang us for witches, like in New England."

"They haven't done that in New England in years," said Arthur Stuart.

"Your Alvin," said the mother. "Did he touch this bread?"

Alvin had, in fact, bought the baguettes. So Arthur hesitated a moment before saying, "How should I know?" He knew that the hesitation was more of an answer than his words. And without knowing why, he wanted to snatch the bread back and send them on their way.

As if she had read his desire, or perhaps because she thought her mother had been too obvious, Dead Mary said, "We go now."

"Inmediatement," echoed her mother.

"Thank you for the food," said Dead Mary.

Even as she was thanking him, her mother was putting a couple more baguettes into her apron. Arthur would have stopped her-that was supposed to be part of breakfast in the morning-but he thought of them out in the swamps for days with nothing to eat and little to drink and he held his tongue. He'd go fetch more baguettes in the morning.

He followed them out the door.

"Non," said the mother.

"You shouldn't go with us," said Dead Mary.

"I'm not," said Arthur Stuart. "I got to go sit in the privy again. So you best move fast, cause I don't want the ensuing odor to offend your delicate sensibilities."

"What?" said Dead Mary.

"I'm gonna let fly in the privy right quick, ma'am, so hightail it if you value your nose."

They hightailed it, and Arthur Stuart went back to groaning over the privy pot.

It began with a few stones thrown against the house late the next night, and a muffled shout that no one inside understood.

Next morning, a group of men marched back and forth in front of the house carrying a coffin, calling out, "Why ain't nobody sick in there!"

Since Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were still nursing three children who had been seized by the fever despite Alvin's preventive healing, it was tempting to invite the men inside to see that their claim was a lie. But everyone knew that showing three sick children wouldn't be much of an answer, when in this neighborhood more children were dying than anywhere else in Barcy, while not one child in the house of Moose and Squirrel had been carried out in a box.

It wasn't because Alvin had confined his ministrations to the children of the orphanage. He had searched out other heartfires in other houses, and had saved many. But it took time, working one by one, and while he saved many, far more died beyond his reach, ones he had not even looked at. There were limits to what he could do.

No longer did he pretend to run errands or do chores. The baguettes Arthur Stuart had shared with Dead Mary and her mother were the last he bought; and when he slept it was because he could stay awake no longer.