The Crystal City Page 0,71

would give him a place for respite and resupply. He might hear news. And maybe the love of his life would be there, ready to introduce herself and take him away from all these complicated things.

Alvin's got him a wife and a baby on the way, and what do I have? Sore legs. And no clients.

What I need is to find a lawyer in Noisy River who needs a good courtroom lawyer in his practice. I think I know how to partner with another lawyer. I'll never be a partner to Alvin Maker. He's his own best partner, except perhaps for his wife, and as far apart as they always are, it's hard to call that much of a partnership either.

I'll take a look at Springfield, Noisy River, and see if it looks like home.

And I won't go through Vigor Church. The love of my life is not there. For good or ill, it's my love of Alvin Maker that shapes my life, and I was sent to serve him in Springfield. I'll take no circuitous side trip.

He turned his horse and did not go far before he found the fork in the road where the horse had taken the wrong turning. No, be honest, he told himself. Where you took the wrong turning, hoping to flee like Jonah from your duty.

Arthur Stuart watched Alvin close, hoping to learn how to heal this kind of disease. He hadn't caught the details of how Alvin fixed up Papa Moose's foot, but he grasped the main lines of it. This woman's cancer, it was going to be harder. Once Dead Mary had pointed out what was going on in her body, then Arthur had been able to find it, but it was hard to see the boundaries of the cancer, to know where the good flesh left off and the bad began. And there were lots of little spots of it scattered here and there inside her-but there were some he wasn't sure about, whether they were cancer or not.

So when Alvin came into the house and greeted him and La Tia and Rien and Dead Mary, Arthur Stuart could hardly wait to take him to Mistress Cottoner.

Alvin bowed over her hand, and gravely shook the hand of the boy as well, though Roy was sullen about it.

Then Alvin asked if he might sit beside her and take her hands, "because this goes easier if I'm touching you, though I can do it without if you prefer."

In answer, she placed her hands in his. And there, sitting in the parlor, with all the noise of the business of camp outside, and some of it inside, too, as people bounded in from time to time, demanding a decision from La Tia or Rien, Alvin set to work changing her inside.

Arthur Stuart tried to follow along, and this time Alvin was moving slowly and methodically. Almost as if he were trying to make it clear for Arthur-and maybe he was. But always the most important details seemed to elude him. He'd see what Alvin was looking at, and he'd feel how he was seeking out the boundary between good flesh and bad. But how Alvin knew when he had it right, that's what Arthur Stuart just couldn't fathom.

But some things he could see. How, when Alvin broke down the sick flesh, he made it dissolve into the blood to be carried away. How he made sure to connect everything up inside when the cancerous parts were gone. How he left her strong.

"I feel sick," she murmured.

"But not in pain," Alvin whispered back.

"No, no pain."

"I'm almost done. Your body is helping me find all the wrong places. I couldn't do it without your own body's help. You know how to heal yourself, not in your mind, but in the flesh and bone and blood. It just needed a little ... direction. You see? There's no miracle here. My knack is no more than finding what your body already wants to do but can't figure out for itself, and . .. showing the way."

"I don't understand," she said.

"The sick feeling will pass when the last of it comes out of you at stool," he said. "By morning at the latest. Maybe sooner."

"But I won't die?"

"Can't you feel it?" said Alvin softly. "Can't you feel how right things are inside you now?"

She shook her head. "The pain's gone, that's all."

"Well, that's something, ain't it?" said Alvin.

She began to weep.

At once Roy rushed to her, put a hand