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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 was plain and poor, but healthy and there was plenty of it. So much, in fact, that both serving pots had soup left in them. Mama Squirrel poured them back into the big cauldron by the fire. "I never made but one batch of soup in all the years we've lived here," she said.

Even the old bread and the half-eaten scraps from the children's bowls were scraped into the big pot. "As long as I bring the pot to a long hard boil before serving it again, there's no harm from adding it back into the soup."

"It's like life," said Papa Moose, who was scouring dishes at the sink. "Dust to dust, pot to pot, one big round, it never ends." Then he winked. "I throw some cayenne peppers in it from time to time, that's what makes it all edible."

Then the children were herded upstairs into the dormitories, kissing their parents as they passed. Papa Moose beckoned Alvin to come with him as he followed the children up. It wasn't quick, following him up the stairs, but not slow, either. He seemed to bob up the stairs on his good foot, the clubbed foot somewhat extended so it stayed out of the way and, perhaps, balanced him a bit. It was wise not to follow too close behind him, or you could find out just how much of a club that foot could be.

They all lay down on mats on the floor -- a floor well-limed and clean-swept. But not to sleep. One-hour candles were lighted all around the room, and all the children lay there, pretending to be asleep while Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel made a pantomime of tiptoeing out of the room. Naturally, Alvin glanced back into the room and saw that every single child pulled a book or pamphlet out from under their mat and began to read.

Alvin came back downstairs with Moose and Squirrel, grinning as he went. "It's a shame none of your children can read," he said.

Papa Moose held to the banister and half hopped, half slid down the stairs on his good foot. "It's not as if there were anything worth reading in the world," he said.

"Though I wish they could read the holy scriptures," said Mama Squirrel.

"Of course, they might be reading on the sly," said Alvin.

"Oh, no," said Papa Moose. "They are strictly forbidden to do such a thing."

"Papa Moose showed our ragged little collection of books to all the children and told them they must never borrow those books and carefully return them as soon as they're done."

"It's good to teach children to obey," said Alvin.

"'Obedience is better than sacrifice,'" quoted Papa Moose.

They sat down at the kitchen table, where Arthur Stuart was already seated, reading a book. Alvin realized after a moment that it was written in Spanish. "You're taking this new language of yours pretty serious."

"Since you know everything there is to know in English," said Arthur Stuart, "I reckon this is the only way to get one up on you."

They talked for a while about the children -- how they supported them, mostly. They depended a lot on donations from likeminded persons, but since those were in short supply in Barcy, it was always nip and tuck, allowing nothing to go to waste. "Use it up," intoned Papa Moose, "wear it out, make it do or do without."

"We have one cow," said Mama Squirrel, "so we only get enough milk for the little ones, and for a little butter. But even if we had another cow or two, we don't have any means of feeding them." She shrugged. "Our children are never noted for being fat."

After a few minutes the conversation turned to Alvin's business -- whatever it was. "Did Margaret send you here for a report?"

"I have no idea," said Alvin. "I usually don't know all that much more about her plans than a knight does in a game of chess."

"At least you're not a pawn," said Papa Moose.

"No, I'm the one she can send jumping around wherever she wants." He said it with a chuckle, but realized as he spoke that he actually resented it, and more than a little.

"I suppose she doesn't tell you everything so you don't go improving on her plan," said Squirrel. "Moose always thinks he knows better."

"I'm not always wrong," said Papa Moose.

"Margaret sees my death down a lot of roads," said Alvin, "and she knows that I don't always take her warnings seriously."

"So instead of giving you warnings, she asks you to help her," said Squirrel.

Alvin shrugged. "If she ever said so, it would stop working."

"The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden," said Papa Moose, "now that snakes can't talk."

Alvin grinned. "But just in case she actually sent me here for a purpose, do you have anything to report to her?"

"Meaning," said Arthur Stuart, looking up from his book, "do you have anything you'd be willing to tell Old Alvin here, so he can figure out what's going on?"

"Isn't that what I said?"

"There's all kinds of plots in this city," said Papa Moose. "The older children eavesdrop for us during the day, as they can, and we have friends who come calling. So we know about a good number of them. There's a Spanish group trying to revolt and get Barcy annexed by Mexico. And of course the French are always plotting a revolution, though it don't come to much, since they can't come to any agreement among the parties."

"Parties?"

"Them as favor being part of an independent Canada, and them as want to conquer Haiti, and them as want to be an independent city-state on the Mizzippy, and them as wish to restore the royal family to the throne of France, and two different Bonapartist factions that hate each other worst of all."

"And that don't even touch the split between Catholics and Huguenots," said Squirrel. "And between Bretons and Normans and Provençals and Parisians and a weird little group of Poitevin fanatics."

"That's the French," said Moose. "They may not know what's right, but they know everybody else is wrong."

"What about the Americans?" asked Alvin. "I hear English on the street more than French or Spanish."

"That depends on the street," said Moose. "But you're right, this city has more English-speakers than any other language. Most of them know they're just visitors here. The Americans and Yankees and English care about money, mostly. Make their fortune and head back home."

"The dangerous plotters are the Cavaliers," said Squirrel. "They're hungry for more land to put into cotton."

"To be worked by more and more slaves," said Alvin.

"And to restore some glory to a king who can't get his country back," said Squirrel.

"The Cavaliers are the ones who want to start a fight," said Papa Moose. "They're the ones who hope that a revolution here would make the king step in to bail them out -- or maybe they're already sponsored by the king so he'd just use them as an excuse to send in an army. There's rumors of an army gathering in the Crown Colonies, supposedly to guard the border with the United States but maybe it's bound for Barcy. It's one and the same -- if the King came in here, in control of the mouth of the Mizzippy ..."

Alvin understood. "The United States would have to fight, just to keep the river open."

"And any war between the U.S. and the Crown Colonies would turn into a war over slavery," said Papa Moose. "Even though parts of the United States allow slavery, too. Free-state Americans may not care enough to go to war to free the blacks, but if they won the war, I doubt they'd be so stone-hearted as to leave the slaves in chains."

"Does all this have anything to do with Steve Austin's expedition to Mexico?" asked Alvin.

They both hooted with laughter. "Austin the Conqueror!" said Papa Moose. "Thinks he can take over Mexico with a couple of hundred Cavaliers and Americans."

"He thinks dark-skinned people are no match for white," said Squirrel. "It's the kind of thing slaveowners can fool themselves into believing, what with black folks cowering to them all day."

"So you don't think Austin and his friends amount to anything."

"I think," said Papa Moose, "that if they try to invade Mexico, they'll be killed to the last man."

Alvin thought back to his encounter with Austin, and, more memorably, with Jim Bowie, one of Austin's men. A killer, he was. And the world wouldn't be impoverished if the Mexica killed him, though Alvin couldn't wish such a cruel death on anyone. Still, given what Alvin knew about Bowie, he wondered if the man would ever let himself be taken by such enemies. For all Alvin knew, Bowie would emerge from the encounter with half the Mexica worshiping him as a particularly bloodthirsty new god.

"Doesn't sound like there's much useful for me to do," said Alvin. "Margaret don't need me to gather information -- she always knows more than I do about what other folks aim to do."

"It kind of reassures me to have you here," said Squirrel. "Iffen your Peggy sent you here, stands to reason this is the safest place to be."

Alvin bowed his head. He would have been angry if he didn't fear that what she said was so. Hadn't Margaret watched over him from her childhood on? Back when she was Horace Guester's daughter Little Peggy, didn't she use his birth caul to use his own powers to save him from the dealings of the Unmaker? But it galled him to think that she might be sheltering him, and shamed him to think that other folks assumed that it was so.

Arthur Stuart spoke up sharp. "You don't know Peggy iffen you think that," he said. "She don't send Alvin, not nowhere. Now and then she asks him to go, and when she does, it's because it's a place where his knack is needed. She sends him into danger as often as not, and them as think otherwise don't know Peggy and they don't know Al."

Al, thought Alvin. First time the boy ever called him by that nickname. But he couldn't be mad at him for disrespect in the midst of the boy defending him so hot.

Papa Moose chuckled. "I sort of stopped listening at 'not nowhere.' I thought Margaret Larner would've done a better job of learning you good grammar."

"Did you understand me or not?" said Arthur Stuart.

"Oh, I understood, all right."

"Then my grammar was sufficient to the task."

At that echo of Margaret's teaching they all laughed -- including, after a moment, Arthur Stuart himself.

During the day Alvin busied himself with repairs around the house. With his mind he convinced the termites and borers to leave, and shucked off the mildew on the walls. He found the weak spots in the foundation and with his mind reshaped them till they were strong. When he was done with his doodlebug examining the roof, there wasn't a leak or a spot where light shone through, and all around the house every window was tight, with not a draft coming in or out. Even the privy was spic and span, though the privy pot itself could still be found with your eyes closed.

All the while he used his makery to heal the house, he used his arms to chop and stack wood and do other outward tasks -- turning the cow out to eat such grass as there was, milking it, skimming the milk, cheesing some of it, churning the cream into butter. He had learned to be a useful man, not just a man of one trade. And if, when he was done milking her, the cow was remarkably healthy with udders that gave far more milk than normal from eating the same amount of hay, who was to say it was Alvin did anything to cause it?

Only one part of the household did Alvin leave unhealed: Papa Moose's foot. You don't go meddling with a man's body, not unless he asks. And besides, this man was well known in Barcy. If he suddenly walked like a normal man, what would people think?

Meanwhile, Arthur Stuart ran such errands for the house as a sharp-witted, trusted slave boy might be sent on. And as he went he kept his ears open. People said things in front of slaves. English-speakers especially said things in front of slaves who seemed to speak only Spanish, and Spanish-speakers in front of English-speaking slaves. The French talked in front of anybody.

Barcy was an easy town for a young half-black bilingual spy. Being far more educated and experienced in great affairs than the children of the house of Moose and Squirrel, Arthur Stuart was able to recognize the significance of things that would have sailed right past them.

The tidbits he brought home about this party or that, rebellions and plots and quarrels and reconciliations, they added but little to what Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel already knew about the goings on in Barcy.

The only information they might not have had was of a different nature: rumors and gossip about them and their house. And this was hardly of a nature that he would be happy to bring home to them.

All their elaborate efforts to abide by the strict letter of the law had paid off well enough. Nobody wasted any breath wondering whether their house was an orphanage or a school for bastard children of mixed races, nor did anyone do more than scoff at the idea that Mama Squirrel was the natural mother of any of the children, let alone all of them. Nobody was much exercised about it one way or another. The law might be filled with provisions to keep black folks ignorant and chained, but it was only enforced when somebody cared enough to complain, and nobody did.

Not because anybody approved, but because they had much darker worries about the house of Moose and Squirrel. The fact that the miracle water a few days ago had appeared in the public fountain nearest that house had been duly noted. So had the traffic in strangers, and nobody was fooled by the fact that it was a boardinghouse -- too many of the visitors came and went in only an hour. "How fast can a body sleep, anyway?" said one of the skeptics. "They're spies, that's what they are."

But spies for whom? Some were close to the target, guessing that they were abolitionists or Quakers or New England Puritans, here to subvert the Proper Order of Man, as slavery was euphemistically called in pulpits throughout the slave lands. Others had them as spies for the King or for the Lord Protector or even, in the most fanciful version, for the evil Reds of Lolla-Wossiky across the fog-covered river. It didn't help that Papa Moose was crippled. His strange dipping-and-rolling walk made him all the more suspicious in their eyes.

There were more than a few who believed like gospel the story that Moose and Squirrel trained their houseful of children as pickpockets and cutpurses, sneakthieves and nightburglars. They were full of talk about how there was coin and silverware and jewelry and strange golden artifacts hidden all in the walls and crawlspaces of the house, or under the privy, or even buried in the ground, though it would take six kinds of fool to try to bury anything in Barcy, the land being so low and wet that anything buried in it was likely to drift away in underground currents or bob to the surface like the corpse of a drowned man.

Most of the stories, though, were darker still -- tales of children being taken into the house for dark rites that required the eyes or tongues or hearts or private parts of little children, the younger the better, and black only when white wasn't available. With such vile sacrifices they conjured up the devil, or the gods of the Mexica, or African gods, or ancient hobgoblins of European myth. They sent succubi and incubi abroad in Barcy -- as if it took magic to make folks in Barcy get humpty thoughts. They cursed any citizens of Barcy as interfered with anyone from that house, so those wandering children was best left alone -- lessen you wanted your soup to always boil over, or a plague of flies or skeeters, or some sickness to fall upon you, or your cow to die, or your house to sink into the ground as happened from time to time.

Most folks didn't quite believe these tales, Arthur Stuart guessed, and them as did believe was too scared to do anything about it, not by themselves, not in a way that their identity might be discovered and vengeance taken. Still, it was a dangerous situation, and even though Mama Squirrel joked about some of the rumors, Arthur Stuart reckoned they didn't have any idea of how important their house was in the dark mythology of Nueva Barcelona.

It was a sure thing they never heard such talk directly. While he was still introducing himself as being the servant of a man staying at the house of Moose and Squirrel, people would be real cooperative but say nothing in his presence about that house. That was no help, so he soon started telling folks the equally true story that he was the servant of an American trader who came down the Mizzippy last week, and then it didn't take much to get folks talking about strange things in Barcy, or dangers to avoid. And it wasn't just slave chat. White folks told all the same stories of Moose and Squirrel.

"Don't you think it's dangerous?" Arthur Stuart asked Alvin one night, as they were both in bed and going to sleep. "I mean, anything bad goes wrong, and folks are gonna blame these good people for it. Do they know what folks think of them?"

"I expect they do, but as with many warnings and ill portents, they get used to them and stop taking them serious till all of a sudden it's too late," said Alvin. "It's how cats stalk their prey, if you've noticed. They don't hide. They move up so slow and hold still so long that their prey gets used to them and thinks, well, it hasn't harmed me so far. And then all at once they pounce, no warning at all. Except there's been plenty of warning, iffen that poor bird or mouse had had the brains to just get up and move."

"So you see it my way. They gotta get out of here," said Arthur Stuart.

"Oh, sure," said Alvin. "They think so, too. The only difference of opinion is about when this great migration ought to occur. And how they're supposed to get some fifty children of every race out of town without nobody taking notice of just how far they've flouted the race laws. And what about money? Think they've got the passage for a riverboat north? Think they can swim Lake Pontchartrain and fetch up in some friendly plantation that'll be oh so happy to let a whole passel of free black children stay the night in their barn?"

Arthur was annoyed that Alvin made it sound like he was dumb to have wanted them to git. "I didn't say it'd be easy."

"I know," said Alvin. "I was exasperated at my own self. Because you know what I think? I think Peggy sent me here for exactly that purpose. To get them out of here. Only I didn't guess it till you thought of it."

"Three things," said Arthur Stuart.

"I'm listening."

"First. It's about time you realized what a brilliant asset I am on this trip."

"Shiny as a gallstone," said Alvin.

"Second. There's no chance this is what Peggy sent you for. Because if that was what she had in mind, she would've told you. And then you could have told them that she'd given warning, and they'd do whatever it took. As it is, they're just gonna fight you every step of the way, since they don't think you and me is so almighty smart that we can see how things are in Barcy better than they can."

Alvin grinned. "Hey, you're getting to be almost worth how much it costs to feed you."

"Good thing, cause I got no plan to eat less."

"Well, it'll still take you ten years to make up for how much I've wasted on you up to now when you wasn't worth a hair on a pig's butt."

"So this ain't what Peggy wants us to do," said Arthur Stuart, "and we can be pretty sure Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel don't want us to do it. So the way I see it, that makes it just about our number one priority."

"I'll talk to them."

"That always works."

"It's a start."

"And then you'll sing to them? Cause that might do more toward getting them to move out."

"So what's the third thing?" asked Alvin. "You said three things."

Arthur had to think for a second. Oh, yes. He wanted to ask Alvin why he hadn't done anything about Papa Moose's foot. But now it seemed pretty silly to ask. Because wasn't as if Alvin hadn't noticed Moose's club foot. He'd have to be blind not to notice it. And it's not as if Alvin didn't know what he could or couldn't heal.

And besides, there was something else.

Wasn't Arthur supposed to be a prentice maker?

"Just my suggestion about singing to them," said Arthur.

Alvin grinned. "So you changed your mind about the third thing."

"For now," said Arthur Stuart. "I already used up all my brains thinking up how you ought to talk to Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel.

But there wasn't a chance to talk to Moose and Squirrel about it, because next morning five of the children were sick, screaming with pain, shaking with chills, burning up with fever. By nightfall there were six more, and the first ones had yellow eyes.

There wasn't any school now. The schoolroom became the sick ward, the benches all stacked up against the wall. None of the other children were allowed into the room. Instead they were sent outside to play among the skeeters. They could still hear the screaming out there. They could hear it in their minds even when nobody was making a sound.

Meanwhile, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were up and down two flights of stairs with water, poultices, salves, and teas. A couple of the herbs in the tea seemed to be a little help, and of course the water helped keep the fever down. But Alvin knew that even with the ones that had a rash, the salves and poultices did no good at all.

Of course he and Arthur Stuart helped -- chasing up and down stairs with things so Papa Moose didn't have too, running errands in town, keeping food in the house, tending the fire, hauling the chamber pots to and from the sickroom. Moose and Squirrel didn't allow them to come inside, though, for fear of contagion.

That didn't stop Alvin from spending most of his concentration on the sick children. Having seen the disease at the end of its course in Dead Mary's mother, he knew what to look for, and kept repairing the damage the disease was doing, including keeping the fever down enough that it didn't harm them.

He also studied the sick children, trying to find out what caused the disease. He could see the tiny disease-fighting creatures in their blood, but he couldn't see what they were hunting down the way he could with gangrene or some other sicknesses. So he couldn't find any way to help them get rid of the cause of the disease. Still, he could see that it helped to keep the fever down and the seepage of blood under control. With Alvin tending to their bodies, the disease ran its course, but quickly, and never became dangerous.

And in the healthy children, whom he examined one by one, he found that most of them were already producing the disease-fighters, and he took such preventive action as he could.

What interested him, though, was the handful of children who did not get sick. Were they stronger? Luckier? What did they have in common?

Over the days of sickness in the house, Alvin checked on each of the ones who wasn't ill. They were of different races, and both sexes. Some were older, some younger. They did tend to be the ones who read the most -- he always found them curled up in some corner of the house, always indoors with a book in their hands, now that Papa Moose wasn't patrolling to make sure none of them could be caught reading. But how could reading keep them from getting sick? Bookish people died all the time. In fact, they tended to be more frail, more easily carried off by disease.

Meanwhile, it was Arthur Stuart who kept his eyes open outside the house. The yellow fever was beginning to spread through the town, but the early cases all showed up in the area around the fountain. It was inevitable that people began to say that the "miracle water" had brought the fever back to Barcy. Many who still had any of it threw it out. But others were just as convinced it was the only cure, which God had sent in advance, knowing that the yellow fever was coming to smite the wicked.

Arthur Stuart was glad, for the first time he could remember, that white folks around here didn't pay all that much attention to a half-black young man carrying water with his master. So far nobody had linked him or Alvin to the miracle water. But that didn't mean somebody might not remember how he sat there in the plaza, waiting for his master to come back from some Swamptown shack where Dead Mary had said her mother might have yellow fever. No, said she did have it. The first victim of this epidemic.

And it occurred to Arthur that however much danger the house of Moose and Squirrel might be in, Dead Mary would face much worse, and much quicker, now that the yellow fever was back.

When this thought came to him he was in the market down in the old town, choosing whatever was cheap but still edible. He debated with himself for a moment -- what was more urgent, to get food back to Alvin, or go check on the girl?

What would Alvin choose?

Well, that made it easy. He always went for the dramatic over the sensible -- or rather, he chose whatever would cause him the most inconvenience and danger.

He'd already bought a sack of yams, and not a light one. It not only got heavier as he walked, but it made it so he couldn't run -- nothing was more sure to get him stopped than to be a half-black boy running with a sack of something on his back. Everybody knew that slaves on their masters' business always moved about as slow as they could get away with, without somebody pronouncing them dead. So when a boy of color was running, it was sure to be a crime in progress.

So he walked, but quickly, and followed, as best he could find it, the path he'd seen Alvin's and Dead Mary's heartfires trace through the swamps. He knew he didn't see heartfires anywhere near as well as Alvin did, and once they got a few hundred yards off, or mixed in with a lot of other folks, it was hopeless. But Alvin's heartfire he could follow, it was so bright and strong, and not only that, when he followed Alvin he could see, like a sort of backwash, something of where he was, the terrain he was moving through. And he had traced along with Alvin and Dead Mary all the way to her mother's house. He had seen her heartfire flicker and grow strong, even if he didn't understand what Alvin had done.

Now it took a bit of splashing around and slapping at skeeters before he finally got to the plank bridge leading to Dead Mary's house. He stood this side of the plank and clapped his hands. "Hello the house!" he called. "Company!" Which was wrong, of course -- he was supposed to call out, "Alvin Smith's servant here!" Or, if the world had not been so ugly, "Alvin Smith's brother-in-law!" Then again, he didn't know if Alvin had ever so much as told Dead Mary his name. Maybe names wouldn't mean a thing here.

And they didn't. Because no one was home.

Or if they were, they weren't answering.

He walked swiftly across the bridge and pushed open the door, half fearing that he might find them dead, murdered by fearful people. But he knew that couldn't be so -- iffen some mob blamed Dead Mary for the plague and wanted to kill her for it, they'd have burned down the house around them.

The house was empty. Cleaned out, too -- or else they didn't own a blame thing. Most likely they had realized their peril and fled. He didn't need to tell them how Dead Mary was regarded in this town.

He shouldered his sack of yams and retraced his route back into the city. Staying away from crowded streets and especially from the plaza with the public fountain, he made his way back to the house of Moose and Squirrel, scratching at skeeter bites the whole way.

He emptied the sack of yams into the bin in the kitchen, an action which Alvin, who was stirring the soup, greeted with a raised eyebrow. Which made Arthur Stuart feel guilty about how few of his errands he had finished.

"What?" asked Arthur Stuart. "It's not like I had a lot of money, and besides, I got worried about Dead Mary and her mother, and so I went out to check on them."

"I expect they were gone," said Alvin.

"You expect right," said Arthur Stuart.

"But that's not why I raised my eyebrow at you."

"Too lazy to wave?"

"You don't just dump out a sack of yams. They need washing. Or peeling."

"Why should I, when you can just talk the dirt right off the skins, or the skins right off the yams?"

"Because knacks weren't given to us for frivolous purposes."

"Oh, like the time you made me work half a summer making a dugout canoe when you could have made a canoe out of it in five minutes."

"It was good for you."

"It was a waste of my time," said Arthur Stuart. "And it nearly got you shot by that bear hunter."

"Old Davy Crockett? I ended up kind of liking that fellow."

"Peeling the yams wouldn't stop you from healing those kids upstairs the way you been doing."

Alvin turned slowly. "How do you know that?" said Alvin. "How do you know what it costs me to do that work?"

"Cause it's easy for you. You do it like breathing."

"And when you run up a hill, how easy is it to breathe?"

"Maybe I'd know what healing was like if you ever tried to teach me."

"You only just started hotting up metal."

"So I'm ready for the next step. You're working so hard on healing those children, I know you are. So tell me, show me what to do."

Alvin closed his eyes. "You don't think I wish you could?" he said. "But you can't help if you can't see what's going on inside their bodies. And Arthur Stuart, I tell you, you got to be able to see pretty small."

"How small?"

"Look at the thinnest, smallest hair on your arm," said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart looked.

"That hair is like a feather."

Arthur Stuart tried to get his rudimentary doodlebug inside that hair, to get the feel of it like he got the feel of iron. He could almost do it. He couldn't see the featherness of it, but he could sense that it wasn't smooth. That was something.

"And each strand of that feather is made of lots of tiny bits. Your whole body is made of tiny pieces, and each one of them is alive, and there's stuff going on inside those pieces. Stuff I don't understand yet. But I get a sense of how those pieces are supposed to work, and I kind of ... you know ..."

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "You tell them how you want them to be."

"Or ... sort of show them."

"I can't see that small," said Arthur Stuart.

"Bones are easier," said Alvin. "Bones are more like metal. Or wood, anyway. Broken bones, I bet you could fix those."

Immediately Arthur Stuart thought of Papa Moose's foot. Was that a problem with bones? Was Alvin maybe hinting something to him?

"But the yellow fever," said Alvin. "I barely know what I'm doing with that, and I think it's out of your reach so far."

Arthur Stuart grinned. "So what about yams? Think I could get the dirt off yams?"

"Sure. By scrubbing."

"What about taking off the skins?"

"By peeling only, my friend."

"Because it's good for me," said Arthur Stuart, and not happily.

"Because if you do it any other way, I'll just put the skins and dirt right back on them."

Arthur Stuart had no answer to that. He sat down and held a yam in his hand. "All right, which is it? Peel or wash? Cause I ain't doing both."

"You asking me?" said Alvin. "You know what a bad cook I am. And I don't think Squirrel wants me to toss these yams into the permanent soup. I think they'd kind of take over the flavor for the next couple of years."

"So we'll roast them," said Arthur Stuart.

"Suits me," said Alvin.

And it occurred to Arthur Stuart that Alvin hadn't grown up watching Old Peg Guester wash and peel taters and yams for twenty or thirty people at a time. All this was new to Alvin. Of course, if Arthur Stuart had his druthers, he'd rather be an expert on healing people with fevers or club feet.

"So I'll wash them," he said.

"And meanwhile," said Alvin, "I'll keep snapping beans from the back garden, while my doodlebug works on the body of the most recent person to get the fever."

"Who's that?"

"You," said Alvin.

"I'm not sick," said Arthur Stuart.

"Yes you are," said Alvin. "Your body's already fighting it."

Arthur Stuart thought about that for a minute. He even tried to see inside his own body but it was all just a confused mass of strange textures to him. "Is my body going to win?"

"Who do you think I am, Dead Mary?"

So it was on to snapping beans and scrubbing yams, while Arthur Stuart wondered what had made him sick. Somebody cursed him? He walked into a house that had fever in it a week ago? Dead Mary touched him? Yams?

Where was Dead Mary? Hiding in the swamp? Traveling to some safe, familiar place? Or skulking somewhere, hoping not to get killed by those who thought her knack caused the diseases that she warned about?

Or was she already dead? Her body burnt somewhere? Her mother too? Caught by superstitious fools who blamed them for something they had no part in causing?

Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause -- and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause -- one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne.

So why is it, Arthur Stuart wondered, that Alvin and Margaret and I and so many other decent people manage to bear the unbearable without having to punish anyone at all?

Though come to think of it, Alvin did kill the slavecatcher who killed Arthur's and Peggy's mother. In a fit of rage he slew the man -- and regretted the killing ever since. Alvin hadn't flailed around at any old victim; he got the right man, for sure. But Alvin, too, had needed someone to blame for the unbearable.

What about me, then? I talk big, I have a mouth like no half-black boy ought to have, my birth being so shameful, the rape of a slave woman by her master. Haven't I had unbearable things happen? My mother died after carrying me to freedom, my adopted mother was murdered by the catchers who came to take me back to my owner. People tried to bar me from school even in the north. Being nothing but a third-rate prentice maker in the shadow of the greatest maker seen in this world in many lifetimes. So much that I've lost, including any hope of a normal life. Who'll marry me? How will I live when I'm not Alvin's shadow?

Yet I never want to lash out and punish anybody, except with words, and even then I always pretend that it's a joke so nobody gets mad.

Maybe that's how God will get out of it, when he gathers us at his judgment seat and tries to explain why he let so many awful things go on. Maybe he'll say, "Can't you take a joke?"

More likely, though, he'll just tell the truth. "I didn't do it," he'll say. "I'm just the one who has to clean up your mess." Like a servant. Nobody ever says, How can we make things easier on God? No. We just make messes and expect he'll come around later and clean it all up.

That night in bed, Arthur Stuart sent out his doodlebug. He searched for Papa Moose's heartfire and found him easily enough, sleeping lightly while Mama Squirrel kept watch over the children.

Arthur Stuart wasn't used to examining people's bodies, and he had trouble keeping his doodlebug inside the boundaries. But he began to get the knack of it, and soon found the club foot. The bone was clearly different from the other tissues -- and the bones were a mess, broken into dozens of pieces. No wonder his foot was so crippled.

He might have begun to try to put the pieces back together, but it wasn't like looking at them with his eyes. He couldn't grasp the whole shape of each bone fragment. Besides, he didn't know what the bones in a normal foot were supposed to look like.

He found Papa Moose's other foot and almost groaned aloud at his own stupidity. The good foot had just as many bones as the bad one. The club foot wasn't the way it was because the bones were broken. And when Arthur went back and forth between them, comparing the bones, he realized that because Papa Moose's foot had been twisted up his whole life, none of the bones were the right shape any more to fit together like a normal foot.

So it wouldn't be a matter of just getting the bones back into place. Each one would have to be reshaped. And no doubt the muscles and ligaments and tendons would all be out of place, too, and the wrong size. And those tissues were very hard to tell apart. It was exhausting work just trying to make sense of them. He fell asleep before he understood much of anything.

Copyright © 2003 Orson Scott Card