“I thought we wasn’t supposed to touch the boy,” said Po.
“Hush up you blame fool,” said Horace Guester. “Alvin knows what he’s doing.”
I wish that was true. thought Alvin. But at least he had an idea what to do, and that was better than nothing. Now that their living skin was pressed together, Alvin could look and compare Arthur’s secret signature with his own. Most of it was the same, exactly the same, and the way Alvin figured, that’s the part that makes us both human instead of cows or frogs or pigs or chickens. That’s the part I don’t dare change, not a bit of it.
The rest—I can change that. But not any old how. What good to save him if I turn him bright yellow or make him stupid or something?
So Alvin did the only thing as made sense to him. He changed bits of Arthur’s signature to be just like Alvin’s own. Not all that was different—not all that much, in fact. Just a little. But even a little meant that Arthur Stuart had stopped being completely himself and started being partly Alvin. It seemed to Alvin that what he was doing was terrible and wonderful at the same time.
How much? How much did he have to change till the Finders wouldn’t know the boy? Surely not all. Surely just this much, just these changes. There was no way to know. All that Alvin could do was guess, and so he took his guess and that was it.
That was only the beginning, of course. Now he started in changing all the other signatures to match the new one, each living bit of Arthur, one by one, as fast as he could. Dozens of them, hundreds of them; he found each new signature and changed it to fit the new pattern.
Hundreds of them, and hundreds more, and still he had changed no more than a tiny patch of skin on Arthur’s chest. How could he hope to change the boy’s whole body, going so slow?
“It hurts,” whispered Arthur.
Alvin drew away from him. “I ain’t doing nothing to hurt you, Arthur Stuart.”
Arthur looked down at his chest. “Right here,” he said, touching the spot where Alvin had been working.
Alvin looked in the moonlight and saw that indeed that spot seemed to be swollen, changed, darkened. He looked again, only not with his eyes, and saw that the rest of Arthur’s body was attacking the part that Alvin changed, killing it bit by bit, fast as it could.
Of course. What did he expect? The signature was the way the body recognized itseif—that’s why every living bit of a body had to have that signature in it. If it wasn’t there, the body knew it had to be a disease or something and killed it. Wasn’t it bad enough that changing Arthur was taking so long? Now Alvin knew that it wouldn’t do no good to change him at all—the more he changed him, the sicker he’d get and the more Arthur Stuart’s own body would try to kill itself until the boy either died or shed the new changed part.
It was just like Taleswapper’s old story, about trying to build a wall so big that by the time you got halfway through building it, the oldest parts of it had already crumbled to dust. How could you build such a wall if it was getting broke down faster than you could build it up?
“I can’t,” said Alvin. “I’m trying to do what can’t be done.”
“Well if you can’t do it,” said Po Doggly, “I hope you can fly, cause that’s the only way you can get that boy to Canada before the Finders catch up with you.”
“I can’t,” said Alvin.
“You’re just tired,” said Horace. “We’ll all just hush up so you can think.”
“Won’t do any good,” said Alvin.
“My mama could flay,” said Arthur Stuart.
Alvin sighed in impatience at this same old story coming back again.
“It’s true, you know,” said Horace. “Little Peggy told me. That little black slave girl, she diddled with some ash and blackbird feathers and such, and flew straight up here. That’s what killed her. I couldn’t believe it the first time I realized the boy remembers, and we always kept our mouths shut about it hoping he’d forget. But I got to tell you, Alvin. it’d be a pure shame if that girl died just so you could give up on us at this same spot in the river seven years later.”
Alvin closed his eyes. “Just shut your mouth and let me think,” he said.
“I said that’s what we’d do,” said Horace.
“So do it,” said Po Doggly.
Alvin hardly even heard them. He was looking back inside Arthur’s body, inside that patch that Alvin changed. The new signature wasn’t bad in itself—only where it bordered on the skin with the old signature, that was the only place the new skin was getting sick and dying. Arthur’d be just fine if Alvin could somehow change him all at once. instead of bit by bit.
The way that the string came all at once. when Alvin thought of it, pictured where it started and where it ended and what it was. All the atoms of it moving into place at the same time. Like the way Po Doggly and Horace Guester fit together all at once, each doing his own task yet taking into account all that the other man did.
But the string was clean and simple. This was hard—tike he told Miss Larner, turning water into wine instead of iron into gold.
No, can’t think of it that way. What I did to make the string was teach all the atoms what and where to be, because each one of them was alive and each one could obey me. But inside Arthur’s body I ain’t dealing with atoms, I’m dealing with these living bits, and each one of them is alive. Maybe it’s even the signature itself that makes them alive, maybe I can teach them all what they ought to be—instead of moving each part of them, one at a time, I can just say—Be like this—and they’ll do it.
He no sooner thought of it than he tried it. In his mind he thought of speaking to all the signatures in Arthur’s skin, all over his chest, all at once; he showed them the pattern he held in his mind, a pattern so complex he couldn’t even understand it himself, except that he knew it was the same pattern as the signatures in this patch of skin he had changed bit by bit. And as soon as he showed them, as soon as he commanded them—Be like this! This is the way!—they changed. It all changed, all the skin on Arthur Stuart’s chest, all at once.
Arthur gasped, then howled with pain. What had been a soreness in a patch of skin was now spread across his whole chest.
“Trust me,” Alvin said. “I’m going to change you sure now, and the pain will stop. But I’m doing it under the water, where all the old skin gets carried off at once. Plug your nose! Hold your breath!”
Arthur Stuart was panting from the pain, but he did what Alvin said. He pinched his nose with his right hand, then took a breath and closed his mouth. At once Alvin gripped Arthur’s wrist in his left hand and put his right hand behind the boy and plunged him under the water. In that instant Alvin held Arthur’s body whole in his mind, seeing all the signatures, not one by one, but all of them; he showed them the pattern, the new signature, and this time thought the words so strong his lips spoke them. “This is the way! Be like this!”
He couldn’t feel it with his hands—Arthur’s body didn’t change a whit that he could sense with his natural senses. But Alvin could still see the change, all at once, all in an instant, every signature in the boy’s body, in the organs, in the muscles, in the blood, in the brain; even his hair changed, every part of him that was connected to himself. And what wasn’t connected, what didn’t change, that was washed away and gone.
Alvin plunged himself under the water, to wash off any part of Arthur’s skin or hair that might have clung to him. Then he rose up and lifted Arthur Stuart out of the water, all in one motion. The boy came up shedding waterdrops like a spray of cold pearls in the moonlight. He stood there gasping for breath and shaking from the cold.
“Tell me it don’t hurt no more,” said Alvin.
“Any more,” said Arthur, correcting him just like Miss Larner always did. “I feel fine. Except cold.”
Alvin scooped him up out of the water and carried him back to the bank. “Wrap him in my shirt and let’s get out of here.”
So they did. Not a one of them noticed that when Arthur imitated Mis
s Larner, he didn’t use Miss Larner’s voice.
Peggy didn’t notice either, not right away. She was too busy looking inside Arthur Stuart’s heartfire. How it changed when Alvin transformed him! So subtle a change it was that Peggy couldn’t even tell what it was Alvin was changing—yet in the moment that Arthur Stuart emerged from the water, not a single path from his past remained—not a single path leading southward into slavery. And all the new paths, the new futures that the transformation had brought to him—they led to such amazing possibilities.
During all the time it took for Horace, Po, and Alvin to bring Arthur Stuart back across the Hio and through the woods to the smithy, Peggy did nothing more than explore in Arthur Stuart’s heartfire, studying possibilities that had never before existed in the world. There was a new Maker abroad in the land; Arthur was the first soul touched by him, and everything was different. Moreover, most of Arthur’s futures were inextricably tied with Alvin. Peggy saw possibilities of incredible journeys—on one path a trip to Europe where Arthur Stuart would be at Alvin’s side as the new Holy Roman Emperor Napoleon bowed to him; on another path a voyage into a strange island nation far to the south where Red men lived their whole lives on mats of floating seaweed; on another path a triumphant crossing into westward lands where the Reds hailed Alvin as the great unifier of all the races, and opened up their last refuge to him, so perfect was their trust. And always by his side was Arthur Stuart, the mixup boy—but now trusted, now himself gifted with some of the Maker’s own power.
Most of the paths began with them bringing Arthur Stuart to her springhouse, so she was not surprised when they knocked at her door.
“Miss Larner,” called Alvin softly.
She was distracted; reality was not half so interesting as the futures revealed now in Arthur Stuart’s heartfire. She opened the door. There they stood, Arthur still wrapped in Alvin’s shirt.
“We brought him back,” said Horace.
“I can see that,” said Peggy. She was glad of it, but that gladness didn’t show up in her voice. Instead she sounded busy, interrupted, annoyed. As she was. Get on with it, she wanted to say. I’ve seen this conversation as Arthur overheard it, so get on with it, get it over with, and let me get back to exploring what this boy will be. But of course she could say none of this—not if she hoped to remain disguised as Miss Larner.
“They won’t find him,” said Alvin, “not as long as they don’t actually see him with their eyes. Something—their cachet don’t work no more.”
“Doesn’t work anymore,” said Peggy.
“Right,” said Alvin. “What we come for—came for—can we leave him with you? Your house, here, Ma’am, I’ve got it hexed up so tight they won’t even think to come inside, long as you keep the door locked.”
“Don’t you have more clothes for him than this? He’s been wet—do you want him to take a chill?”
“It’s a warm night,” said Horace, “and we don’t want to be fetching clothes from the house. Not till the Finders come back and give up and go away again.”
“Very well,” said Peggy.
“We’d best be about our business,” said Po Doggly. “I got to get back to Dr. Physicker’s.”
“And since I told Old Peg that I’d be in town, I’d better be there,” said Horace.
Alvin spoke straight to Peggy. “I’ll be in the smithy, Miss Larner. If something goes wrong, you give a shout, and I’ll be up the hill in ten seconds.”
“Thank you. Now—please go on about your business.”
She closed the door. She didn’t mean to be so abrupt. But she had a whole new set of futures. No one but herself had ever been so important in Alvin’s work as Arthur was going to be. But perhaps that would happen with everyone that Alvin actually touched and changed—perhaps as a Maker he would transform everyone he loved until they all stood with him in those glorious moments, until they all looked out upon the world through the lensed walls of the Crystal City and saw all things as God must surely see them.
A knock on the door. She opened it.
“In the first place,” said Alvin “don’t open the door without knowing who it is.”
“I knew it was you,” she said. Truth was, though, she didn’t. She didn’t even think.
“In the second place, I was waiting to hear you lock the door, and you never did.”
“Sorry.” she said. “I forgot.”
“We went to a lot of work to save this boy tonight, Miss Larner. Now it’s all up to you. Just till the Finders go.”
“Yes, I know.” She really was sorry, and let her voice reveal her regret.
“Good night then.”
He stood there waiting. For what?
Oh. yes. For her to close the door.
She closed it, locked it, then returned to Arthur Stuart and hugged him until he struggled to get away. “You’re safe,” she said.
“Of course I am,” said Arthur Stuart. “We went to a lot of work to save this boy tonight. Miss Larner.”
She listened to him. and knew there was something wrong. What was it? Oh, yes, of course. Alvin had just said exactly those words. But what was wrong? Arthur Stuart was always imitating people.
Always imitating. But this time Arthur Stuart had repeated Alvin’s words in his own voice, not Alvin’s. She had never heard him do that. She thought it was his knack, that he was so natural a mimic he didn’t even realize he was doing it.
“Spell ‘cicada,’” she said.
“C-I-C-A-D-A,” he answered. In his own voice, not hers.
“Arthur Stuart,” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong, Miss Larner,” he said. “I’m home.”
He didn’t know. He didn’t realize it. Never having understood how perfect a mimic he had been, now he didn’t realize when the knack was gone. He still had the near-perfect memory of what others said—he still had all the words. But the voices were gone; only his own seven-year-old voice remained.
She hugged him again, for a moment, more briefly. She understood now. As long as Arthur Stuart remained himself, the Finders could have found him and taken him south into slavery. The only way to save him was to make him no longer completely himself. Alvin hadn’t known, of course he hadn’t, that in saving Arthur, he had taken away his knack, or at least part of it. The price of Arthur’s freedom was making him cease to be fully Arthur. Did Alvin understand that?
“I’m tired, Miss Larner,” said Arthur Stuart.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “You can sleep here—in my bed. Take off that dirty shirt and climb in under the covers and you’ll be warm and safe all night.”
He hesitated. She looked into his heartfire and saw why; smiling, she turned her back. She heard a rustle of fabric and then a squeak of bedsprings and the swish of a small body sliding along her sheets into bed. Then she turned around, bent over him where he lay upon her pillow, and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“Good night, Arthur,” she said.
“Good night,” he murmured.
In moments he was asleep. She sat at her writing table and pulled up the wick on her lamp. She would do some reading while she waited for the Finders to return. Something to keep her calm while she waited.
No, she wouldn’t. The words were there on the page, but she made no sense of them. Was she reading Descartes or Deuteronomy? It didn’t matter. She couldn’t stay away from Arthur’s new heartfire. Of course all the paths of his life changed. He wasn’t the same person anymore. No, that wasn’t quite true. He was still Arthur. Mostly Arthur.
Almost Arthur. Almost what he was. But not quite.
Was it worth it? To lose part of who he had been in order to live free? Perhaps this new self was better than the old; but that old Arthur Stuart was gone now, gone forever, even more surely than if he had gone south and lived the rest of his life in bitter slavery, with his time in Hatrack as a memory, and then a dream, and then a mythic tale he told the pickaninnies in the years just before he died.
Fool! she cried to herself in her heart. No one is the same person today that he was yesterday. No one had a body as young as it was, or a heart so naive, or a head so ignorant as it was. He would have been far more terribly transformed-malformed-by life in bondage than by Alvin’s gentle changes. Arthur Stuart was more surely himself now than he would have been in Appalachee. Besides, she had seen all the dark paths that once dwelt in his heartfire, the taste of the lash, the stupefying sun beating down on him as he labored in the field, or the hanging rope that awaited him on the many paths that led to his leading or taking part in a slave revolt and slaughtering dozens of Whites as they lay in their beds. Arthur Stuart was too young to understand what had happened to him; but if he were old enough, if he could choose which future he’d prefer, Peggy had no doubt that he would choose the sort of future Alvin had just made possible.
In a way, he lost some of himself, some of his knack, and therefore some of the choices he might have had in life. But in losing those, he gained so much more freedom, so much more power, that he was clear winner in the bargain.
Yet as she remembered his bright face when he spelled words to her in her own voice, she could not keep herself from shedding a few tears of regret.
19
The Plow
THE FINDERS WOKE up not long after Arthur Stuart’s rescuers took him across the river.
“Look at this. Manacles still fastened tight. Good hard iron.”
“Don’t matter. They got them a good spell for sleeping and a good spell for slipping out of chains, but don’t they know us Finders always find a runaway, once we got his scent?”
If you could’ve seen them, you’d think they was glad Arthur Stuart got loose. Truth was, these boys loved a good chase, loved showing folks that Finders just couldn’t be shook loose. And if it so happened they put a fistful of lead shot through somebody’s belly before the hunt was done, well, ain’t that just the way of it? Like dogs on the trail of a bleeding deer.
They followed Arthur Stuart’s path through the forest till they came to the water’s edge. Only then did their cheerful looks give way to a kind of frown. They lifted up their eyes and looked across the water, searching for the heartfires of men abroad at this time of night, when all honest folk was bound to be asleep. The white-haired one, he just couldn’t see far enough; but the black-haired one, he said, “I see a few, moving about. And a few not moving. We’ll pick up the scent again in Hatrack River.”
Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III Page 32
