Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

  The driver slammed the window shut and the carriage lurched forward, quite roughly. Fishy whooped and nearly fell off her seat, then sat there laughing. “I don’t know how come you White folks don’t ride like this all the time.”

  “Rich people do,” said Margaret. “But not all White people are rich.”

  “They all richer than me,” said Fishy.

  “In money, I’m quite sure you’re right.” And then, because she was enjoying Fishy’s delight, she also bounced up and down on her seat. The two of them laughed like schoolgirls.

  * * *

  Denmark felt the knife in his pocket like a two-ton weight. It was a terrible thing he’d been planning to do, killing a helpless man like that, and it was made all the worse by the fact that White lady knew he meant to do it. He was used to being invisible, White people paying him no mind except now and then to give him a little random trouble. But this woman, her idea of trouble was specific. She knew things about him that nobody knew, not even Gullah Joe. She scared him.

  So he was glad to get away, glad to wander the streets of Blacktown until he came upon a door and suddenly he knew this was the one, though he couldn’t have said how he knew, or why he didn’t remember it from before. He set his hand on the knob and it opened easily, without a key. Once he was inside and the door shut behind him, he remembered everything. Gullah Joe. The struggle over the name-strings. No wonder he was supposed to kill that White man! The thing he did, unraveling some poor slave’s name and cutting it loose to wander who knows where....

  But he did know where. He whooped with laughter. “Gullah Joe, you won’t believe it! I met the Black girl what got her name cut loose by the devil you caught!”

  Gullah Joe glared at him. “Be maybe you not shouting me business so all can hear it in the street, they.”

  “She goes by the name Fishy,” said Denmark, close enough that he didn’t have to shout. “I don’t think it was no accident that White boy cut her name loose, cause she be rented out to his sister-in-law.”

  “I think you telling me you find this White man?”

  “I did, but he ain’t dead yet.”

  Gullah Joe slapped the table hard. Denmark was startled and his jocular mood fell away. “You lose you courage?”

  “She knew I was coming,” said Denmark.

  “A woman, she!”

  “She got him down to the battery, all them White folks around, you think I’m going to show that knife, let alone cut a White boy with it?”

  “Boy? This White man be maybe him a child?”

  “No, he a man, but he be young. Bet he don’t shave.” Denmark remembered how Calvin looked. So empty. Like his woman. That White witch knew all about her.

  Against his will, Denmark looked for her. There she was, mending clothes in a corner. She didn’t look up. It took all her concentration just to get the needle into and out of the cloth. She used to be hot-hearted like that Fishy girl. Maybe I could have won her over fairly, if I tried. If I set her free. But I had to control her, didn’t I? Just like a White man. I was master.

  “How he be?” demanded Gullah Joe.

  “Who?”

  “The devil him body!”

  “He pretty far gone, Gullah Joe.”

  “Not far enough.” Gullah Joe glanced over to the circle that contained the captive. Denmark saw that it was twice as thick with knotwork charms as it had been when he left early in the morning.

  “He been trying to escape?”

  “Be maybe he already escape, him.”

  “Well, if he did, wouldn’t we know it? Wouldn’t you be dead?”

  “Be maybe he learn too much,” said Gullah Joe. “Look! Look a-that.”

  Though there was not a touch of a breeze in the attic, one of the charms suddenly swayed, then bounced up and down.

  “He doing that?” asked Denmark.

  Gullah Joe looked at him with scorn. “No, fool, they cockroaches in the charm, they be making her bounce.”

  “How can he do that if you got him captive?”

  Gullah Joe might have had an answer, but at that moment they both heard the door opening downstairs. Gullah Joe seemed to leap straight up in the air, and Denmark was about to let out an exclamation when Joe shook his head violently and covered his own mouth with his hand as a sign for silence.

  Denmark leaned over close. “I thought you said nobody could get in here.”

  There were footsteps on the stairs. No effort was being made to muffle them, either. Clump, clump, clump. Slow progress, many feet.

  Finally Denmark realized what he was hearing. “It’s her,” he whispered. “She brought him here.”

  Her voice wafted up the stairs. “Indeed I did,” she said. “Step aside, Denmark Vesey. It’s Gullah Joe I need to talk to.”

  Gullah Joe danced around his desk like a child desperate to pee. Nobody had ever pierced his defenses so easily. No one had ever called him by name when he didn’t want them to. Whoever this was had to be so powerful that Gullah Joe hardly knew what charms to try. She had already passed by some of his most powerful ones.

  Denmark saw the witchy man’s desperation and realized that this situation was definitely not under control.

  “Calvin!” cried Margaret. “Can you hear my voice?”

  They were near the top of the stairs, now, able to peer around in the attic and see all the hanging charms. The White woman, the White man, and the slave girl Fishy.

  Margaret was listening for an answer. To her surprise, it came from the man beside her.

  “I hear you,” said Calvin. But his voice was soft, his manner distracted.

  “I’ve brought your body near to your doodlebug, Calvin,” she explained.

  Calvin’s mouth mumbled a reply. “Get me out of here,” he said, his voice flat.

  “Kill him now,” said Gullah Joe. “He body, she calling back him soul. Kill him!”

  Denmark picked up a much larger knife than the one he had concealed in his pocket. “You keep him back,” he said to Margaret.

  She ignored him completely, and instead began to lead Calvin closer to the large concentration of charms.

  “Stop, you! Don’t take him there!” Gullah Joe threw a handful of powder at her, but it blew away from her in a sudden breeze and ended up stinging his eyes and making him weep. “How you do that witchery!”

  She ignored him, and parted the charms to push Calvin through.

  “Oh, yes,” said Calvin, now sounding more like himself, though not quite that cocky yet. “This is right. Bring me home.”

  “Stop him!” screamed Gullah Joe.

  Denmark lunged between the charms and the White man, his knife drawn.

  Margaret immediately shoved Calvin hard, forcing him and Denmark both to stumble and fall into the midst of the circle that contained Calvin’s doodlebug.

  Gullah Joe howled in fury and threw himself to the floor.

  “I have a problem, here, Margaret.”

  It was quite likely the thing Calvin would have said. It had his intonation. And it was certainly true. Unfortunately, the voice was coming out of Denmark Vesey’s mouth.

  “What’s your problem, Calvin?” she asked.

  “I can’t get back into my body,” he said. “So I’m glad you tossed in a spare.”

  “That’s not a spare body, somebody’s using it,” Margaret said.

  “You think I don’t know that? But I can’t get into my own body and I can’t talk without I got one.”

  Margaret walked over to Gullah Joe. “What’s wrong? Why can’t he get back into his body?”

  “Cause she be half-dead, she! Look a-him, he steal my friend body him!”

  “Your body is dying,” Margaret said to Calvin.

  “Denmark said something about that before. You’re rotting.”

  “Give back him body!” cried Gullah Joe.

  “Then help me get him back into his own body!”

  “How I do that!” said Gullah Joe. “He dead man in him grave!”


  “He is not,” said Margaret. “Calvin, you have to heal your body.”

  “I don’t know how,” said Calvin. “I never tried to raise the dead.”

  “You’re not dead,” said Margaret. “Look, your chest is rising and falling.”

  “All right, I’m trying, but it’s not like a cut finger, I don’t know what to—”

  “Wait!” Abruptly, Margaret turned around, walked over to Gullah Joe, and dragged him to his feet. “You know!” she shouted. “Tell me!”

  “What I know?” said Gullah Joe, feigning helpless misery. “You the witchy woman, you break down all this charm, you.”

  Gullah Joe smiled and shrugged. Margaret recognized the expression, the gesture. It was the way slaves told their masters to go to hell. She looked into his heartfire and saw many things. But all his lore was hidden from her.

  “You know how to heal him,” Margaret said, looking him in the eyes, her breath on his face. “You’ve captured souls before, and you know how to put them back.”

  Gullah Joe just folded his arms and stared off into space.

  “Excuse me, Miz Margaret,” said Fishy. She pushed past Margaret and, placing her left hand on Gullah Joe’s right cheek, with her right hand she slapped his other cheek with such force that blood shot right out of his mouth. “Talk to the nice lady!” screamed Fishy in Gullah Joe’s face. “She be no enemy, you hear me?”

  “Him scare me!” cried Gullah Joe, pointing at Calvin on the floor. “Get him out on that body!”

  Fishy laid another slap on him, this time so hard that Gullah Joe fell over, his arms pinwheeling, his long knotted braids flopping away from his body. Some charm must have come loose this time, because suddenly more of his mind opened up to Margaret. She didn’t need him to tell her now. She opened two little jars on Joe’s big table, got two solid pinches of powder, one from each, then strode to the charm circle where Calvin lay and threw the powder out over him.

  She thought of Antigone as she did it, spreading dirt on her brother’s corpse despite the edict of Creon forbidding it. Am I ritually burying my husband’s brother? If I thought Alvin might be saved by letting him die ... but I’d lose Alvin. This is his beloved little brother that he played with half his growing-up years. If he dies it can’t be by my hand, even indirectly. It would destroy my life with Alvin, and wouldn’t necessarily save his. In Alvin’s heartfire, which she spent a moment checking, there was no path that did not lead to Calvin’s treachery. As long as the boy is alive, Alvin isn’t safe.

  And yet it was for love of Alvin that she didn’t let him die. The powders drifted down onto Calvin’s body, got sucked in through his nostrils, and almost at once he became more animated. He sat up. “I’m so damn hungry,” he said.

  Gullah Joe screamed. “No! Go back! Get out of here!”

  Calvin rose to his feet. “This the bastard trapped me here outside my body?”

  “It was an accident,” said Margaret. “Don’t harm him.”

  Calvin reached up, then winced and stumbled.

  “Heal yourself!” cried Margaret again.

  Calvin stood there, apparently trying something that no one else could see. “I’m getting better by the second,” he said. “Just having my bug back in my body, it’s healing me by itself.”

  At that moment, Fishy screamed. Margaret whirled around, and there was Denmark, knife in hand, staggering toward Calvin, brandishing the blade. Fishy leapt onto his back, tugging on the knife arm, and finally toppling the two of them onto the floor.

  In the meantime, Calvin wasn’t swaying anymore. He was steady on his feet, and when he turned around to face Denmark, he had the presence of mind to heat the knife so hot that Denmark screamed and flung it from him. “You got into my body!” Denmark screamed at Calvin, but now he was holding his burned hands limply in front of him. “I be wearing your castoff!”

  Calvin seemed not even to notice Denmark. It was Gullah Joe he was looking for. “You lousy bastard, you filthy trap-laying witch!” he cried. “Where are you!”

  At that moment a seagull started fluttering frantically around the room. Before it could find an open window, Calvin pointed at it and it dropped to the floor. In the instant, the bird disappeared and Gullah Joe lay there where it had been. Calvin advanced toward him, and the look of hate and rage on his face was terrible to behold.

  “Calvin, stop it!” cried Margaret. “It was an accident! They caught you in a snare but they had no idea it was you, and when they realized your powers they had no choice but to keep you confined for fear of whatever vengeance you might take.”

  Calvin regarded her in silence for a moment, then turned back to the circle he had been in. He yanked all the charms from the ceiling until the circle didn’t exist anymore. Gullah Joe’s weeping was the only sound they could hear. But when Calvin walked over to the lesser circle and began pulling down those charms too, Joe began to shout at him. “Leave that alone! I begging you! You turn them loose like that, some of names never find they way home to they body!”

  Calvin paid no attention to him. He tore the charms from the ceiling and then opened the new net, this time by hand, scattering the name-strings all over the attic floor.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Gullah Joe pleaded, weeping. “Stop him, Denmark!”

  But Denmark was sitting on the floor, weeping.

  “Tear up the name-strings,” cried Fishy. “Give the slaves back their anger!”

  Calvin looked over at Fishy and smiled nastily. “What good does anger do for anybody?”

  Then, savagely, furiously, with the power of his mind alone he unmade all the knotted strings until they lay in tatters. They all watched the seething pile of name-strings as bits of this and that flew upward from the untangling mass. And then all lay still, the bits and pieces commingled.

  Now that the deed was done, Gullah Joe stopped remonstrating with Calvin. He looked up toward the invisible sky beyond the ceiling that crouched overhead. “Go home to you body, you! All you name go home!” Then he sank to his knees, weeping.

  “What are you crying for,” demanded Calvin. He looked at Denmark, too, who was only just beginning to dry his eyes.

  “You too strong a wind for me,” said Gullah Joe. “Oh, my people, my people, go home!”

  Calvin lurched toward him a couple of steps, then fell to the floor. “I’m dying, Margaret,” he said. “My body’s too far gone.”

  “He be dying, that save me the trouble of killing him,” said Denmark. “All we done for our people, he just undid it all.”

  “No!” cried Fishy. “He be setting us free! All our rage tied up in that net, that be the bad jail of all. We be slaves then, right down to the heart. Give up ourself so we can hide? From what? The worst thing already happen, when we give you our name-string.”

  Margaret knelt beside Calvin’s body. “You have to heal yourself,” she kept murmuring to him.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Calvin whispered. “I’m filled with corruption clear through.”

  “Alvin!” cried Margaret desperately. “Alvin, look! Look at me! See what’s happening here!” She rose to her feet and began forming letters in the air. H-E-L-P. C-A-L-V-I-N. H-E-A-L H-I-M! “Look at me and save his life, if you want him to live!”

  “What you do in the air, you?” asked Fishy. “What you waving at?”

  “My husband,” said Margaret. “He doesn’t see me.” She turned to Gullah Joe. “Is there something you can do to help all those lost names return home?”

  “Yes,” said Joe.

  “Then take your friend Denmark and go do it.”

  “What are you going to do” asked Denmark sullenly.

  “I’m going to try to get my husband to heal his brother. And if he can’t, then I’m going to hold Calvin’s hand while he lies dying.”

  Calvin let out a deep moan of despair. “I ain’t ready to die!” he said.

  “Ready or not, you’ll have to do it sometime,” Margaret reminded him. “Heal yourself, as bes
t you can,” she told him. “You’re supposed to be a Maker, aren’t you?”

  Calvin laughed. Weak and bitter, the sound of that laughter. “I spend my whole life trying to get out from under Alvin. Now the one time I need him, it’s the only time he isn’t right there under foot.”

  In the ensuing silence, Gullah Joe’s voice came, soft and low. “They do it, them,” he said. “They finding the way back.”

  “Then you’d better go out into the street and spread the word through the city,” said Margaret. “They’re filled with rage long pent up. You have to keep them from rising up in a fruitless rebellion as soon as all their strong passions come back.” They did nothing. “Go!” she shouted. “I’ll take care of Calvin here.”

  Gullah Joe and Denmark staggered out into the street, going from house to house. Already the sound of moaning and singing could be heard all over the city. In Blacktown, they collared every black person they could find and explained it to them as best they could, then sent them out with the warning: Contain your anger. Harm no one. They’ll destroy us if we don’t keep to that. The taker of names says so. We’re not ready yet. We’re not ready yet.

  Inside the warehouse attic, Margaret and Fishy were reduced to mopping Calvin’s brow as he lay delirious in his fever-racked stupor. Body and soul were together again, but only, it seemed, in time to die.

  After a while a third pair of hands joined them. A Black woman who moved slowly, hesitantly. Her speech was slurred when she asked a question or two; it was hard to understand her. Margaret knew at once who she was. She laid her hand on the Black woman’s hand; on the other side of her, Fishy did the same. “You don’t gots to work today,” said Fishy. “We take care of him.”

  But the woman acted as if she didn’t understand. She kept on helping them take care of Calvin as if she had some personal stake in keeping him alive. Or maybe she was simply loving her neighbor as herself.

  13

  Judgment Day

  John Adams didn’t even bother to seat himself comfortably on the bench. It was supposed to be routine. Quill would read out the charge. The young lawyer for the defense would plead his client guilty or not. They’d be back out the door in a few minutes.