Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (41 page)

When the door of the robing room had closed behind him, John couldn’t help it. He danced a little jig all around the room, singing a childish ditty as he did.

Then he remembered what he had seen Alvin Smith do, and his mood sobered at once.

He sat in the plush chair and tried to understand what he had seen. John had never believed in knacks that defied natural law, but now he realized that he had come to believe this, not because they didn’t exist, but because no one would dare to use such powers in New England, where you could hang for it. The witch laws were wrong, not because such powers were wholly imaginary, but because they didn’t necessarily come from Satan. Or did they? Had he crippled the witchcraft laws at the very moment when he had proof that they were necessary?

No. Cooper might not have prevailed with his motions, but his point was well taken. It was only the falsified testimony of the witchers that showed any involvement of Satan with knacks. Without the witchers, knacks were just inborn talents. That some of them were extraordinary did not mean that the possessor of such a knack was either evil or good. Nor was there any evidence that the witch laws had ever been used against people whose hidden powers were truly dangerous. It was obvious that if Alvin Smith had not wished to be confined, no jail could have held him. Therefore only those whose knacks were relatively mild and harmless
could ever have been convicted and hanged. It was a law that did nothing it was intended to do. It protected no one and harmed many. It would be good to be rid of it.

In the meantime, though, there was Alvin Smith. What a strange young man! To walk away from his own trial because he thought his lawyer was going to get him off by hurting society at large—was he really that altruistic? Did the good of the people mean more to him than his own good name? For that matter, why had he stayed? John knew without asking. Just as Hezekiah had begged him not to let any harm come to Purity, so also had Alvin stayed for the trial specifically in order to link Purity’s fate to his own. But no matter what happened, Purity wasn’t going to hang. Alvin had the power to see to that.

But that wasn’t enough for Verily Cooper. Saving his friend, saving this girl, that wasn’t enough. He had to save everybody. John understood the impulse. He had it himself. He had been thwarted in it, and it hurt him to fail. Not like it hurt Hezekiah Study, of course. But at long last, Cooper had brought them both a chance to redeem their past failures. It was a good gift. Cooper might be too clever for his own good, but he used it in a good cause, which was more than could be said for many clever men.

Knacks. Alvin Smith could shed iron like melting butter. What is my knack? Do I have one? Perhaps my knack is just to hold on my course whether it seems to be taking me anywhere or not. Stubbornness. That could be a gift of God, couldn’t it? If so, I daresay I’ve been blessed with far more than my share. And when God judges me someday, he’ll have to admit I didn’t bury my talent. I shared it with everyone around me, much to their consternation.

John Adams had a good laugh about that, all by himself.

No sooner was Alvin out of the courtroom than he began to run, long loping strides that would carry him to the river. No greensong helped him at first, for the town was too built up. Yet he was scarcely wearied when he reached the place where Arthur, Mike, and Jean-Jacques were just awakening from their late-afternoon naps. For a moment they wanted to show him what Jean-Jacques had painted, but Alvin had no time for that.

“I was in court and I couldn’t pay attention to half that folderol, and my mind wandered to Margaret and there she was, her heart beating so fast, I knew something was wrong. She was spelling big letters in midair. Help. And I looked around her and there was Calvin lying on the floor of an attic in Camelot, and he’s in a bad way.”

Jean-Jacques was all sympathy. “You must feel so helpless, to be so far away.”

Mike Fink hooted with laughter. “Alvin ain’t all that helpless wherever he is.”

“It means we’re going to part company with you, Jean-Jacques,” Alvin said. “Or rather, some of us are. Arthur, you’re coming with me.”

Arthur, who had been on tenterhooks waiting to hear the plan, now grinned and relaxed.

“Mike, I’d appreciate it if you’d go on into town and meet Very. He’ll have that Purity girl with him, I reckon, or I’ll be surprised if he don’t. So if you’d tell him that he and you and her and Jean-Jacques here, you should all head for the border of New Amsterdam. I figure we can join up in Philadelphia when I’m done with whatever it is Margaret wants me to do.”

“Where?” asked Mike. “Philadelphia’s a big place.”

“Mistress Louder’s rooming house, of course.”

“What if she don’t got room?”

“Then leave word with her where you’ll be. But she’ll have room.” Alvin turned again to Jean-Jacques. “It’s been a pleasure, and I’m proud to know a man with such a knack for painting, but I’m taking Arthur and we got nobody to hold the birds still for you now.”

“So what I do now?” said Jean-Jacques. “I make you angry when I kill the bird and stuff it. My career is over if I do not kill the bird.”

Alvin looked at Arthur Stuart. “I got to tell you, Arthur, I got no problem with him killing a bird now and then for the sake of folks studying his paintings.”

Arthur stood there looking down at the ground.

“Arthur, it ain’t like I got a lot of time here,” said Alvin.

Arthur looked up at Jean-Jacques, then at Alvin. “I just got to know one thing. Does a bird have a soul?”

“Am I a, how you say, théologien?”

“I just—if a bird dies, when it dies, when you kill it, what happens to it? Is it completely dead? Or is there some part of it that...”

Arthur stood there with tears beading up on his
cheeks. Alvin reached out to hug him, but Arthur pulled away. “I ain’t asking for a hug, dammit, I’m asking for an answer!”

“I don’t know about that,” said Alvin. “What I see is like a little fire inside every living thing. Humans got a big bright one, most of them anyway, but there’s fire like that in every animal. The plants, too, only the fire is spread out all through the plant, not just in one place like it is with the animals. Margaret sees something like that, she says, only she don’t catch much more than a glimpse of what’s in the animals, like the shadow of a fire, if you get my drift. Now is that heartfire a soul? I don’t know. And what happens to it after a body dies? I don’t know that either. I know it ain’t in the body anymore. But I know sometimes the heartfire can leave the body. Happens when I’m doodlebugging, part of it goes out of me. Does that mean that when the body’s dead the whole thing can go? I don’t know, Arthur. You’re asking me what I can’t tell you.”

“But it might, you can say that, can’t you? It might live on, I mean if humans do it, then birds might too, right? Their heartfires may be smaller but that don’t mean they’ll burn out when they die, does it?”

“I reckon that’s good thinking,” said Alvin. “I reckon if anybody lives on after death—and I think they do, mind you, I just ain’t seen it—then why not birds? Heartfire is heartfire, I should think, lessen somebody tells me different. Is that good enough?”

Arthur Stuart nodded. “Then you can kill a bird now and then, if you got to.”

Jean-Jacques bowed in salute to Arthur. “I think, Mr. Stuart, that this was the question you really wanted to ask me from the start. Back in Philadelphia.”

Arthur Stuart looked a little embarrassed. “Maybe it was. I wasn’t sure myself.”

Alvin rubbed Arthur’s tight-curled hair. Arthur ducked away. “Don’t treat me like a baby.”

“You don’t like it, get taller,” said Alvin. “Long as
you’re shorter than me, I’m going to use your head to scratch an itch whenever I feel like it.” Alvin touched the brim of his hat in salute to Mike and Jean-Jacques. “I’ll see you in Philadelphia, Mike. And Jean-Jacques, I hope to see you again someday, or at least to see your book.”

“I promise you your own copy,” said Jean-Jacques.

“I don’t like this,” said Mike. “I should be with you.”

’I promise you, Mike, I’m not the one in danger down there.”

“It’s a blame fool thing to do!” said Mike.

“What, leave you behind?”

“Healing Calvin.”

Alvin understood the love that prompted these words, but he couldn’t leave the idea unanswered. “Mike, he’s my brother.”

“I’m more brother to you than he ever was,” said Mike.

“You are now,” said Alvin. “But there was a time when he was my dearest friend. We did everything together. I have no memories of my childhood without him in them, or scarcely any.”

“So why doesn’t he feel that way?”

“Maybe I wasn’t as good a brother to him as he was to me,” said Alvin. “Mike, I’ll come back safe.”

“This is as crazy as it was you going back to jail.”

“I walked out when I needed to,” said Alvin. “And now I’ve got to get moving. I need you to get Jean-Jacques out of New England without getting deported as a Catholic, and Verily and Purity need somebody who isn’t ga-ga with love to make sure they eat and sleep.”

Arthur Stuart solemnly shook hands with Mike and Jean-Jacques. Alvin hugged them both. Then they took off at a jog, the man leading, the boy at his heels. In a few minutes the greensong had them and they fairly flew through the woods along the river.

*      *      *

“He’s coming,” said Margaret.

“Where he be, you say?” asked Gullah Joe.

Outside, they heard the sound of galloping horses. The singing and wailing from the slave quarters had grown more intense as the sun set and darkness gathered.

“I can’t tell,” said Margaret. “He’s in the midst of the music. Running. He moves like the wind. But it’s such a long way.”

“We tell folks what you say,” said Denmark, “but this be too hard for them. The anger, it come so fast to them. I hear some talking about killing their White folks tonight in their beds. I hear them say, Kill them the White babies, too, the children. Kill them all.”

“I know,” said Margaret. “You did your best.”

“They be other ones, too,” said Gullah Joe. “No name come back a-them. Empty like him. More empty. They die. He kill them.”

Margaret looked down at Calvin’s body. The young man’s breath was so shallow that now and then she had to check his heartfire just to see if he was alive. Fishy and Denmark’s woman were tending him now, so Margaret could rest, but what good did washing him do? Maybe they were keeping the fever down. Maybe they were just keeping him wet. They certainly weren’t keeping him company, for he had lapsed into unconsciousness hours ago and all his futures had come down to just a handful that didn’t lead to a miserable death here, tonight, in this place.

“Why he no fix up, him?” asked Gullah Joe. “He strong.”

“Strong but ignorant,” said Margaret. “My husband tried to teach him, but he refused to learn. He wanted the results without practicing the method.”

“Young,” said Gullah Joe.

“I learned when I was young,” said Denmark.

“You never be young,” said Gullah Joe.

Denmark grimaced at that. “You right, Gullah Joe.”

“Your wife,” said Margaret.

Denmark looked at the slave woman he had bought and ruined. “She never let me call her that.”

“She never told you her name, either,” said Margaret.

Denmark shook his head. “I never call her by no slave name. She never tell me her true name. So I got no name for her.”

“Would you like to speak that name? Don’t you think that in her present state, she’d like to hear someone call her by name?”

“When she be in her right mind she don’t want me to,” said Denmark.

“Slavery makes people do strange things,” said Margaret.

“I never was a slave,” said Denmark.

“You were, all the same,” said Margaret. “They fenced you around with so many laws. Who is more a slave than the man who has to pretend he’s a slave to survive?”

“That didn’t make me do
that
to her.”

“I don’t know,” said Margaret. “Of course you made your own choices. You tried to find a wife in just the way your father did—you bought one. Then you found yourself in a corner. You thought murder was your only hope. But at the last moment you couldn’t do it.”

“Not the last moment,” said Denmark. “The moment after.”

“Yes,” said Margaret. “Almost too late.”

“Now I live with her every day,” said Denmark. “Now who own who?”

“All that anger outside—what if they kill? Do you think they’re murderers?”

“You think they not?” asked Denmark.

“There has to be something between murder and innocence. I’ve seen the darkest places in everyone’s heartfire, Denmark. There’s no one who doesn’t have memories he wishes he didn’t have. And there are crimes that arise from—from decent desires gone wrong, from justified passions carried too far. Crimes that began only
as mistakes. I’ve learned never to judge people. Of course I judge whether they’re dangerous or not, or whether they did right or wrong, how can anyone live without judging? What I mean is, I can’t condemn them. A few, yes, a few who love the suffering of others, or who never think of others at all, worthless souls that exist only to satisfy themselves. But those are rare. Do you even know what I’m talking about?”