The Crystal City

7

Errand Boy

Verily Cooper awoke in the old roadhouse in the town of Hatrack River. It was the place where Alvin Maker was born, and where he returned twelve years later to serve his prenticeship to the blacksmith there.

It was that prenticeship that brought Verily Cooper there. The old smith had died a while ago, and since his wife had died before him, their children were now in possession of a will that gave them "one plow of pure gold, stolen by a prentice named Alvin, son of Alvin Miller of Vigor Church." Margaret Larner's father, Horace Guester, had written to Verily as soon as rumors of the will began to spread through town. Verily was the only lawyer old Horace trusted, and so here he was to try to prevent some hare-brained judge from issuing a writ demanding that Alvin produce the plow.

If only the plow didn't exist.

But it did exist, and the smith had never owned it. Alvin had forged it himself in the Hatrack River smithy. It was Alvin who had somehow turned it to gold, and it was only greed that made the old smith claim that Alvin stole it from him.

It would be an open-and-shut case, if not for the local prejudice that for many years had made Alvin out-at least among those who never knew him-to be six kinds of scoundrel. In vain had Horace insisted to all and sundry that the smith never owned that much gold, that his daughter would never have married a thief, and that everyone knew the smith was a notorious liar and sharp-dealer. It would come to court, and the judge, who had to stand for reelection this fall, might well issue a writ based on popular prejudice rather than law.

And that's why Verily Cooper, attorney-at-law, was here once again to plead Alvin's case in court. This time, fortunately, Alvin himself was not incarcerated. He was off somewhere doing his wife Margaret's bidding-as if he didn't have work of his own to do.

Not fair, not right. Judge not, lest somebody think you're jealous of Alvin's wife, for heaven's sake.

It was full dark outside. Why in the world had he woken up now? He didn't particularly need to micturate. There must have been some kind of noise. Some drunk refusing to leave the roadhouse at closing time?

No. Now he heard a stamping of horses and the voice of the stableman as he led a team off to be walked and watered and fed and stabled for the night. It was rare for the coach to push on in the darkness. But when Verily stepped to the window and opened it, sure enough, there it was, lanterns blazing-enough of them that from a distance it might be mistaken for a forest fire.

Curiosity would never let him go to sleep without finding out who had arrived at such an untimely hour.

He was not altogether surprised to find, sitting at the kitchen table, Alvin's wife Margaret, just settling in to have a bowl of her father's justly famous chicken stew.

"You," she said.

"And I'm delighted to see you, as well, Goody Smith." If she was going to be rude to him, he could reply by giving her the "courtesy" of calling her by her husband's name instead of her own.

She squinted her eyes at him. "I'm tired and I was surprised to see you up, but you have my apology, Mr. Cooper. Please accept it."

"I do, Mistress Larner, and you have mine as well."

"Nothing to apologize for," she said. "I haven't been a teacher in years, so I hardly deserve the name Larner any more. And I'm proud to have my husband's occupation as my title, since his work is all the work that's left to me."

Old Horace walked up behind her and rubbed her shoulders. "You're tired, Little Peggy. Save conversation till morning."

"He might as well know it now. I expected not to see him till morning, but as long as I've woken him, I might as well ruin the rest of his night."

Of course she had known he was in Hatrack River. Even if Horace hadn't written to her about his arrival, she would have known, the way she knew anything she cared to, what with her gift as a torch. It always bothered him more than a little, that she knew just by looking at him what lay in his future, but never took the trouble to tell him.

"What is it you want me to know?" said Verily.

"Alvin needs your help."

"Alvin unchose me as his traveling companion years ago," said Verily. "But I'm still helping him-that's why I'm here."

"Something more urgent than this."

"Then send somebody else," said Verily. "If I don't settle this business with the will and the plow right now, it's going to come back to haunt him."

"Right now," said Margaret, "he's got about live thousand people who have just escaped from Nueva Barcelona. More than half are runaway slaves or free blacks, and most of the rest are despised French folk, so you can imagine how eager the Spanish are to have them back under their thumb."

"So I'm going to do what, recruit an army and we'll all fly down there like passenger pigeons to save them just in the nick of time?"

Horace Guester clucked his tongue. "It's not impossible, you know."

"It is to me," said Verily. "That's not my knack."

"Your knack," said Margaret, "is making things fit together."

"Sometimes."

"Alvin can keep these people safe while they travel," she said. "What he needs most desperately is a place that they can travel to."

"I assume you've got a place in mind."

"Alvin made a friend down in Nueva Barcelona," said Margaret. "A failed storekeeper from the western reaches of Noisy River. His name is Abraham Lincoln."

"And he has land?"

"He's well-liked in his part of the country. He can help you find some land."

"Free of charge, I hope," said Verily. "My practice hasn't been such as to make me a wealthy man. I keep working pro bono for my friends."

"I don't know how it will be paid for," said Margaret. "I only know that if you don't go to see Mr. Lincoln, there are few paths that lead anywhere but to disaster for Alvin and the people in his care. But if you do go..."

"Let me guess-there might be some path that leads to safety."

"First things first," said Margaret. "He needs a place that will take in these homeless folk and board them and bed them for a time. There's no place in the slave lands that will have them, that's certain."

Verily sat down at the table and leaned his chin on his hands and stared into her eyes. "I'd rather stay here and get Alvin shut of this will once and for all time. Why don't you go and talk to this Mr. Lincoln?"

She sighed and stared into her bowl. "Mr. Cooper, I have spent five years of my life trying to persuade people to do the things that would avoid a terrible, bloody war. With all my years of talking, do you know what I accomplished?"

"We ain't had a war yet," said Verily.

"I postponed the war by a year or two, maybe three," she said. "And do you know how I did that?"

"How?"

"By sending my husband to Nueva Barcelona."

"He put off a war?"

"Without knowing what he did, yes, the war was delayed. Because of an outbreak of yellow fever. But then he went on and did this-this impossible escape. This rescue, this liberation of slaves."

Horace chuckled. "Sounds like he finally got him the spirit of abolition."

"He's always had the wish for it," said Margaret. "Why did he have to pick now to find the will? This escape of slaves-it will lead to war as surely as ever."

"So he eliminated one cause of war, and then brought about another," said Verily.

Margaret nodded and took a bite of soup. "This is very good, Papa."

"Forgive me for thinking like a lawyer," said Verily Cooper, "but why didn't you foresee this before you sent him down?"

She was chewing, so Old Horace answered. "She can't see that clear when it comes to Alvin. Can't see what all he's going to choose to do. She can see some things, but not most things, when it comes to him. Which I think is a plain mercy. A man who has a wife can see everything he does and thinks and wants and wishes, well, I think he might as well kill himself."

Horace was joking, and so he laughed, but Margaret didn't take it as a joke. Verily saw her tears drop into the stew.

"Ho, now," he said, "that's already salted well enough, I can swear to that, I had some for supper."

"Father is right," she said. "Oh, poor Alvin. I should never have married him."

Verily had actually had that thought occur to him several times in the past, and since he knew she could see into his heartfire, he didn't bother trying to lie and reassure her. "Maybe so," he said, "but as you already know, Alvin's a free chooser. He chose you the way most folks choose a mate, not seeing the end, but wanting to find his way to it with his hand in yours."

She placed her hand on his and gave him a weak smile. "You have a lawyer's way with words," she said.

"What I said is true," said Verily. "Alvin chose you because of who you are and how he feels about you, not because he thought you'd always make right choices."

"How he feels about me," she said, and shuddered. "What if he finds out that I sent him to Nueva Barcelona knowing that by going there, he'd cause the deaths of hundreds of souls?"

"Why does he have to find out?" said Verily. But he knew the answer already.

"He'll ask me," said Margaret. "And I'll tell him."

"He caused the plague of yellow fever, is that it?"

"Not on purpose, but yes."

"And you knew he would."

"It was the only thing that would stop the war that the King already planned. His invasion of Nueva Barcelona would have forced the United States to invade the Crown Colonies in order to keep the King from sealing off their access to the sea. But the yellow fever prevented the King's army from approaching the city. By the time the fever is gone, so will be all the King's agents inside the city. That road to war is closed."

"So at the cost of those who die of the fever," said Verily, "you saved the lives of all who would have died in the war."

She shook her head. "I thought it would. But Alvin reopened the door without realizing it, and the war that will come now is every bit as bloody."

"But you delayed it a few more years," said Verily.

"What good is that?"

"It's two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It's not a small thing, those years."

"Maybe you're right," said Margaret. "But that won't keep Alvin from hating me for sending him down there to cause hundreds of deaths in order to postpone hundreds of thousands of others."

"Hush now," said Horace. "He's not going to hate you."

But Verily wasn't sure. Alvin wasn't one to appreciate being manipulated into committing what he would see, no doubt, as a terrible sin. "Why couldn't you just tell the man and let him decide for himself?"

She shook her head. "Because every path that included me telling him led to him doing something else to prevent the war-and all those things would have failed, and most of those paths ended with him dead."

She burst into tears. "I know too much! Oh! God help me, I'm so tired of knowing so much!"

Horace was sitting beside her in a moment, his arm around her shoulder. He looked at Verily, who was about to try to offer comfort. "She's tired, and you were wakened out of your sleep," said Horace. "Go to bed, as she will too. Tomorrow is time enough for talk."

As usual, Horace knew just the right thing for everyone to do to be content. Verily got up from the table. "I'll go and do what you asked," he said to Margaret. "You can count on me to help find a place for Alvin's people."

She nodded slightly, her face still hidden in her hands.

That was all the good-night he was going to get, and so he headed back along the hall toward his room. At first he was filled with irritation at having to set aside his plan to free Alvin from the smith's litigious heirs. But by the time he got to his room he had already let go of that. It wasn't his case any more. He had other work now, but it hadn't yet begun. And so, when he lay back down in his bed, it took him little time to sleep, for at the moment he had no worries.

In the morning, he didn't see Margaret after all. There was a note waiting for him on the floor of his room, giving the name of Abraham Lincoln's town and how to get there.

At breakfast the old innkeeper looked grave. "I'm worried about the baby," said Horace. "She started throwing up last night. She's worn herself out and she's sick as a dog. She's asleep now, but if she loses this baby too, I swear I don't know but what she'll lose her mind."

"So I should go on without talking to her?"

"Everything you need to know is on that paper."

"I doubt that," said Verily.

"All right then," said Horace with a wan smile. "Everything she thinks you need to know."

Verily Cooper matched his smile, then went back to his room to get his things together for the long westward ride. If he'd only stayed in Vigor Church instead of coming here to Hatrack River, he'd have only one-third the journey now. Sometimes it felt to him as though he'd spent most of his life traveling, and never quite got to anywhere that mattered.

Then again, that might be as good a description of what life was supposed to be as anyone ever thought of. The only real destination was death, and our lives consisted of finding the most circuitous and pleasant path to get there.

He was on horseback and on his way hours before noon, so the sun was still at his back. It would be nice when they finally got the railroad through clear to the Mizzippy. If they laid enough tracks, a man wouldn't even need to keep a horse. But for now it was either ride the horse or struggle to keep the horse from going crazy on a flatboat or a steamboat and he wasn't inclined to try either.

He thought, as he rode, about how Alvin and Margaret were the two most powerful, gifted, blessed people on this continent, without question, and yet Margaret was desperately sad and frightened all the time, and Alvin wandered about half-lost and melancholy, and not for the first time Verily thought it was a good thing to be a man of relatively ordinary gifts.