“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?”
“I know you scared,” said Denmark. “You talk when you scared.”
“We're safe enough here,” said Margaret. “I'm just… what you did to your wife, Denmark. Do you think I haven't thought of doing that to someone? An enemy? Someone who I know will someday cause the death of the person I love most, the person I've loved my whole life, from childhood up. I know that desperate feeling. You have to stop him. And then you see the chance. He's helpless. All you have to do is let nature take its course, and he's gone.”
“But you call your husband,” said Denmark. “You wave your arms and make letters in the air. Somehow he see that.”
“So I chose to do the right thing,” she said.
“Like me,” said Denmark.
“But maybe I chose too late,” she said.
Denmark shrugged.
“Maybe. It ain't all work out yet.”
“All these people thirsting for vengeance. What will they choose? When will it be too late for them? Or just in time?”
A new sound. Marching feet. Margaret ran to the window. The King's Guard, marching in Blacktown.
“Damn fool they,” said Gullah Joe. “What we do here in Blacktown? Who we hurt? They scared of us, they no remember they gots them Black pe
ople hate them, in they house, they wait down the stair, White man sleep, up the stair they go, cook she got she knife, gardener he got he sickle, butler he break him wine bottle, he got the glass, the edge be sharp. When they blood paint the walls, when they body empty, who the Black man put on that tall hat? Who the Black woman wear the bloody dress?”
The images were too terrible for Margaret to bear. She had already seen them herself, in the blazing heartfires of angry slaves. What Gullah Joe imagined, she had seen down ten thousand paths into the future. Until Calvin tore up the name-strings, that future hadn't shown up anywhere. She couldn't predict it. Calvin had the power to change everything without warning. Margaret was unaccustomed to surprise. She didn't know how to deal with a situation that she hadn't had time to watch and think about.
She walked away, into a corner of the room. She began to pray.
But she couldn't keep her mind on the words of her prayer. She kept thinking of Calvin. As if she didn't have enough to worry about. Wasn't it just like Cal? Set loose forces that could cause the deaths of thousands of people, and he was going to lie there dying through it all.
As for Gullah Joe and Denmark, she hadn't the heart to tell them, but the likeliest future, whether the slave revolt happened or not, was that the King and his men would be looking for the person who planned the revolt. It had to be a conspiracy. It couldn't be mere chance that in the morning the entire slave population of Camelot was docile, and suddenly by nightfall they were keening and howling in every house. There had to be a plot. There had to be a signal given. It wasn't hard to find slaves who, under torture, would mention the taker of names. And others who would point him out. The mastermind of the conspiracy, that's what they'd call him. They'd call it Denmark Vesey's War, as if it was war to have families murdered in their sleep, and then every third slave in Camelot hanged in retribution, while Denmark Vesey himself would be drawn and quartered, and the pieces of him hung on poles in Blacktown, lest anyone forget.
She hadn't the heart to tell him that. Nor did it matter, in the end, for one thing was certain in Denmark's heartfire: If this happened to him, he would believe that he deserved it, for the sake of what he did to his woman.
Calvin. Again he kept intruding in her thoughts. Something about Calvin. What? He can't heal himself, so what is he good for?
For something that he does know how to do.
Margaret got up from her prayer and rushed to Gullah Joe. “You've done this before, Gullah Joe. I've heard the stories, I've seen them in the slaves' memories, legends of the zombi, the walking dead.”
“I no do that,” said Gullah Joe.
“I know, you don't do it on purpose, but there he is, dead but alive. There must be something you have, something in your tools, your powders, that can wake him up. Just for a little while.”
“Wake him up, then he die faster,” said Gullah Joe.
“I need him. To save the people he did this to.”
“He no heal him own body,” said Gullah Joe scornfully.
“Because he doesn't know how. But he can do something.”
Gullah Joe got up and went to his jars. Soon he had a mixture– a dangerous one, to judge from the way he never let any of the powders touch his skin and looked away when mixing so as not to breathe in any of the dust. When it was mixed, he poured it through a hole in a small bellows, then plugged the hole tightly. Even at that, he wetted down cloths for the rest of them to breathe through, in case any dust got loose in the air.
Then he took the bellows, put the end in one of Calvin's nostrils, then waxed the other nostril closed. “You,” he said to Denmark. “Hold him mouth closed.”
“No,” said Denmark. “I can't do that. That too much like drowning him.”
“I'll do it,” said Margaret.
“What you tell husband then, this go bad?”
“It's my fault anyway,” said Margaret. “I told you to do it.”
“I do it, ma'am,” said Fishy. “I do this.”
Margaret stepped back. Fishy got one hand under Calvin's jaw and the other atop his head.
“I say go, you close him tight the mouth,” said Gullah Joe.
Fishy nodded.
“Go.”
She clamped Calvin's mouth shut. Calvin feebly resisted, desperate for breath. Nothing came in except a thin stream of air around the nipple of the bellows. Gullah Joe slammed the bellows together just as Calvin inhaled desperately. A cloud of dust emerged from around the bellows. Gullah Joe was ready for it. He picked up a bucket of water and doused Calvin with it, catching and settling the dust at the same time.
Calvin jerked and twitched violently. Then he sat up, pulling away from Fishy's grip, tearing the bellows and the wax out of his nostrils. Then he choked and coughed, trying to clear his lungs.
He looked no healthier. Indeed, patches of his skin were sloughing off, sliding like rotten fruit thrown against a window. But he was alert.
“Calvin, listen to me,” Margaret said.
Calvin only choked and gasped.
“The slaves are about to revolt. It has to be stopped. Alvin's too far away, I need your help!”
Calvin wept. “I can't do nothing!”
“Wake up!” Margaret shouted at him. “I need you to be a man, for once! This isn't about you, this isn't about Alvin, it's about doing the decent thing for people who need you.”
Some of what she was saying finally penetrated Calvin's hazy mind. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”
“Something to take their minds off their anger,” she said. “What we need is a heavy storm. Wind and rain. Lightning!”
“I can't do lightning.”
“How do you know you can't?”
“Cause I grew up trying.” He looked down at his hand. The bare bone of one finger was exposed. “Margaret, what's happening to me!”
“You were too long out of your body,” she said. “Alvin's hurrying here to save you.”
“He don't want to help me, he wants me dead!”
“Stop thinking about yourself, Calvin!” she said sternly. “I need something that feels like a force of nature.”
“I can do fires. I can set the city on fire.”
As he spoke, a couple of tiny flames danced around on the floor beside him.
“No!” cried Margaret. “Good heavens, are you insane? The slaves will be blamed for setting the fires, it would make everything even worse! Not fire.”
“I don't know how anything works,” Calvin said. “Not deep enough to change it. Alvin tried to teach me but all I wanted was the showy stuff.” He wept again. Margaret had to seize his wrists to keep him from rubbing the skin off his face.
“Get control of yourself,” she said. She turned helplessly to Gullah Joe. “Isn't there something–”
Gullah Joe laughed madly. “I tell you! No good this way! Zombi no good! All he think be, I so dead! He be sad, all sad, him.”
“What about the water?” she asked Calvin. “I know you and Alvin played with water, he told me. Making it splash without throwing in a stone– that's a game you played. Remember?”
“Big splash,” he said.
“Yes, that's right. Make it splash out there. In the river, really big splashes. Slosh the water up on the shore. Make it flood.”
“All we did was little splashes,” said Calvin.
“Well this time do a big one!” Margaret shouted, her patience wearing thin. If, in fact, she had any patience left at all.
“I'll try, I'll try, I'll try.” He cried again.
“Stop that! Just do it!”
She felt someone kneel down beside her. Fishy? No, Denmark's wife. She had a damp cloth. Gently she pressed it against Calvin's forehead. Then his cheek. She mumbled something unintelligible, but the music of it was calm and comforting. Calvin closed his eyes and began trying to make the water in the river splash.
Margaret also closed her eyes and cast about for heartfires near the river. She skipped from one to another, up and down the shor
e, on the north side of the peninsula and the south. No one was looking toward the water. They were all watching inland, fearful of the howling from the slaves.
Then one of them noticed that the boats were rocking in the water. Masts tipped, then tipped back again. He looked out at the water. Wave after wave was coming, as if from giant stones falling, or perhaps something pulsing deep under the water. Each wave was higher than the one before. They began breaking onto the docks.
More and more people were seeing the waves now, and those near the water began to run farther inland. The waves were coming up onto the streets, forming rivers that flowed over the cobblestones. Farther inland the water came until it was streaming across the peninsula. Ships battered against the dock and began to break into kindling. People ran screaming through the streets, pounding on doors, begging to be let inside.
And the slaves also pounded on the doors. Where a moment before all they could think of was murder and vengeance, now in their groundfloor quarters a new passion had taken hold: to get to the first floor before this flood drowned them. Wave after wave swept through the slave quarters. The howling and singing stopped, to be replaced by a cacophony of panicked cries.
Many of the Whites, seeing the flood, opened the doors and let their slaves, now chastened and afraid, come up to safety. Others, though, kept the doors locked, and more than one discharged a weapon through the door, warning the slaves to stay back.
There were no more thoughts of killing the White families they worked for. Already the slaves were telling the stories that made sense to them. “God be telling us, Thou shalt not kill, or I send a flood like Noah!” “Lord, I don't want to die!” Terror took the place of rage, damped it down, swept it out, drowned it, for the moment, at least.
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