Read Online The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online Page B

can’t help if you can’t see what’s going on inside their bodies. And Arthur Stuart, I tell you, you got to be able to see pretty small.”
    “How small?”
    “Look at the thinnest, smallest hair on your arm,” said Alvin.
    Arthur Stuart looked.
    “That hair is like a feather.”
    Arthur Stuart tried to get his rudimentary doodlebug inside that hair, to get the feel of it like he got the feel of iron. He could almost do it. He couldn’t see the featherness of it, but he could sense that it wasn’t smooth. That was something.
    “And each strand of that feather is made of lots of tiny bits. Your whole body is made of tiny pieces, and each one of them is alive, and there’s stuff going on inside those pieces. Stuff I don’t understand yet. But I get a sense of how those pieces are supposed to work, and I kind of…you know…”
    “I know,” said Arthur Stuart. “You tell them how you want them to be.”
    “Or…sort of show them.”
    “I can’t see that small,” said Arthur Stuart.
    “Bones are easier,” said Alvin. “Bones are more like metal. Or wood, anyway. Broken bones, I bet you could fix those.”
    Immediately Arthur Stuart thought of Papa Moose’s foot. Was that a problem with bones? Was Alvin maybe hinting something to him?
    “But the yellow fever,” said Alvin. “I barely know what I’m doing with that, and I think it’s out of your reach so far.”
    Arthur Stuart grinned. “So what about yams? Think I could get the dirt off yams?”
    “Sure. By scrubbing.”
    “What about taking off the skins?”
    “By peeling only , my friend.”
    “Because it’s good for me,” said Arthur Stuart, and not happily.
    “Because if you do it any other way, I’ll just put the skins and dirt right back on them.”
    Arthur Stuart had no answer to that. He sat down and held a yam in his hand. “All right, which is it? Peel or wash? Cause I ain’t doing both.”
    “You asking me?” said Alvin. “You know what a bad cook I am. And I don’t think Squirrel wants me to toss these yams into the permanent soup. I think they’d kind of take over the flavor for the next couple of years.”
    “So we’ll roast them,” said Arthur Stuart.
    “Suits me,” said Alvin.
    And it occurred to Arthur Stuart that Alvin hadn’t grown up watching Old Peg Guester wash and peel taters and yams for twenty or thirty people at a time. All this was new to Alvin. Of course, if Arthur Stuart had his druthers, he’d rather be an expert on healing people with fevers or club feet.
    “So I’ll wash them,” he said.
    “And meanwhile,” said Alvin, “I’ll keep snapping beans from the back garden, while my doodlebug works on the body of the most recent person to get the fever.”
    “Who’s that?”
    “You,” said Alvin.
    “I’m not sick,” said Arthur Stuart.
    “Yes you are,” said Alvin. “Your body’s already fighting it.”
    Arthur Stuart thought about that for a minute. He even tried to see inside his own body but it was all just a confused mass of strange textures to him. “Is my body going to win?”
    “Who do you think I am, Dead Mary?”
    So it was on to snapping beans and scrubbing yams, while Arthur Stuart wondered what had made him sick. Somebody cursed him? He walked into a house that had fever in it a week ago? Dead Mary touched him? Yams?
    Where was Dead Mary? Hiding in the swamp? Traveling to some safe, familiar place? Or skulking somewhere, hoping not to get killed by those who thought her knack caused the diseases that she warned about?
    Or was she already dead? Her body burnt somewhere? Her mother too? Caught by superstitious fools who blamed them for something they had no part in causing?
    Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause—and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause—one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne.
    So why is it, Arthur Stuart wondered, that Alvin and