Free The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI by Orson Scott Card

Margaret and I and so many other decent people manage to bear the unbearable without having to punish anyone at all?
    Though come to think of it, Alvin did kill the slavecatcher who killed Arthur’s and Peggy’s mother. In a fit of rage he slew the man—and regretted the killing ever since. Alvin hadn’t flailed around at any old victim; he got the right man, for sure. But Alvin, too, had needed someone to blame for the unbearable.
    What about me, then? I talk big, I have a mouth like no half-black boy ought to have, my birth being so shameful, the rape of a slave woman by her master. Haven’t I had unbearable things happen? My mother died after carrying me to freedom, my adopted mother was murdered by the catchers who came to take me back to my owner. People tried to bar me from school even in the north. Being nothing but a third-rate prentice maker in the shadow of the greatest maker seen in this world in many lifetimes. So much that I’ve lost, including any hope of a normal life. Who’ll marry me? How will I live when I’m not Alvin’s shadow?
    Yet I never want to lash out and punish anybody, except with words, and even then I always pretend that it’s a joke so nobody gets mad.
    Maybe that’s how God will get out of it, when he gathers us at his judgment seat and tries to explain why he let so many awful things go on. Maybe he’ll say, “Can’t you take a joke?”
    More likely, though, he’ll just tell the truth. “I didn’t do it,” he’ll say. “I’m just the one who has to clean up your mess.” Like a servant. Nobody ever says, How can we make things easier on God? No. We just make messes and expect he’ll come around later and clean it all up.
    That night in bed, Arthur Stuart sent out his doodlebug. He searched for Papa Moose’s heartfire and found him easily enough, sleeping lightly while Mama Squirrel kept watch over the children.
    Arthur Stuart wasn’t used to examining people’s bodies, and he had trouble keeping his doodlebug inside the boundaries. But he began to get the knack of it, and soon found the club foot. The bone was clearly different from the other tissues—and the bones were a mess, broken into dozens of pieces. No wonder his foot was so crippled.
    He might have begun to try to put the pieces back together, but it wasn’t like looking at them with his eyes. He couldn’t grasp the whole shape of each bone fragment. Besides, he didn’t know what the bones in a normal foot were supposed to look like.
    He found Papa Moose’s other foot and almost groaned aloud at his own stupidity. The good foot had just as many bones as the bad one. The club foot wasn’t the way it was because the bones were broken. And when Arthur went back and forth between them, comparing the bones, he realized that because Papa Moose’s foot had been twisted up his whole life, none of the bones were the right shape any more to fit together like a normal foot.
    So it wouldn’t be a matter of just getting the bones back into place. Each one would have to be reshaped. And no doubt the muscles and ligaments and tendons would all be out of place, too, and the wrong size. And those tissues were very hard to tell apart. It was exhausting work just trying to make sense of them. He fell asleep before he understood much of anything.

4
La Tia
    The rumor mill went on. The yellow fever only added to it—who’s sick, who’s dead, who fled the city to live on some friend’s plantation until the plague passed.
    The most important story, though, was no rumor. The army that the King had been assembling was suddenly ordered back home. Apparently the King’s generals feared the yellow fever more than they feared the military might of Spain.
    Which might have been a mistake. The moment the threat of invasion disappeared, the Spanish authorities in Nueva Barcelona began arresting Cavalier agents. Apparently the Spanish had been aware of the plots all along—they heard the same rumors as everyone else—and had