IGMS Issue 2 by IGMS Read Free Book Online Page B

doubted the boy could hide from him if Alvin was actually seeking him out. Right now he knew that the boy was down below in the slave quarters, a place where no one would ask him his business or wonder where his master was. What he was about was another matter.
    Almost as soon as Alvin opened up his poke to take out the cornbread and cheese and cider he'd brought in from town, he could see Arthur start moving up the ladderway to the deck. Not for the first time, Alvin wondered just how much the boy really understood of makering.
    Arthur Stuart wasn't a liar by nature, but he could keep a secret, more or less, and wasn't it just possible that he hadn't quite got around to telling Alvin all that he'd learned how to do? Was there a chance the boy picked that moment to come up because he
knew
Alvin was back from town, and
knew
he was setting hisself down to eat?
    Sure enough, Alvin hadn't got but one bite into his first slice of bread and cheese when Arthur Stuart plunked himself down beside him on the bench. Alvin could've eaten in the dining room, but there it would have given offense for him to let his "servant" set beside him. Out on the deck, it was nobody's business. Might make him look low class, in the eyes of some slaveowners, but Alvin didn't much mind what slaveowners thought of him.
    "What was it like?" asked Arthur Stuart.
    "Bread tastes like bread."
    "I didn't mean the bread, for pity's sake!"
    "Cheese is pretty good, despite being made from milk that come from the most measly, mangy, scrawny, fly-bit, sway-backed, half-blind, bony-hipped, ill-tempered, cud-pukin', sawdust-fed bunch of cattle as ever teetered on the edge of the grave."
    "So they don't specialize in fine dairy, is what you're saying."
    "I'm saying that if Thebes is spose to be the greatest city on the American Nile, they might oughta start by draining the swamp. I mean, the reason the Hio and the Mizzippy come together here is because it's low ground, and being low ground it gets flooded a lot. It didn't take no scholar to figure that out."
    "Never heard of a scholar who knowed low ground from high, anyhow."
    "Now, Arthur Stuart, it's not a requirement that scholars be dumb as mud about ... well, mud."
    "Oh, I know. Somewhere there's bound to be a scholar who's got book-learnin'
and
common sense, both. He just hasn't come to America."
    "Which I spose is proof of the common sense part, bein' as this is the sort of country where they build a great city in the middle of a bog."
    They chuckled together and then filled up their mouths too much for talking.
    When the food was gone -- and Arthur had et more than half of it, and looked like he was wishing for more -- Alvin asked him, pretending to be all casual about it, "So what was so interesting down with the servants in the hold?"
    "The slaves, you mean?"
    "I'm trying to talk like the kind of person as would own one," said Alvin very softly. "And you ought to try to talk like the kind of person as was owned. Or don't come along on trips south."
    "I was trying to find out what language those score-and-a-quarter chained-up runaways was talking."
    "And?"
    "Ain't French, cause there's a cajun what says not. Ain't Spanish, cause there's a fellow grew up in Cuba what says not. Nary a soul knew their talk."
    "Well, at least we know what they're not."
    "I know more than that," said Arthur Stuart.
    "I'm listening."
    "The Cuba fellow, he takes me aside and he says, Tell you what, boy, I think I hear me their kind talk afore, and I says, what's their language, and he says, I think they be no kind runaway."
    "Why's he think that?" said Alvin. But inside, he's noticing the way Arthur Stuart picks up exactly the words the fellow said, and the accent, and he remembers how it used to be when Arthur Stuart could do any voice he heard, a perfect mimic. And not just human voices, neither, but bird calls and animal cries, and a baby crying, and the wind in the trees or the scrape of a shoe on dirt. But that was before Alvin