“That can’t be,” said Allan. He was twenty-five, a full sorcerer himself by most standards, very handsome, more like his father now, at the height of his technical powers, with many honors and much brilliant thaumaturgy behind him, though none half as satisfying as his first exorcism rune for Esther Peters. He had, generally, the respect of everyone in Abbeville. And, it must be said, they waited eagerly for word of his first solo demonstration. This tortured Allan. He paced around the table, where Rubin sat repairing a fishing line. His belongings, rolled in a blanket, lay by the door. He pleaded, “There must be one more strategy.”
“One more maybe,” agreed the Sorcerer. “But what you need to know, you’ll learn.”
“Without you?” Allan shuddered. He saw himself, in a flash of probable futures, failing Rubin. Dishonoring Richard. Ridiculed by everyone. “How can I learn without you?”
“You just do like you did that evening when you helped Esther Peters….”
That wasn’t me, thought Allan. I was younger. I don’t know how, but everything worked then. You were behind me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried the rain-making charm over and over. It doesn’t rain! They’re only words!
The old Sorcerer stood up and embraced Allan quickly, for he did not like sloppy good-byes or lingering glances or the silly things people said when they had to get across a room and out the door. “You go home and wait for your first caller. You’ll do fine.”
Allan followed his bare feet away from the houseboat, his head lowered and a light pain in his chest, a sort of flutter like a pigeon beating its wings over his heart — an old pain that first began when he suspected that pansophical knowledge counted for nothing. The apprentice said the spell for fair weather. Fifteen minutes later a light rain fell. He traipsed through mud into Abbeville, shoved his bag under an empty table in a tavern, and sat dripping in the shadows until he dried. A fat man pounded an off-key piano. Boot heels stamped the floor beneath Allan, who ordered tequila. He sucked lemon slices and drained off shot glasses. Gradually, liquor backwashed in his throat and the ache disappeared and his body felt transparent. Yet still he wondered: Was sorcery a gift given to a few, like poetry? Did the Lord come, lift you up, then drop you forever? If so, then he was finished, bottomed out, bellied up before he even began. He had not been born among the Allmuseri Tribe in Africa, like Rubin, if this was necessary for magic. He had not come to New Orleans in a slave clipper, or been sold at the Cabildo, if this was necessary. He had only, it seemed, a vast and painfully acquired yet hollow repertoire of tricks, and this meant he could be a parlor magician, which paid well enough, but he would never do good. If he could not help, what then? He knew no other trade. He had no other dignity. He had no other means to transform the world and no other influence upon men. His seventh tequila untasted, Allan squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, rummaging through his mind for Rubin’s phrase for the transmogrification of liquids into vapor. The demons of drunkenness (Saphathoral) and slow-thinking (Ruax) tangled his thoughts, but finally the words floated topside. Softly, he spoke the phrase, stunned at its beauty — at the Sorcerer’s beauty, really — mumbling it under his breath so no one might hear, then opened his eyes on the soaking, square face of a man who wore a blue homespun shirt and butternut trousers, but had not been there an instant before: his father. Maybe he’d said the phrase for telekinesis. “Allan, I’ve been looking all over. How are you?”
“Like you see.” His gaze dropped from his father to the full shot glass and he despaired.
“Are you sure you’re all right? Your eyelids are puffy.”
“I’m okay.” He lifted the shot glass and made its contents vanish naturally. “I’ve had my last lesson.”
“I know — I went looking for you on the river, and Rubin said you’d come home. Since I knew better, I came to Abbeville. There’s a girl at the house wants to see you — Lizzie Harris. She was there when you sawed Deacon Wills in half.” Richard picked up his son’s bag. “She wants you to help her to—”
Allan shook his head violently. “Lizzie should see Rubin.”
“She has.” He reached for Allan’s hat and placed it on his son’s head. “He sent her to you. She’s been waiting for hours.”
Much rain fell upon Allan and his father, who walked as if his feet hurt, as they left town, but mainly it fell on Allan. His father’s confidence in him was painful, his chatter about his son’s promising future like the chronicle of someone else’s life. This was the night that was bound to come. And now, he thought as they neared the tiny, hip-roofed farmhouse, swimming in fog, I shall fall from humiliation to impotency, from impotency to failure, from failure to death. He leaned weakly against the porch rail. His father scrambled ahead of him, though he was a big man built for endurance and not for speed, and stepped back to open the door for Allan. The Sorcerer’s apprentice, stepping inside, decided quietly, definitely, without hope that if this solo flight failed, he would work upon himself the one spell Rubin had described but dared not demonstrate. If he could not help this girl Lizzie — and he feared he could not — he would go back to the river and bring forth demons — horrors that broke a man in half, ate his soul, then dragged him below the ground, where, Allan decided, those who could not do well the work of a magician belonged.
“Allan’s here,” his father said to someone in the sitting room. “My son is a Conjure Doctor, you know.”
“I seen him,” said a girl’s voice. “Looks like he knows everything there is to know about magic.”
The house, full of heirlooms, had changed little since Allan’s last year with Rubin. The furniture was darkened by use. All the mirrors in his mother’s bedroom were still covered by cloth. His father left week-old dishes on the hob, footswept his cigars under the bare, loose floorboards, and paint on the front porch had begun to peel in large strips. There in the sitting room, Lizzie Harris sat on Beatrice’s old flat-bottomed roundabout. She was twice as big as Allan remembered her. Her loose dress and breast exposed as she fed her baby made, he supposed, the difference. Allan looked away while Lizzie drew her dress up, then reached into her bead purse for a shinplaster — Civil War currency — which she handed to him. “This is all you have?” He returned her money, pulled a milk stool beside her, and said, “Please, sit down.” His hands were trembling. He needed to hold something to hide the shaking. Allan squeezed both his knees. “Now,” he said, “what’s wrong with the child?”
“Pearl don’t eat,” said Lizzie. “She hasn’t touched food in two days, and the medicine Dr. Britton give her makes her spit. It’s a simple thing,” the girl assured him. “Make her eat.”
He lifted the baby off Lizzie’s lap, pulling the covering from her face. That she was beautiful made his hands shake even more. She kept her fists balled at her cheeks. Her eyes were light, bread-colored, but latticed by blood vessels. Allan said to his father, without facing him, “I think I need boiled Hound’s Tongue and Sage. They’re in my bag. Bring me the water from the herbs in a bowl.” He hoisted the baby higher on his right arm and, holding the spoon of cold cereal in his left hand, praying silently, began a litany of every spell he knew to disperse suffering and the afflictions of the spirit. From his memory, where techniques lay stacked like crates in a storage bin, Allan unleashed a salvo of incantations. His father, standing nearby with a discolored spoon and the bowl, held his breath so long Allan could hear flies gently beating against the lamp glass of the lantern. Allan, using the spoon like a horseshoe, slipped the potion between her lips. “Eat, Pearl,” the apprentice whispered. “Eat and live.” Pearl spit up on his shirt. Allan closed his eyes and repeated slowly every syllable of every word of every spell in his possession. And ever he pushed the spoon of cereal against the child’s teeth, ever she pushed it away, gagging, swinging her head, and wailing so Allan had to shout each word above her voice. He oozed sweat now. Wind changing direction outside shifted the pressure inside the room so suddenly that Allan’s stomach turned violently — it was if the farmhouse, snatched up a thousand feet, now hung in space. Pearl spit first clear fluids. Then blood. The apprentice attacked this mystery with a dazzling array of devices, analyzed it, looked at her with the critical, wrinkled brow of a philosopher, and mimed the Sorcerer so perfectly it seemed that Rubin, not Allan, worked magic in the room. But he was not Rubin Bailey. And the child suddenly stopped its struggle and relaxed in the apprentice’s arms.