Enigmatic Pilot

CHAPTER 1. Awakening West

IT WAS NOT THE SLURPING OF THE PADDLE-WHEEL WOOD WHACKING the water that first penetrated his consciousness. It was another softer, nearer sound. After all the horrors and the tremors-the weevils burrowing into his flesh and the clam-sweat-salt-dry-throat retching and gulping of buggy water-he now heard a persistent nibbling rasp just above his head. At first he thought he was back in the stable in St. Louis, but the stench of the urine-soaked hay and the wafts from the glue renderer’s were different. Instead, he smelled the odor of damp hemp and warping lumber, with traces of vinegar and gunpowder-and somewhere the scent of a woman’s underthings. He blinked, trying to focus-to both remember and forget.

Gradually, Hephaestus Sitturd came to accept that he was lying in the dingy waterline cabin of a steamboat, going where he could not yet fix in his brain. The noise he had been hearing was an industrious little mouse, pecking at something in a hammerhead-size hole just above a bent-slat rail that ran across the wall behind the rope-hinged excuse for a bed. The creature’s nose poked out at him once or twice, sniffing for news of danger or sustenance. After the insidious roaches and the rats, and the other beady-eyed nameless things that had tormented him in his delirium, the affront of this actual rodent might have seemed a cruel reality to awaken to, but it struck the stretched-thin blacksmith instead as innocent and reassuring. Despite the wagon wreck he had made of his life, he was still in the world-and not alone. There were others struggling just as precariously as he. He held out his right hand and the mouse’s nose twitched at the lip of the hole, then withdrew in a scurry of tiny-clawed feet.

Hephaestus recognized that, humble though they were, his surrounds were much more gracious and hygienic than where he had been previously, even though he could not summon a precise image of what that had entailed. He noted the presence of his son’s and his wife’s things. They had been huddling on the floor, it appeared, while he had occupied the narrow bunk. Inching back the sheet of nubbled muslin, he saw that he was naked. One of his shins sported a livid bruise, which brought to mind a baby bluebird he had found at the door of the forge back in Zanesville one spring. A boil on his left thigh had been lanced and dressed, and a purulent sore on the ankle of his deformed foot was sealed and calming beneath a dab of lanolin. His arms were flaky and pocked, but his body did not stink. Rapture, he guessed, had managed to bathe him in his trials. He thought that he could recall her firm hands pouring over him like tepid water.

His ribs stuck out like the skeleton of an abandoned boat; he seemed to remember blacking out with an old boot full of mash. The beard he had managed to accumulate more than grow had been trimmed, and the lump of pig iron that had been his gut had managed to relax back into sausage skin and digestive juice. He felt right hungry. For pickled eggs and black loaf bread, a stuffed squab or a nice piece of charred fish.

He would have given himself over to an imagined banquet had he not become aware of another kind of longing rising up between his legs. The insistent appendage was as thick as a scrubbed yam and as stiff as one of his old farrier implements, but with a peeled, raw quality that reminded him of a flayed squirrel. He stared at it. A tear formed in the glass of his rifle eye, one pinched branch-water pearl of thankfulness and disbelief. It was in this condition that Rapture discovered her husband. Lost forever for safekeeping and now returned, home to his fugitive family, sheltering in a mouse hole of their own and steaming west. West!

She jetted out a whisper that might have been “Mussiful Gawd” but which sounded as hopeful to Hephaestus as a kettle just beginning to purr on a flame. A rough swish of linsey-woolsey and his tight stone tear became a river to soak her bosom when she stepped over the piled garments on the floor to first embrace and then slip astride him.

After a while the kettle began to rattle, and at last whistled, then stilled to a riffling sob. Wherever it was they were right then, Hephaestus knew that he was indeed home-returned from the haunted wilderness of himself to the vagrant sanctuary of their lives together. Whatever scraps they would have to scrounge and whatever risks and rapids they had yet to run, he knew that he would remain, and remain himself. Hurt but healing.

Many tears were shed then by both husband and wife. Tears of anger and tears of gratitude. When the last cascade had run dry, the grief and celebration still seemed to seep from the pores of their two hushed forms, like the last residual drops of alcohol that had poisoned Hephaestus and the desperate, shamed memories of what Rapture had had to do to survive in St. Louis-and all that she had done to keep her mate alive and her family from foundering irrevocably since their departure under weird and watchful eyes.

Jolted to the core by the half-fathomed report of her son’s undertakings-fearing news every day of her husband’s drowned and bloated corpse wheeled to greet her on a donkey cart by some hogshead Samaritan with a hand out for compensatory silver, and then to be confronted with the miraculous abomination of Hephaestus’s rum-keg carcass still breathing-she had been hard pressed to keep her wits about her. So much had happened to unhinge her. The dandy with the humped back and his dark henchmen. The midget and the woman with the hairy mole. That fetid cabin with its guns and torches, and the signals to unseen overseers-they swirled in her thoughts like backwash around a towhead.

Leaving the Mississippi, they had not left their tribulations behind. Far from it. For what seemed like the worst part of her whole life, Rapture had been forced to nurse her sodden, mumbling husband at close quarters with no relief. Bullboats, canoes, Mackinaws, and keelboats were all used on the Missouri, which was notorious for its obstacles and its obstreperous nature, but the vagaries of the spring and autumn high water, along with increased demand for goods and transit west had favored the rise of the steamboat, which flourished.

Now, in between the dry of summer and the heavy fall rains, the going was particularly difficult and muddy, even for a boat with iron muscle. Three times they had been forced to halt, once for an entire day, because of treacherous snags and sandbars. Then a wild downpour after a thunderstorm unleashed a flash torrent that dredged up keel-killing logs and the debris of old wrecks, making progress slower still. A “wood hawk,” one of the local shore dwellers hired to help the fueling parties find timber to feed the ravenous boilers, had turned out to be in cahoots with a ruffian gang who tried to board the steamboat and were repelled by gunfire, which left a crew member wounded and two of the villains dead. A fast boat at the time could have reached Independence in eight days. They had already been gone five and were not even as far as Jefferson City.

Hephaestus had been racked with fever and visions while all this was happening. Meanwhile, Lloyd had remained locked in a catatonic state of retreat and denial. In all the years, Rapture had never seen her son so remote, so enclosed. She had managed, because she had had no choice, to accept that he had endeavored, by some means that remained mysterious to her, to attempt to fly. In a dirt-floor cabin, from a man with a lump on his back the size of a feather pillow, she had gathered in some uncomprehending way that her son had been the perpetrator of a deliberate and unnatural spectacle that had cost at least one wretched slave his life and had permanently jeopardized their safety in St. Louis and perhaps all America.

But these bizarre intelligences had not shed any light that she could see by. With the demonic, muffled counterpoint of Hephaestus’s ravings, they had just served to make the voyage they were committed to now seem more amphibious and ghostly, until she began to doubt her own sanity, and the pain in her feminine heart began to strain her resilient will to live. The tears and the lovemaking released her. It was Lloyd’s return to the cabin that wrenched the couple back to reality and the tenuous situation they found themselves in once more.

“He better now,” Rapture announced, trying to adjust her dress and bodice back into place.

“I see that,” the boy sniffed, his eyes as green and hard as old Chinese jade.

Hephaestus craned his neck, fearing for an instant that he had been under some dire spell longer than he imagined, so much older and cynical did his young son seem.

Lloyd wore a knitted skullcap that Schelling had stuck on his head to make him less recognizable, with an orphanage long shirt over short cotton sack pants and rough leather shoes. The blacksmith’s mind flitted back to the horror in the eyes of Phineas, the vivisected rabbit. At last he found his voice.

“I’m sorry, Lloyd,” he said. “I’ve-I’ve made a mess of things. I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do,” the boy returned, but despite the blankness of his tone his father spied a flicker of something warmer and human in the cold green eyes.

“It won’t ever happen again,” the scrawny blacksmith vowed with a clearer voice. “Now, tell me what has happened and we will make a plan. A new plan.”

Rapture’s eyes darted to her son, and then and there she decided an issue that had been weighing on her soul since boarding the boat. They would say nothing about Lloyd’s misadventures in St. Louis. There was nothing she could say that she understood herself anyway. Maybe the black times behind them would drift into obscurity like some washed-away raft they passed in the night. There was at least no use in troubling her troubled husband with uncertain details now. Now was the time for simple known things, and for coming together.

She was relieved when Lloyd assumed an Indian squat on the floor amid their few belongings and remained still but far more attentive than she had seen him in days, as she recounted in broad, general terms her conclusion that getting them out of St. Louis and back on their way to Texas and whatever lay ahead for them was their best course, and so had brought about their departure. Lloyd’s face betrayed no emotion as she steered around the prickly matters, hoping that her husband’s clouded memory would stay clouded. The money they had now, she said, she had stolen from one of her employers-a desperate act that she was not proud of but which seemed necessary given Hephaestus’s fragile condition. His discovery and retrieval were credited to a free Negro who frequented the fish market in town, who had found him passed out in a shack downriver. The senior Sitturd seemed too exhausted from his ordeal and too ashamed to inquire further. Like his wife, all he found himself caring about and able to face up to was where they were at the moment, and where they were going.

In truth, their current position had to be deemed a significant improvement over the near-end of the world in St. Louis. They had lower-deck cabin passage paid to Independence, Missouri, on board a side-wheeler called the Defiance, built in Louisville fifteen years before and overhauled one too many times. Just under two hundred feet long, with a thirty-five-foot beam and a cargo capacity of five hundred tons and carrying six hundred, it was a “floating palace” that had been forced to earn its keep. In its heyday the Defiance had transported explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, mountain men, and missionaries, but more recently it had given passage to settlers and would-be western travelers, some laden already with overloaded wagons and visions of vast expanses of free land to turn into farms. Its cargo manifest was as miscellaneous as its passengers: Hudson’s Bay blankets, indigo cloth, frock coats, flannel shirts, Marseilles vests, and fancy calico shirts; Indian trading trinkets (like wampum moons and medals featuring a representation of John Jacob Astor on one side and peace and friendship on the reverse), horse bells, yellow bullet buttons, gun worms, awls, padlocks, oval firesteels, black-barley corn heads, octagon brass barrel pistols, hunter’s clay pipes, tinned rivets, iron kettles, refined borax, powder horns, oakum, pitch, pilot bread and Havana sugar; violin bows and Manila rope, emery paper, twist tobacco, sealskin trunks and sealing wax, rattail files and trap chains, sturgeon twine and silver gorgets; ladies’ Moroccan heel pumps and men’s thick brogans, ivory combs and silk handkerchiefs, bags of shot and pounds of chalk-white beads; butcher knives and boxes of thimbles, ground ginger, Seidlitz powders and lucifer matches; cod fish and pepper sauce, lime juice, Lexington mustard, bacon, rosin, foolscap paper, salted mackerel, and barrels of molasses (and, for Fort Atkinson and Fort Benson, plenty of alcohol and gunpowder).

The Sitturds’ fellow passengers included such a motley assortment of failures, fanatics, coarse-shirt dirt growers, and the odd silk-hatted scoundrel, they had been able to go relatively unnoticed so far, and God willing might yet arrive at their destination without drawing unwanted attention, despite the endless delays. They had a dwindling but sufficient number of provisions that Schelling had supplied, and with Hephaestus regaining clarity, and more money in their pockets than they had had in a long while, there at least appeared to be cause for some little optimism. There was also before them again the prospect of Micah’s legacy of Dustdevil, a tarnished star that had renewed in luster.

“We have a whole new life ahead of us now,” Hephaestus announced, as if he had just found the money that had been stolen by the pickpocket back in St. Louis.

“Hopen net wus’den ’ebbeh,” Rapture remarked.

“Now, don’t be thinkin’ like that, Murruh,” the revived souse insisted. “Who knows but that the jerkiest part of the road is well behind and that maybe a treasure awaits us. The treasure of a fresh start, if nothing else-which seems mighty valuable to me.”

“No moa saa’bints en slabes,” his wife answered, as if that would be good enough for her.

No, thought Lloyd. No more servants and slaves-at least not the way she meant. He thought again of the wretched thing he had done on Fourth Street. Did anyone know what lay ahead for them? A trap? Prosperity? Safety? Damnation?

His mind once more moved to the uncle he had never met, the man they hoped to find still alive… the cryptic words of his letter, which had set their rickety wheels in motion. So many enigmas-and that made him think once more of Mother Tongue, hiding like a spider, feeling for the trembling in her web. Was she another shape the darkness took-or an angel of deliverance, a guide to the labyrinth? He had no answers, and so he said to his parents, “Well, it will be good to have a home again-that’s ours. If we get there.”

The Missouri is now and was then a wilder river than the Mississippi, requiring more alertness from its captains and crews, especially since the Defiance was a tawdrier vessel than her competitor cousins. Like a dusky maiden lurking on the edge of a debutante’s ball, her attempt at Gothic finery was too soiled by hard circumstance to afford much grandeur anymore. And perhaps she heard, in the escapements and the jeering bells of the stern-wheelers that were beginning to gain prominence, that her days were numbered. In any case, her piston rods were well greased and her heavy heart thumped in time to the deeper rhythm of pioneer expectation, as if there was something animate and fulfilled in her to be again heading west.

The Sitturds were once more embarked on a journey, and so had rediscovered their place together. Even Lloyd could not ignore the change in mood since seeing his father’s remorseful but lucid eyes greet him across the cabin. Like sleepers awakened from a communal nightmare, they reunited now with a common will. And if it was a delicate task getting the sobered drunkard out of the bunk and dressed again, and then to limp-a stealthy expedition up into the open air, lingering in the shadow of the pilothouse on the hurricane deck with the escape pipes belching-they all rose to the challenge.

It was just on sunset, and they were halfway on their voyage west to the frontier-fueled outposts of western Missouri. A fresh autumn breeze strengthened as the blood sun sank. A lone chicken hawk circled beneath high smoke-signal clouds, and the artery of muddy green river lapped up to the ravaged base of rampart sand cliffs that flowed and smeared out like time itself into the starved suggestion of lonely prairie beauty that lay beyond the shoreline chains of surging settlement. Voices echoed in the speaking tube, but the family from Zanesville was listening farther away. Rapture was trying to hear the spirits of her lost parents, the ghost music of places she knew that she would never see again. Hephaestus was trying not to hear the demons of backsliding degradation and oblivion, and to catch some whisper on the wind of his brother and the promise of what awaited them in Texas. Young Lloyd, who no longer looked young-at least not the way a child should look-was listening for pursuit, still reeling from his attempt to mate with the sky: the terrible inviting softness of death, the fatalities he had caused. Somewhere, out there in the distance, or perhaps as close as on board the same boat, were forces that he barely understood, if at all. But the piles of cloud above the river gave no sign of collusion with anything other than the setting sun and the strident smashing of the wooden wheel in the current.

It was this pervasive sense of doubt that had kept the boy sharp enough to stay free of the clutches of a deep depression from which he might not have recovered-a survival instinct channeled through the fine filaments of his heightened intellect, which kept him linked to the world despite an anguish and a regret that made his father’s look paltry. The voices of the past-Zanesville bullies tormenting him, St. Ives and Miss Viola, the professor, Schelling, Mother Tongue, Brookmire, the black man beneath the courthouse crying out to heaven, and the insane chatter of the doomed Martian Ambassadors-they were all stilled in the splash of the steam-driven wheel and the new look of longing in his father’s eyes.

Lloyd reasoned that he must maintain not just his mother’s pretense about what had caused them to leave St. Louis but the much larger and more complex fantasy of a world without the Spirosians and the Vardogers. “I cannot tell them about what I do not understand myself,” he admonished himself. “They have lost innocence enough, better to keep these other, longer shadows to myself.” And so he did.

Both adults experienced a wave of reassurance in the few remarks their son offered before they all slipped back down to their cabin for refreshment and rest. They chose to forgo the dining saloon (as much to avoid what passed for the “boiled meat” as to avoid questions). There was still a span of river to survive, not to mention the so-called Indian Frontier, which at that moment in history extended from the Lake of the Woods in the north to Galveston Bay in the south (and, of course, was being pushed inexorably west).

All the known routes to the Pacific were alive with white settlers. The great thrust of migration along the Oregon Trail had commenced in earnest, making mad boomtowns of places like Council Bluffs and Omaha. The Potato Famine in Ireland and the war with Mexico were about to send more shock waves rippling out through the long grass. Then the insanity of the gold rush. Once peaceful relationships with tribes of Indians across the continent had already strained to the point of bloodshed and were building in intensity, just as the tensions over slavery and the great ideological and cultural differences between the North and the South were mounting to what would end up being a sprawling red mountain of corpses in the years to come.

Farmers, freed slaves, miners, Mormons, and families like theirs came spilling domesticated animals and heirlooms in the hope of finding some semblance of home, disrupting cycles of wild game and dispossessing native tribes on a scale and at a speed unseen on the planet before. The newspaper editor John O’ Sullivan was about to coin the phrase “manifest destiny.” It insinuated itself into even the Sitturds’ cloistered cabin, and began to make Lloyd restless.

Rapture and Hephaestus, quite content to have some moments alone, allowed the boy to slip out after darkness fell. He had made a habit of this late at night, when his mother collapsed in discomposed sleep on the floor beside the tortured patriarch, always on the lookout for some stranger who might know more about them than he would like. Gorging on the sustenance of rediscovered intimacy, his parents allowed him to exit on the last stroke of the eleventh bell, imagining that he would slink around the boat like their cabin-mate mouse.

It was in fact a very different plan the boy had in mind now that his father had arisen from his stupor. But this plan was to be subverted, and it was a little after yet another midnight when Lloyd found out that there was indeed a stranger worth knowing about on board the Defiance. Someone stealthier than any mouse.

CHAPTER 2. A Different Kind of Darkness

THE WIND HAD DIED DOWN, BUT THERE WERE NO STARS OR MOONLIGHT visible, for a low ceiling of cloud had fallen over the river, warming the air and dulling all sounds. Almost all the other passengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the poop-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars.

The Sitturds’ fellow travelers were a furtive lot in Lloyd’s view, a ragtag of prayer-sayers, blue-sky believers, runaway thieves, and would-be saints mixed up like nails and raisins in a jar. On nights before, he had heard the men playing. He had smelled their smoke and cheap whiskey, and caught the occasional loud oath or imprecation giving way to murmured bluffing and wagering. More than once he had felt the pang of memory, pondering where St. Ives and Miss Viola were-itching to be able to join the game and clean the shaving brush-bearded simpletons out of every pot. The thought of having to live in hiding even for the duration of their river journey sickened him, the stupid skullcap pulled down tight on his head like a badge of shame. And what about the future? Would he and therefore his family always be looking over their shoulders, shuttered up in claustrophobic spaces while the bright, teeming world grew faster and ever more luminous outside?

Old mud-rut routes and plank toll roads were giving way to macadamized causeways. Lloyd knew that the world would one day soon be speaking the firefly language of the telegraph (like the kind he had designed back home). Mechanical marvels would rumble over the earth and city-size balloons might rise like new suns. He wanted a part of it-to lead it, to steer the future. To soar above the flour mills and the distilleries like a lord of innovation. To him, it seemed that they had only appeared to leave Zanesville. The truth was it had followed them-or, rather, he had managed against all intention to re-create it.

The roof of heavy dry cloud weighed down upon him. His mind kept zooming back to the night he had met Mother Tongue in the grotto beneath the graveyard-the miraculous lights that had illuminated the cavern. If he had accepted her offer, everything might be different. Even if she had exaggerated in her story about the Spirosians and the Vardogers, he was convinced now that she was telling some species of truth. He could have had a rich, sparkling education. He could have shared in deep matters and worked with others more like himself to solve complex riddles. There would have been fresh meat and vegetables, scientific instruments-and the acquaintance of women, not girls but grown, knowing women like Viola Mercy. For the life of him, he could not recall what had blinded him to the epic opportunity he had been offered.

He saw not a single star or night bird. Only blank, cheerless clouds reflecting back the blur of lights from the foredeck and the pilothouse, and the intermittent flickers from the shacks and settlements along the shore. The dimness he glimpsed all around was surpassed only by what he felt inside. What did it matter if they did reach Texas, as unlikely as that still seemed? There would be no books or microscopes or dynamos there. (Note: the term “dynamo” had yet to be coined at that point; Lloyd’s term for such a device was an “electrogene.”) His desire was not to plow fields for cotton or wheat but to harvest the treasures of magnetic fields. To master lightning. He had no yen to raise snap beans and hogs like a high-ranking beast of burden. He yearned to penetrate the mysteries of minerals and numbers-and the secret machinery of the mind. To invent new forms of power-new vehicles, new hybrids of intelligent light.

What he foresaw for them in Texas was dust and wind and poverty, the perpetual seclusion of guilt and disgrace. “This is no way to live,” he told the thick Territory night. And yet, as he expressed this verdict, he saw that perhaps for his parents things could be different. If it was true that he was the principal cause of their troubles-and there was a strong argument that this was the case-then would not his parents’ lives, now that Hephaestus had recovered from his alcoholic debauchery, be happier without him? Of course they would grieve, he acknowledged, but ultimately they would worry less. The sorrow would pass, and then they would be free. Perhaps they would have another child in time, a child less likely to cause heartache and destruction. A child less gifted but not damned-or, at least, not dogged by shadows and perverse ambitions.

The more he dwelled on this notion the more it formed in his mind. Another bitter bite of shock for his father and mother, yes, but then release, maybe forever. Besides, since the old man was back among the living Lloyd had no place at the head of the family. His childhood had been lost in the scent of Miss Viola’s thighs and in the glare of the sun when he fell to earth, and he had killed at least one other human being and perhaps two innocent monsters, and caused who knows what hardships and dismay for the professor and Brookmire, not to mention Schelling and his clandestine tribe. The solution to all the conundrums facing him seemed amazingly simple when he examined it in the faint light of the empty deck. He found himself climbing up onto the rail, staring down at the dark flow that surged around the shape of the Defiance just as the blood coursed through the vessels in his throbbing, cap-hidden head. All it would take was a little weight, and he would disappear without a trace.

Speak to me, Lodema, cried out Lloyd in his mind, reaching out with all his will to feel the spirit of his dead twin. Give me a sign.

“You best get down,” a voice behind him said, and the surprise almost sent him plunging into the black water. Instead, he tumbled back onto the deck, eyes wild, heart racing, all the old fears rekindled and the thought of jumping jettisoned utterly. “Who are you?” he rasped, but he might well have asked where.

“No damn fool like you,” the voice answered, and it seemed to Lloyd that the night itself was addressing him. The pitch and tone were female, but unlike any he could remember.

“I’m not a fool,” he answered, raising himself up cautiously.

“Could’ve foxed me,” the voice replied, and still Lloyd could not pick out a face or body in the gloom. Could this be some magical science of the Spirosians or their foes, or was he imagining it?

“Come out and let me see you,” he said, and was struck dumb when a hand patted his shoulder in response.

He whirled about, but it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust and comprehend the new information that had presented itself so dangerously close beside him. Ever since the alley in St. Louis, he had prided himself on his alertness. Now, here someone had crept up within knifing distance-and a girl at that! She had emerged from under a roll of oilcloth behind one of the distress boats lashed to the rail. She was dressed in dark clothes, like a boy, and was as far as he could tell several years older than he-taller, anyway. She wore a skiff boy’s cap and kept both hands in front of her. Lloyd blinked, half expecting her to fade back into the murk, but her figure held firm, like a phantom reluctantly fleshed.

“Come,” she whispered, and seized his elbow. “Out of sight.”

To his further astonishment, Lloyd yielded to her touch. She pulled him down one of the crew-ways to a step rail that led toward the cargo hold. He had peeped down that way the day before but had grown skittish when one of the crew members, a snaggle-toothed moron they called Clapper burped at him. Inside a tiny storeroom with an ax mounted on the wall, a bald man dozed on his hands at a knotwood table that played host to a tin cup and a spitting candle in a blackout box. The Night Girl shuffled Lloyd softly past and into the jumbled shadows of another chamber. A stack of firewood and some smoked meats hanging in nets met his eyes-a gaff pole, crates, kegs. With impressive certainty, the girl steered him through the maze to a trunk against a bulkhead, and then eased the trunk back without making a sound. She lifted a plank and motioned to him to step down into a hole.

Through the taut working wood Lloyd could feel the thrum and clunk of the engine, chugging at reduced speed now at night-and he imagined that he could also feel the vibrations of the other passengers, tossing in their sleep or making love, fending off creditors in dreams, savage beasts or Indian war parties that awaited them in the wilderness beyond. He had visions of stepping down into some iron cage to be trapped, and yet he did as his strange guide directed and was relieved beyond measure when she followed him, the bare skin of her hands brushing against him when they were settled in the inky confinement just below. Shades of the false-bottomed graveyard, Lloyd thought.

They crouched on the floor, facing each other in total darkness, and he heard the plank slid back into place. A moment later, the mysterious girl lit a small storm lantern that sat between them. The light flared up as if inside a cave.

“Smuggler’s hold,” the girl muttered. “Doan nobody know we’re here, so talk low.”

There was something about her voice or, rather, her way of speaking that perplexed Lloyd. He let his eyes suck in the surroundings, which were so near there was not much to see. A rough bedroll and a sack of food that smelled like cold mutton and boiled potato-their refuge was no more than a large mouse hole. Then the girl pulled off her cap and he let out a stifled sigh.

She was a Negro with milk-coffee skin and eyes that shone like the color of honeycomb in the lantern reflection. Her hair was not kinky, puffed, or nappy like that of other dark girls he had seen but straight and tinged a rich cinnamon shade, clipped as though she had taken a pair of pinking shears to her head without a mirror. She smelled a little-or perhaps it was the mutton-but her teeth were clean and white, her nose sleek and narrow. He guessed her age to be about twelve, although it was hard to tell. Thirteen, maybe. He knew that she was taller than he, but there was a womanly cast to her face despite the hardened scowl she affected and the boyish clothes she wore-a rough cotton tow shirt under a mussel-blue fisherman’s jacket and loose britches that looked as if they were stitched out of some old curtain. The garments smelled of smoke and sweat, and the moist, greasy air of the boat. Her feet were bare, the soles as pale as butter.

“Why you gwain jump?” she demanded, and then cleared her throat.

Lloyd tried to think, but all he could do was stare at her.

“You crazy or you in trouble?”

The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.

“You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin’ at?”

Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.

“What’s your name?”

This question was delivered with a steeled self-assurance.

“Are you scared?”

She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty boy’s garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but could not bring himself to do it.

“Worried ’bout bein’ with a nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.

“Who… are… you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured to be able to speak.

“Wailll…” she smirked. “Dey calls me Shoofly.” She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, “But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That’s my proper name.”

Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk soles of her feet-everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.

“That’s… a fine… name,” he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.

The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. “I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that,” she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.

His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarrassed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this attitude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning-sometimes condescending, other times rudely compassionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.

“You’re beautiful,” he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.

The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.

“Like niggers, huh?” She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.

Lloyd could feel some violence coiling up inside her. She might have pulled a water moccasin out of her breast-or a blade-but he made no move to protect himself.

“Rub my feet,” she commanded.

“W-what?” he stammered.

“Rub my feet, boy,” she repeated, with a face like a fist, and in one fluid motion she brought her legs up over the lantern and into his lap, so that if she had extended her toes they would have pressed against his straining hardness.

Lloyd gulped and took the right foot in his fingers-and, without being able to take his eyes from hers, he began to stroke and caress the arch and ball, feeling the coarse skin soften with the oil of his palm. The girl blew out the lantern.

His parents did not know where he was. No one on board knew where he was. He did not know whom he was with. She might have been mad, for all he knew-and must have been mad in some way to be hiding down there in that hole, stalking the boat alone late at night, with no family or traveling companions. A girl her age. And a Negro-or half Negro. Yet, plunked down now in complete darkness with her, massaging the calloused flesh of her foot, he was flooded with an unknown calmness. He kept his hands at their task, trying not to breathe.

What seemed like a very long time passed, and at last the girl said, “It’s different in the dark. Some folks is afraid of it. I ain’t-I’m not. Are you?”

“Sometimes,” Lloyd managed. “But not… now…”

“Call me Hattie. What I call you?”

“L-loyd.”

“All right, then. Lloyd. Were you really going to jump?”

Lloyd could no longer picture her firmly in his mind. Just her eyes. He felt as if he were caressing the darkness itself. Her tone was sultry and soothing, but the words were young and white. Southern. Mixed up. Like someone in a dream.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Someone’s affer you,” Hattie said, again sounding black.

“How do you know that?”

“I can feel it. I can smell it.”

“I thought that was mutton.”

The girl gave a light grunt.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me about it, if’n you don’t want to. Got troubles enough of my own.”

“Are you… running away?”

“Yep,” she answered. “I surely am. Folks affer me for sure.”

“Are you… a… slave?”

The softening foot withdrew, then thrust forward deeper into his hands.

“Not anymore,” the girl replied, her voice whitening once more.

“You don’t act like…” Lloyd’s cracking voice trailed off.

“Thass ’cause I ain’t!” Hattie hissed. “Not for true. I’m from downriver-the Mississippi. Long way. Been sneakin’ on boats and layin’ low and trampin’ for more than two moons. Covered a lot of ground. Gwain to keep movin’.”

“So… you escaped? Were you on a farm?”

“Plantation. Big one. With a big white house and los of niggers.”

The last word stalled in the air like a belch.

“W-where?” Lloyd asked, squeezing the other foot.

“They calls it-call it-the Corners. Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louise-y-anna. Down on the line there. Grand place back off the river a few mile.”

“Why-did you run away? Was the master mean?”

The girl’s right hand whipped out like a frightened bat and cuffed his face in the dark.

“The mastah was my papa!”

Lloyd’s cheek smarted from the blow, but he did not stop working his fingers into her other foot, which seemed to him to have taken on a life of its own, like some cave animal he was cuddling. He thought back to the professor’s monkey, Vladimir, and Mother Tongue’s odd cat.

“I was born in the cabin, as they say. But he allas treated me special. Right. Gave me learning. On the sly. Told me one day I’d go to school. Europe. One day… I’d be a lady. Fine dresses. Books. Music.”

“Then why… did you run away?” Lloyd gasped, confused about why his companion in the dark had thrown away the same sorts of chances that he had.

“His wife hated me! She knew the truth. She saw I waddn’t like the other niggers. She hated my mother, but she hated me more. When I’s younger, it was just mean. But when I got a figure-and she found out I could read and write and do sums-she became a devil. Thought it was a sin that I should know about paintings and novels. Wouldn’t raise a hand to me long as Mama was alive. But when Mama died last year-I reckon she was poisoned! Then the old thing laid for me.”

Lloyd swallowed hard.

“She sent me up to Memphis to be sold away. It was her daddy had the land first. She was older ’n Papa. He married her back when she was still a little pretty. But she got crooked and sick-and evil inside. Lay up in her white bed all day dabbing her throat with cologne and whining for the nigger girls to fan her and shoo the flies. Story was she lost a baby. Wouldn’t let Papa come to her bed after that. So… he came… to my mother.”

“Why didn’t your father… protect you?”

“He tried.” Hattie sighed, with a mixture of fatigue and sadness that made Lloyd lighten his touch. “But men are weak. They’re all… slaves.”

This last assertion made Lloyd wince, but he kept rubbing the foot, subconsciously easing it against his erection. This girl was like no one he had ever imagined. Shining machines and flying over rivers and cities did not seem so wondrous as before.

“Papa’s heart was broken when Mama died,” the girl continued, as if she were reconsidering the events as she recounted them.

“He sounds… like a sad man,” Lloyd offered, feeling stupid. He kept imagining her eyes in the dark.

“He was a brave man and a wise man, and a good man,” Hattie insisted. “Let all the niggers read the Bible-and more. Got ’em learning arithmetic-and the stars. The neighbor white folks hated him for that.”

“He must miss you now.”

“He’s dead,” Hattie said, and must have reached in the sack for a hunk of mutton, because Lloyd could hear her jaws click. “Hung hisself.”

“He did?” the boy wheezed, thinking back to his own actions on the deck.

“Died in shame,” the girl continued. “Man named Barlow-plantation owner nearby-challenged him to a duel. Said he was a nigger lover and a traitor to the South! Papa strung himself up the night before. His old wife had her way after that. Her and the overseer.”

Lloyd did not know what to say. It reminded him of the story Mother Tongue had told him. Perhaps the man had not hanged himself. But it was not his place to speak now.

“Give me your hands.”

“What?” Lloyd whispered, feeling his stomach turn.

“Give me your damn hands,” Hattie hissed.

He loosened his grasp of her feet and stretched out his hands. There was a rustle of fabric and then he touched warm skin. Girlish breasts beginning to form. A fragile hint of womanly fullness. And ripeness. His own skin tingled. But her flesh was ridged and welted. The body before him leaned into his grope, filling his fingers with a different kind of darkness. Lloyd could feel the girl’s breath, mutton-scented, on his face, while his intrigued, frightened hands were allowed to roam over her bare skin.

Where there should have been nipples there were lumpy crosses of scars. His fingertips explored small slices and pocks and bumps that reminded him of the Ambassadors’ secret hierograms. The girl’s entire chest and belly rippled with markings that seemed to radiate an angry heat.

“They… did… this… to you?”

“Not all at once, mind,” Hattie whispered. “They took their sweet time. Her and Riddick.”

Lloyd recollected the tone of St. Ives’s voice when he told of his maiming at the hands of the diabolical Rutherford. The odor of the mutton was starting to make him nauseated. Or maybe it was the scarring.

“And that’s not all they did,” Hattie hissed-and Lloyd caught the faintest hint of a sob in her voice. He pulled his hands back.

“I’ll never have chillum-children. And… I’ll never have pleasure. With a man. Understand? I reckon you old enough to know what I mean. That’s what the old hag wanted. Then she sold me off. Up Memphis way. That’s when I run off. First chance I had. Only chance I thought I’d get. ”

Lloyd could think of nothing to say. His hands had retracted from the girl’s wounded skin, and yet had been drawn to the feel of her, as if through some perverse attraction. His stomach growled-still his erection stiffened. The space they were in seemed to contract around them, as if somewhere deep within he retained the memory of what it had been like to be so close to his twin sister, Lodema, back in the mother darkness.

“So. Lloyd?” Hattie inquired after a long moment’s silence. “Why you wanna end your life? ’Cause you a mongrel colored boy in disguise?”

“What?”

“I see through you. Niggers will. Smart ones, anywise. I knew it the first time I saw you sneakin’ around with the Judas face.”

Lloyd remained still, listening through the coffin-creaking walls.

“You gots woes and worries? You gots scars, too?” Hattie badgered. “Hmm? Let me feel ’em!”

“I killed a man,” he answered at last. “Maybe three. Back in St. Louis.”

“You lie!” Hattie scoffed and jabbed her feet into his belly.

“How a li’l skunk like you do that?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Lloyd replied. “But I did. Just as sure as I’m sitting here.”

“White men? Or niggers?”

“I killed a… slave…” Lloyd answered, not sure what to say about the Ambassadors from Mars.

“Well, then. That ain’t so bad,” Hattie said, sounding younger and blacker again. “Less’n he was somebody else’s. And I reckon he was-way y’all look. I seen your mama slinkin’ round, too. She white, I eat your stinky hat. But she pretty and smart. Plays good.”

This calling attention to his mother’s ancestry, and therefore his own, did not sit well with Lloyd, although he was relieved that she did not seem to know about his father. He had come to believe that the family had overcome or managed to obscure their mixed blood, and that their problems lay on another level. But seen now through the eyes of this blighted creature before him-in the dark, torn between tribes and destinies like two girls separated at birth by a knife and then sewn back up in a single body-he felt again the stirrings of the monstrous within himself. Had not the professor once joked that he was as anomalous as the Martian brothers in his own way? He may not have scars on his skin like this half-educated, half-slave girl, but what if someone were to feel deeper?

His head and heart were inundated-the hosanna-shouting Mule Christian below the courthouse, the chatter of the freakish twins borne away into the sky. Every detail of the infernal incident came rushing back upon him like the rising of the ground. And before he could master himself he burst into tears.

“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine look like?”

Lloyd choked on his words. “I… I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis… this ugly man… in an alley one night.”

The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.

“He take down your pants?”

“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart… and… and… he did me. Hard as he could.”

Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.

“He said… he said… I felt just like a little… pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.

Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking-the insistence on fulfilling it-than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering-so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola… so different…

More like some hideous revenge… of… Phineas…

The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy’s tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom-half boy’s, half girl’s and raked like a battlefield-hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.

He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life-dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious-and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.

“Shush, boy,” she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much-too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a tent roof too heavy with rain to tip. He was full of a lot of things, she sensed.

Boy though he was, she felt the manhood bursting out of him. It was surprising in one his age, but she had become accustomed to surprises. She stripped down his britches, as the garments had been rent from her in the past, taking hold of his privacy as if reaching for a chunk of meat. Maybe a different kind of darkness would cure his grief. Boys, like men, were like that.

Yes, he was young. Very young. But what did that matter when there were people hunting her?

She had done it before with a boy named Samuel and another named Tee, with a white man named Johnson and another called Cooley. She had always done what she had had to do. And she had survived what had been done to her. In a corncrib and a canebrake. In a shell-pink high-ceilinged bedroom, razor-stropped to an iron cot with the queer scents of magnolia and quinine oozing in.

Lloyd was too jangled to resist. Even as his precocious lust sprang forth, he gave in-let her lead. Hattie used him like a rag to staunch a hemorrhage. Hers-and his, too. She always imagined blood streaming from between her legs now. She would wake in a cold sweat at the memory of it. Not like the blood of the moon, the blood of the garden. No, like the blood of the living dead. She could take no pleasure and extract no seed that would take fruit-still, she would take something. And maybe in doing so now she would give something back.

They merged into each other’s wounds with an urgency that made them both quake.

CHAPTER 3. No One Sees the Thunder

THE SUDDEN CHANGE IN LLOYD’S DEMEANOR RAPTURE ATTRIBUTED to the return of her husband’s sobriety and health. Even the bung foot seemed to bother Hephaestus less now, and he took to exercising in their tiny cabin and accepted with grace the restrictions on his open appearance throughout the boat in daylight. Lloyd, meanwhile, had lost his sullen casing of detachment and seemed positively cheerful. To Rapture, it was a blessing. Perhaps the past was behind them.

The Defiance plowed on westward, and Lloyd sneaked out of the cabin every single chance he could, which allowed his parents to rebuild their romantic bridges as well as to talk about the next stage in their journey. Of course, Rapture worried about her son when he was out of sight. Not understanding the nature of the crisis that had forced their removal from St. Louis, she retained anxieties both about what the boy would get up to and who might be taking an interest in him. However, the thought that her only child, who was still only a child, was often, at the very same moment that she was in the arms of her recovering husband, languishing and coming to life in the arms of a half-breed girl (much as she had been at the same age) in the world hidden between decks of the riverboat never once crossed her mind.

That he satisfied himself with his hand and took great satisfaction from the practice, she knew well and discreetly ignored. Her own upbringing had been free and earthy in matters of the body, and the enjoyment of sex fit into her view of the world just as a belief in haints or the protective and restorative powers of lynx spice and fennel. But the thought that her son was not a virgin, and was in fact engaged in the most torrid romping that Hattie’s stowaway status would allow, would have come as a shock, and Lloyd was careful to spare her and his fragile father.

Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, the willful prodigy and fallen angel, had found something he had known only in his imagination while lying among the wind machines of his shrine to his lost sister back in Zanesville. It was an energizing, redemptive peace that seemed to flood his entire being.

There would have been countless other things that might have occupied his mind, such as the performance of the steam engines or the physics of the current. There was plenty of river traffic to note and wildlife to observe along the shore: deer, wolves, bison, elk, and the now extinct Carolina parrots. There was a joint-skinny German on board, whose sagging flesh told a story of hardship and deprivation, who nonetheless would ascend to the hurricane deck at twilight and play a mournful silver cornet-in thanks, he said, for coming to America. And there were always stories to hear among his fellow passengers-tales of taxes and lost farms, of grubbing out trees and burying sick children, whispered fears of Indians and blizzards, and of fortunes to be made in trading whiskey, salt, tobacco, and beeswax.

But Hattie LaCroix, bastard mulatto woman-child, was all he could think of. The smell of her on his hands, the sounds she made, the things she said, the tears that she gave him, were like rain from a higher sky. They watered and nourished him out of his arrogance and guilt, his self-pity and his clumsy bootencased boyness. He always felt naked with her, even when they sneaked out late to smoke her corncob pipe, dressed and wrapped in a stolen horse blanket, beside the distress boats up on deck, where on that first murky night he had contemplated leaping into the river and she had saved him.

She had saved him. The slightest scent of her skin or breath of her voice would set off a tremor inside him, but a tremor that seemed to make him stronger. Back with his parents, chattering about the road ahead to Texas or lying on his slender dog shuck on the floor of their cabin, the memory of something she had said, or the whiff of her body that still clung to him, could make him dizzy. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw her scars burning in his mind, a diabolical language of pain, but a beautiful secret language, too, of survival-the kind of deeper language he felt underlay the world, which he one day hoped to read as easily as algebraic equations or sheet music.

He understood in some storm-lit, intuitive way that she represented a kind of psychic union of the females whose lives or spirits had touched his most profoundly: Lodema, his mother, and Viola Mercy. But the girl was too much her own person, too much her own parents, guardian, and deliverer to be compared with anyone else. Sometimes he thought of her as the gift from his phantom sister, charmed out of his mixed-blood refugee life to give him gumption-more precious than anything Mother Tongue or Schelling had promised. No dusty scientific secret or antique treasure but a contraband friend and soul mate.

Lloyd spent every possible moment he could with the runaway girl. When he was not with her, he was thinking about her. Fixated on her. Hattie was a gift. A sacred, unexpected gift. A mercy. The miseries and sins of St. Louis were all washed away in her presence. She took his mind off the suffering of the past and the uncertainties of the future. He wanted the time with her to extend-for the boat never to reach its destination, but for them to be stealthy, secret, and together always. In all ways.

For her part, she waited with pining impatience for his arrival (although she would never have admitted this and tried hard to suppress any perceptible exuberance at all when he appeared in the dark or in the lull of the afternoon, when the other passengers were fat and sweaty with drowse. It was getting cooler now, though, and oftentimes when they got naked together they needed to hold each other all the tighter so as not to ripple with gooseflesh.

Then they got teeth-chattering cold, when Lloyd let Hattie talk him into something that would have seemed insane to anyone who had not gone sailing three hundred feet into the air, in what amounted to a membrane of handmade spiderweb above a teeming city. She coaxed him into joining her in dangling from one of the towropes down into the river. They did it fully clothed; Hattie referred to it as “doin’ laundry,” and made it sound practical, but Lloyd suspected it was pure adventure that thrilled her, and that it was a kind of challenge to him. He smuggled along another set of his ragged clothes, in case by some wild chance they managed to survive.

They did it at night, when the boat was barely moving. Still, the risks were great. It was a long way even from the service deck down to the water, and of course it seemed infinitely farther coming back up the rope, especially shivering with wet, slippery hands.

“You think you strong enough to make it?” she asked.

“You bet I am!” he snapped back. Good Lord, he thought. She is more boy than I am, and more woman than girl. He could not let himself be shown up by her, even if she was older. But there was something about her that inspired confidence, and made this daredevil rite seem not just possible but casual. Fun. And perhaps something more serious, too. Strengthening. Lloyd had never known such a quality of leadership in a female before. “She would make a good soldier,” he told himself. “A captain of midnight raids. Or… a spy.”

But all the confidence she projected did not take away from the threat of falling off the rope into the current, which was too swift to swim against. It did not keep the floating logs away, or make it any easier to be quiet so as not to alert the crew. Hattie was, after all, a stowaway and a fugitive slave. She had, as she said, “folks affer her for sure.” The river was colder than he had ever known the water to be back in Ohio. It seemed to move with a serpentine force, and there was always the chance that there still were some snakes in it-and to see a snake swimming, as he often had from the decks on their travels, is a disturbing thing. (Of course, not to see one swimming, when you are in the water, too, can be fatal.)

The clasping, gasping, reddened hand-over-hand, leg-and-foot-shimmying drag back up the heavy hemp braid-freezing with even just a light breeze on soaked clothes and skin-was the hardest thing Lloyd remembered ever doing.

It was made no easier when one of the crew appeared in silhouette above them, smoking a cheroot, which forced them to pause in their ascent, just about the time Lloyd felt that his arms would explode or drop off. The pain and strain were excruciating, but there was cloud cover above and a fine mist rising off the water, as if the river really were a kind of monstrous snake and the vapor was the skin it was shedding.

As exhausting as it was, it somehow filled him with an electric zest, because he was not clutching onto the rope in the dark alone. Hattie was just below him, and he knew that she was exerting extra effort to help keep him braced. He knew that she would not have hesitated a second to leap into the current if he had slipped. He was not sure what he would have done if she had fallen, as deep as his feelings ran. She had more than courage. She had a mastery of herself that made her a captain of split-second decisions.

At last the infernal idler finished his smoke and abandoned the deck to them, where they scrambled up and over, dripping, shaking with the wet, the cold, the struggle-and the grand achievement of clandestine triumph. Then they crept back as quietly as they could, given the drenched garments, to Hattie’s hideaway, where with almost ritual devotion they undressed each other by stubbed candlelight.

It was then, with the bracing sensation of ducking down into the fast black water still fresh and vivid in his very bones, that Lloyd realized that Hattie had “bactize” him, as his mother would have said.

What was more, she had enacted with him-virtually holding his hand, certainly holding his heart-a ceremonial variation of the blind, desperate act he had been contemplating the night she had intervened. She had made the darkness visible and livable. He was cured of that attraction forever.

He held her and held her and held her. They melded together for warmth, and the heat of their longing softened their chafed palms. Mother Tongue had teased him with the promise of learning the art of love. But, in all the world, Lloyd doubted if he could have found a better teacher-one more generous or less ashamed.

Sexually maimed though she was, Hattie had not lost her young, powerful libido. It had diffused across her whole body. The blossom may have been cut, but her deeper bloom had not perished. Her skin had a hunger to be touched, and her scars an incandescent need for acceptance and blessing. She found in Lloyd the eye and tender hand witness she had hoped for, without even knowing it.

She was both rough and gentle with him-giving and greedy. She let herself open her broken wings to his mingling, teaching him how to use his penis; it was in the end a tool, just as it is often called. She understood the driving male pleasure, and shared an injured version of the penetrative desire herself. There was the two-becoming-one delight that no mutilation could revoke. But she showed him there was more. Oh, so much more.

There was tongue and breath, kneading and brushing. There were eyelashes and whispers, and the simple ecstasy of mutual grooming. Instead of rutting, panting, and spurting hot wet seed, Lloyd learned some of the secrets of temptation-of fondling, kissing, the exquisite anticipation of a feather down a belly. And he learned the profound wholeness of a shared silence.

It was like being back in the womb again, in a way, he thought. But a new kind of guiltless womb made by consensual, collusive imaginations-two people giving birth to themselves through the vulnerability, faith, and vigor of true nakedness. For all the talk of conspiracies back in St. Louis, this was the one conspiracy he was certain that he wanted to join.

That night, after they had returned from out of the river-after they had mated and consecrated each other with hushed entwinement-Hattie said to him softly, “Roll over.”

Lloyd winced at this, bristling with fear and embarrassment. Some intuition born of their intimacy warned him of what she was thinking. Yet he could not resist her direction, although he asked in a quavering voice, “What are you going to do?” Knowing already.

She moved the candle closer and produced from behind a crate a tin stew pan full of soapsuds, water, and a flannel rag. “You seen how I was hurt,” she said. “That all’s had time to heal. I want to see if you all right. You likely didn’t say nuthin’.”

To his amazement, he found himself turning over onto his stomach, as she brought the candle closer still. He flashed back to Mother Tongue’s story about the Vardogers, the Order of the Claws & Candle. That was the thing about candles-about all sources of light, heat, and hope, he realized. Some have caring fingers… some have seeking claws. The desire to help and heal… the call to crush or to possess. The two sides of the coin of bewonderment: inspiration or terror.

Hattie’s hands were both firm and respectful. She washed him there, the part of our bodies we are all most sensitive about. She dried him, and then brought the candle in close enough for him to feel the urgent caress of the flame. In truth, he had often bled when relieving himself since the incident in the alley, and the feedbag-and-gut-clog diet had not helped. But the pain had eased. He felt very exposed for her to have bathed him that way, though-to examine him. But who better to do it?

“You all right,” she pronounced at last. Then she said, “You gwain be all right, too. Lotta boys had that done to ’em, they’d neva be good inside again. You got nuthin’ to be ’shamed of-hear? You let the pain go, all right? You keep yo’ anger. But you let the pain go.”

“How… how do I do that?” Lloyd asked, his voice muffled, as he lay facedown on the strewn hole floor.

Hattie said, “Reach behine you and pull your cheeks apart.”

He did. To his intense bewonderment, she kissed him there-with the fullness of her soft mouth.

“You be all right,” she said, blowing on his lower back, so that he squirmed. “And doan ever let that hurt you inside anymore. No shame.”

For the second time that night, she had worked a kind of magic-the type you can feel and smell. Lloyd trembled beneath her body, as she enveloped him, the heat of her scars and her tenacity melting into him, just as the wax dripped from the shaft of the candle into its cup-lipped dish.

But despite this depth of animal affection, physical intimacy was not all they shared-by a great measure. They were, after all, still very young-even Hattie. They both savored pickles and would pilfer them from the oily jars in the storeroom, feeding them to each other. They stole squab nuts and beef jerky, a sumptuous wheel of fragrant cheese-and a smoked chicken, too. Then they would dine down in the murk of Hattie’s cubbyhole, pretending they were a lordly couple in some fancy stateroom or a luxurious private railway carriage, rattling through the snowcapped mountains of Europe.

Both of them had at least glimpsed books with brilliant illustrations of the Alps and the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, Paris, Rome, the temples of Greece. Those visions seemed so remote from their circumstances, to openly conjure them would have seemed plain cruel with anyone else. But they had each other, and they somehow gave each other permission to dream aloud-perhaps the greatest intimacy of all.

“I think I should like to be… the first lady prime minister of England,” Hattie announced at one point, with her mouth full of plundered pork crisp and what passed for quince paste (and later passed as gas, which set them both snorting). She had put on her best, crispest “elegant” white accent for this confession, and it set Lloyd chortling, trying to stifle his hilarity-with his own mouth full of what he hoped was smoked side ham. For someone whose thoughts had stretched into abstruse realms far beyond his years, he had done precious little laughing. It was like balm for his inner being. But it did not stop him from ribbing her.

“I don’t… think… that they’ll let you be… prime minister,” he asserted at last, almost hiccupping.

“ ’Cause I’s a girl?” Hattie retorted, chucking his cheek.

“Because… because… you’re not English!” Lloyd replied, which made them both collapse into the delicious foolishness of shared hysterics.

They both seemed to want dogs-several of them-so the hounds could keep one another company. They wanted dogs, books, art. Hattie stressed the importance of music, Lloyd the essentiality of science.

Hattie wanted horses, too-she had never been allowed to ride. Lloyd insisted that new forms of transportation were already taking shape (and he recalled the bizarre locomotive, seemingly made of glass, that Schelling had shown him).

She named him Li’l Skunk. It was not easy for her to express affection, in spite of her passionate nature, so the nickname conveyed more than it appeared. She had first thought of Li’l Pig, to help Lloyd own the evil that had preyed on him and to turn it around-to transform shame into a badge of honor, which was how she felt about her scars and welts. But she knew instinctively that those words rubbed too close to the wound. He would have to make his treaty with them himself now. She had shown him the way.

She chose Li’l Skunk instead, because he was both black and white, because a skunk protects itself through ingenuity rather than physical strength and aggression, and because it gave concise expression to her joshing about his body odor. She meant, in part, that he already had a man smell about him, even though he was still so young.

Rather than taking offense, Lloyd found any comment about his scent amusing, because he was pretty certain that if either of them was more odiferous it was she. Both in a womanly way and because he had the refuge of an official cabin with a washtub, while she was stranded down in her hiding place.

He dubbed her the Brown Recluse, a moniker that at first puzzled and almost pipped her temper. “Why you call me that? A spider? And a dangerous spider, too.”

“There’s something of the spider in all females,” he replied. “And a spider is the first thing I remember, other than my dead sister. It used to come down to visit me on an invisible thread in the kindling scuttle I slept in as a baby. She taught me about time and light, and how to make something out of thin air. But brown recluses don’t spin webs-they hunt on their own, just like you. And in case you didn’t know, you are dangerous,” he told her. “You are very dangerous. You aren’t afraid of things you should fear and that others would. You’re clever and brave, and you have the control to strike when you have the advantage but the sense to conceal yourself, as a rule. You would go about your business without disrupting anyone, yet you have poison enough if the need arises.”

Hattie had to smile at this. Presented thus, the title seemed more a badge of honor than she could have imagined. It was like a promotion in life rank-a reflection from out of the depths of a very subtle mirror of all that she valued and hoped to be seen as-to be.

How often we forget, or are forced to overlook because of lack, that the true fire of connection between hearts and souls is fundamental. Are you seen by the adored as less than you are at your best, or as all that you could be? That is the one sure measure of the health of any adoration. Both of them grasped in the other what was unique, what shone, what was to be prized, and that is rare at any age.

So it became graceful and relaxed to share other secrets, and commonplaces as well. Hattie told Lloyd more about the persecutions she had endured, the horrors she had felt, along with just the day-to-day fowl-plucking, slop-bucket, and weed-pulling life of the Corners. She painted a bright, detailed picture of working, loving, hating, surviving life on a major plantation, and filled in many gaps in his understanding.

She explained that because there was always some movement or migration of slaves due to sales or exchanges between owners, news and gossip about other plantations spread. They were each run in their own ways, yet most of the same larger principles applied. There were pecking orders, an assignment of tasks and a deployment of resources that remained relatively constant. Conditions and treatment might be very different, but there were protocols and codes of action that never varied.

As she spoke, Lloyd realized that what she was providing in her descriptions was both an internal and an exploded view of a very intricate machine. An organic machine, yes, but to him the concept of a machine was organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-assembling, self-consuming, self-sustaining complex system in his mind.

It suddenly struck him, for instance, that the definition of a complex machine was one that was five-dimensional-time defining the fourth, psychology the fifth. Mind transcended time, the same way that language tried to, and could indeed transcend space.

He thought back to Mother Tongue’s remarks about Spiro of Lemnos, the Enigmatist who had glimpsed more deeply than all others into the mesh of things-all that was hidden in plain sight.

It also came to him for the first time that if the complicated workings of something like a plantation-a machine both built by humans and including them as critical components-could be understood as a machine, working within a network of other similar machines to form a bigger, still more complicated machine, then there were two contrary but very pregnant implications.

First, the notion of mechanism, as in the mechanistic philosophy he had become acquainted with in Schelling’s bookshop-as in a reductionist strategy-was categorically deficient, if not totally wrong. Second, the far more interesting idea that such a thing even as multifaceted as a plantation could be rendered diagrammatically, as could any machine. It was just a question of what the hierogram looked like. Then he said to himself, “I meant diagram.”

Even as she spoke, his mind raced. The problem with the traditional mechanists, he grasped, was that they merely broke processes and subassemblies down. There was no integration. Therefore no creation. Everything their method touched died in their hands. Their wholes were always less than the sum of their parts. That had been his problem with the parafoil system in St. Louis. It was not a lack of time and quality materials. It was not just hubris and pilot error. He had not had the model clear enough in his mind, because it was the wrong model. It was only a model.

Without realizing, Hattie taught him-or helped him teach himself-more than all that he had learned up to that moment. She was like the frizzen that fires a flintlock, for a consideration began to take form in his mind: when you really understand something-even a very complex process or system (and what is not complex, if you give it deep enough attention?)-then you can picture it whole. And the picture somehow is the whole.

The hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors streamed through his mind, and it occurred to him to ask, What if their inscrutable emblems were not symbols representing sounds, ideas, and things as other languages do but, rather, intense distillations of relationships between concepts, so that figuratively speaking, if you could step to the other side of them in your mind they would be prismatic ways of seeing certain kinds of complexity whole and clear?

He was wise enough to leave off this spiral train of thought for the moment, but it released him to tell Hattie about the mutant brothers and the ravaging remorse at what he had done.

At first she was very skeptical about his claims of flying, but he spoke so matter-of-factly of how he had gone about it that her doubt wavered. There was no gainsaying his guilt over the deformed twins-and, like her descriptions of plantation life, she heard in his words the unmistakable accuracy of the authentic.

She chided him about what he had done, and yet when he made mention of them having apparently, at least, fallen out of a tornado, she posed another surprising question. “How you know they wasn’t taken back?”

“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, eager, of course, to find any mitigating circumstance.

“Mebbe, you didn’t do ever-thing. You was just the way it happened. The way you talk about ’em, they wasn’t from here.”

“No,” Lloyd agreed. “They were from Indiana.”

“I doan mean that, fool! I mean from somewheres else.”

“Like Mars? I don’t think so.”

“Mebbe, more places to be from than you think.”

Lloyd heard the wisdom in that.

“Some kines of knowin’ just doan answer ever question. My Papa, he had a sayin’:

I seen what the sun, the moon

And the lightning do

But no one sees the thunder

Till they learn how to

Indeed, thought Lloyd.

Learning to see the thunder is what he should have told Schelling when asked his greatest aspiration.

CHAPTER 4. Fetish

LLOYD PUT TOGETHER FOR HATTIE A SIMPLE YET VERY FUNCTIONAL all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace apron, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he stitched himself with a heavy bagger’s needle that he had kept from St. Louis, while his parents were preparing food. (His experience with the kites had taught him a great deal, and he had the artificial hand of St. Ives in mind.)

The kit included a general lock pick that he had sharpened out of harvested wire, a jimmy made from some window flashing, a miniature hammer he had fabricated from a hickorybarrel hove and one of the large bolts from the boat rigging, a carving knife and whetstone, along with a flint and striker from the cabin crew’s quarters, an adjustable wrench he had nipped from the engine room, some lady’s sewing implements that had been left about, a small hatchet that had dropped below the boilers, a magnifying lens he made from some plucked spectacles, and an assortment of bandages and a bottle of iodine wrapped in cotton wool so that it would not break, which he had nicked from a doctor’s bag.

From this same bag he took a vial of laudanum and added to the kit the one bottle of LUCID! that survived from his medicine-show career, in case she became injured and needed pain relief. What he did not find in the bag was an item that he felt was important, and so he made one himself from one of the extra steam valves in the engineer’s room-a stethoscope.

“What’s this for?” Hattie asked, when he proudly laid out his offerings.

“That’s for listening to sounds,” he said. “To hearts-and to the other side of walls, if you have to. I didn’t have time to make a good one. But you’ll hear better than you would on your own. And this, this is for making sounds-music-if you’re alone and need to make noise, instead of shushing all the time. To cheer yourself up.”

The final inclusion was a crude bunch of short, tensioned metal rods screwed into the base of a burgled clock with a hollowed-out hole for a resonator, which Lloyd, in what remained of his innocence, believed at that point he had invented. It was in fact a very old kind of musical instrument-what today we would call a kalimba, or African thumb piano-like a Jew’s harp but with a much wider range of tones. He had at least adjusted the rods in the precise order to create a true musical scale, and the simple strumming of these vibrating keys produced a quiet yet pleasing sound.

To his surprise and delight, she played a plaintive yet charming melody on it. She had seen and heard many such instruments in the secrecy of plantation cabins, and was herself surprised that Lloyd knew what one was.

As to the whole of the gift-for it was a whole-she did not know what to say. Not since her father had anyone given her anything but a belting or a form of torture, and even her father had not given her things he had made himself. And so many things! Each with a sense and a purpose, but with flexibility-the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. She admired the things stolen as much as the items made, because she intuited that everything would have been made specially if there had been time and materials at hand. The important thing was the totality of the package, and she had the wit to appreciate that.

“Is there anything you can’t make if you set your mind to it?” she asked. “I means-mean-if you had the time?”

“I can’t make more time to be with you,” Lloyd answered. “Not just yet.”

Her kiss then was something that would sustain him through many trials to come, because it was not a lewd or debauched kiss as Miss Viola’s had been. It was as innocent as his desire to help her, to give what he could. But it was filled with the fire of passion-and of something so often missing in all romance, whatever the ages: true partnership.

Therein was the great problem. The Sitturds’ way, once arrived in Independence, lay back south, into unknown territory, but almost certainly greater risk for a runaway slave girl-even one who knew that through any two points in space there is one line, and that it was Wordsworth who had suggested the shooting of the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (That she could also bend the note of a white-bean fart and have at least the semblance of an orgasm through the sensitive indulgence of a tongue kiss were other talents that won Lloyd’s deepest admiration.)

What might have been a joy thus became a torture for the young Ohioan. Once more he felt that the blessing of travel and adventure, discovering intimacies with strangers, was a cruel and unusual punishment.

For Hattie, as hard as her heart had become, she too felt the pang of inevitable separation. Lolling with him in the dark of her smelly hidey-hole-or risking all and venturing out at night into the open air of the top deck to smoke some stray leaf-she knew that her life would never be the same if this boy-man were taken from her. She had never had the luxury of not being cunning-of letting down her guard or saying anything she did not really mean. She had lived her whole life with at least “one eye open,” but with Lloyd she relaxed for the first time, drawing energy for what she knew would be more strenuous times ahead.

“You could… come with us,” Lloyd whispered in the dark of her smuggler’s coffin, which was permeated now by the aroma of the sharp cheddar they had plundered from the boat’s larder.

Hattie gave his scrotum a gentle grope. The pain inside was greater than he had ever known. Even the sins and crimes of St. Louis, when he had sailed above the row houses and cobblestones to fall through his own shadow, seemed to have been rinsed from his conscience.

“Then what will you do?” he asked, when she remained silent. “What will you really do?”

“I’ll make my way,” Hattie answered. “Just like I tole you. I’m headed west. Where I can be free. I’m going to California. And I’m going to be rich.”

“You’re thirteen,” Lloyd reminded her. “You’re a runaway slave, and you’ve got-”

“My markings? Boy, it’s these markings of mine that are going to make me rich. You may be smart when it comes to numbers and ideas, but you’ve still got a world to learn about folks. Especially white folks-and especially menfolks. You take a good, Christian white man, never laid a hand on his wife-he get with a colored girl and he’s another creature. The thing I got in my favor is that I am another creature. That’s the giff the old bitch gave to me. She didn’t mean to, but she did.”

“So you’ll be a whore?” Lloyd groaned.

“I may be a queen!” Hattie snapped. “I’ll do what I need to do. What you have to do to get by isn’t who you are, Lloyd. You remember that-and remember I tole you. You say I act and talk white sometimes. That don’t make me white. I got no intention of lowering myself, believe you me. I’m goin’ to learn French. And I’m goin’ to play the harpsichord, and I’m goin’ to have me some silk dresses, buttercup-yellow and watermelon-pink, and I’m goin’ to make sure other black folks learn how to read-and know the names of the stars and how to measure a circle without thinkin’ they have to walk around it.”

“What about me?” Lloyd asked.

The forlorn, honest tone in the boy’s voice reeled Hattie back from her dream. She felt her vulnerability full force once more, and yet she saw what she had sensed the very first moment she had met Lloyd: that here was someone lonelier than she, lonelier than she would ever be. A creature so different, not by markings or skin color, or anything anyone could definitely see, but by who he was inside. He could not just run away to find a better part of the world to live in; he would have to invent his own world if he was to survive. He might have to invent many worlds-so many that he might end up forgetting which were his creations.

“You’ll be something nobody’s ever thought of, Lloyd,” she answered.

“But I want to be with you!” he wailed, and she had to stifle his plea with her warm hand.

“Shush. Don’t you be ruinin’ things now. You gotta buck up and be strong. That’s what bein’ a man is. I’d want to be with you, too, if life would let me-but it won’t, so there’s no use cryin’.”

As she said this, the Zanesville prodigy saw that the older girl was working very hard to restrain her tears. She has enough to cry about, he thought to himself. No need for me to make her sadder still.

It was the first time in his life that Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had ever had such a sentiment about another person, and the novelty of it took him by surprise. He reached out and embraced her, with a firmness and a tenderness that made even the resourceful runaway tremble inside.

“One day I’ll come find you,” Lloyd said, and to Hattie these words hung in the tight, cramped air like a melody on the thumb piano. There was nothing more to be said on the subject of the future and their different destinies, for those words, uttered with complete calm and conviction, had done what every inspired melody does: condense a welter of emotions into an unconflicted clarity that one can instantly recall and call upon. Like a hierogram.

Those words gave Hattie the courage to seek a deeper hiding place when the Defiance landed at last at Independence. To Lloyd, she had given her abused body and something of her hidden soul while in transit together. In parting, she gave him her most prized possession-a token of the love she felt but could express only in deed. It was a tiny ivory skull, carved with gorgeous simple precision, with a hint of a smile. The size of a marble, it nonetheless contained an undeniable radiance. It had been given to her by her mother a few weeks before her death. The girl was told that the icon came from Africa and had been passed through many hands to reach her.

“Mama called it a fetish,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s good luck agin enemies. It means Death smiles on you.”

Clutching the talisman in his own hand, Lloyd had no doubt that it held some unusual power, for it seemed to retain the vitality of all those who had held it before, and the suggestion of the smile imbued it with an eerie optimism, however grim its appearance.

The moment he cupped it, he was charged with a realization that had been waiting for him since birth. He, too, had black blood in his veins. Though it sometimes may have taken a light-skinned Negro to spot it, and this had often been to his advantage, he saw the truth, whole and clear. He remembered every taunt from the Zanesville hooligans he had ever heard. Every sidewise glance from the children in St. Louis. He was not a mongrel, for the Europeans he had encountered in the family travels were as mongrel a bunch as you could imagine. He was part white, part Indian, and part black, and each of those breeds carried its own unique burden and heritage, especially in the America of those times. Something in him connected back to Africa-to the dark magic and turmoil of that faraway continent. He felt the literal truth of this course through him when he gripped the skull. This was a piece of his own puzzle handed back. It daunted and augmented him all at once, and he placed it with extreme, gentle care deep in his little knapsack next to the box with the hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors, his uncle’s letter and map, and the always watching glass eyes of Mother Tongue.

Before Hattie, he had not had the wherewithal to look upon the Ambassadors’ box since leaving St. Louis. Now, nurtured by the girl’s devotion, he could and did examine the container again-and saw in the intricate alien characters that it displayed a message for his life that he knew he must do everything in his power to understand. So Hattie’s gift, no bigger than a berry, served both to free him from his horror of losing her and as a seed. He cried when it dawned on him that he must say goodbye to her. But when the tears were gone he felt refreshed and full of her spirit, as if she had given not only her body to him but all that she had-all that she was. And so, he gave her a gift to remember him by, to watch over her and link her to him.

“Is this a jewel?” Hattie asked when Lloyd put one of Mother Tongue’s eyes in her hands.

“It’s a species of jewel, I believe-and a very great mystery,” he answered. “A very powerful, very old white woman who helps the slaves gave it to me. It’s a match of this,” he told her, holding up the mate.

“They’re eyes!” Hattie cried. “Made eyes!”

“Yes, but who they were made by is the thing. The old woman, who is a kind of witch, you’d say-before she took them out she could see with them, I swear. And I’ve thought I’ve seen things in them, too. There’s some sort of magic to them, just like there is to your fetish. I want you to keep this, then we will each have one.”

Hattie had no doubt about the sincerity of the gesture, and was warmed inside to have something of Lloyd and his past to take with her. There was indeed something touched about the sphere, a talisman to match her skull. She cupped it lovingly in her hand, then hid it away inside her clothes.

The steam whistle blew.

“Do we say goodbye?” Lloyd asked.

“Not folks like us,” Hattie replied.

Lloyd did not look for her when the family stepped off the gangplank at their destination, for he knew that she would not be seen, but that she was moving forward with a will stronger than any river current could ever be.

But God he missed her. The Brown Recluse.

CHAPTER 5. Reliable Omens

INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI, IS A PLACE RICH IN HISTORY. IT BEGAN as a fort when Osage Indians would come to trade furs and pause at the window of Agent George Shipley’s house to listen to his daughter play the piano. A little log courthouse was later built, which doubled as a pig pen and became so infested with fleas that it was necessary to invite sheep inside while the court was in session, to give the bloodsuckers something else to feed on. In the 1830s, the Mormons settled here and for a time prospered, only to be tarred and feathered and eventually burned out. Much, much later, Harry S. Truman would go to high school here, the man whose middle initial stood for nothing-“Mr. Citizen,” who became a judge without ever having been a lawyer, the first and the last United States president to run a failing men’s clothing store, and the man famous for his belief that “the buck stops here.” (He apparently gave the two most important military orders in the history of Western civilization, carried through on August 6th and 9th of 1945.)

What the Sitturds found when they landed was, of course, a very different scene. As the family disembarked, there were a few raised eyebrows about Hephaestus’s appearance, but there was so much activity in this western Missouri “jumping off place” (where many folk, indeed, looked as though they had hurled themselves off the precipice of reason and restraint) that no one in the family, including Lloyd, worried much about who might be watching them just then. There was too much happening.

It was midafternoon and saddles and harnesses poured off the Defiance in piles. Goats, mules, horses, and oxen raised a thick cloud along the long dock road running alongside the mule-drawn railroad link leading to the actual town. Barrels rolled, crates trundled, dry hides flopped. While huge numbers of western emigrants bound for Oregon to the north or Santa Fe to the south had departed months earlier in the year (the moment sufficient spring grass had grown to feed their animals), still others had poured in since, intending to hunker down for winter and either trade their stores or accumulate more for a prompt decampment come the first thaw the next year. It took six months in those days to make the two-thousand-mile trek to Oregon, and planning and provisioning for such an expedition was no small matter, given the number of thieves and scalawags always eager to prey on the unwise.

What was more, another cholera scare had encouraged still more pilgrims and strangers to seek shelter in Independence. While the disease did all too often wreak genuine devastation along the western routes, as well as up and down the Mississippi, it was not an uncommon practice among unscrupulous promoters and shopkeepers to spread rumors about such outbreaks in other settlements, because towns like Independence vied with the likes of St. Joseph, Omaha, and Council Bluffs for trade money. Recently, the nearby haven of Westport had been chosen, and now there was an epidemic of fantastic reports that “folks there is droppin’ like horsetail flies.” This panic precipitated a shift in an already itinerant population and put still more pressure on scarce accommodation and inflationary-priced supplies. The result was a cacophonous hammering and banging, as new and often ill-made buildings were erected as if by indefatigable insects, and the hawking of wares in loud voices for absurd sums.

The first steamboat to venture up the Missouri had stopped here in 1819. Now it seemed that nothing would stop for long, and any signs of the famous personages who had passed through, like Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, or John James Audubon, were lost in a carpentered frenzy of plank, tank, and chicken dirt. Hephaestus had never seen so many blacksmith sheds or wagons that needed repairing. There looked to be a mule for every man and at least a bottle of whiskey (which was perhaps not a good ratio in a locale where each adult white male more than likely also carried a loaded firearm).

Smitten with sorrow about Hattie, Lloyd dragged his feet forward, his eyes blinking at the populace that swirled around them, every bit as turbid as the river had been. Wary-looking Spaniards, their faces shadowed by broad hats, cooked over both open fires and buried ovens. Smells of corn bread, charred rabbit, pulled pork, and bubbling beans surrounded them, as if they had concocted a fortress of aromas to defend against the pipe smoke, forge fires, and manure. Travel-weary Baptist women as stiff as split-oak rails peered out from under sweat-stained blueberry bonnets, stirring great boiling kettles of laundry with fence pickets. Negroes lounged under sagging awnings, eyes peeled raw for trouble, and more Indians than Lloyd had ever imagined lurked and bartered or tethered shaggy ponies to flagpoles and barber poles and poles that held up signs saying not to tie up horses there.

There were Foxes and Sauks, some with shaved heads and painted faces. Others with visages that looked vaguely Mexican wandered in and out of the shops wrapped in old blankets, muttering. Germans mingled with Scots decked out in plaid pantaloons and hobnailed boots. Methodist-looking ducks paraded about. Children’s faces peeped out from the covers of the heavy French carts called mule killers. A grizzled loner leading a buffalo horse on a rope shared a water trough with a busty Mexican lady beneath a battered parasol astride a white donkey, just like a man. And everything was for sale-from a rotgut alcohol whose origins lay in homemade sorghum to apple butter, corn pones, and fresh brown eggs in hickory-bark baskets.

If you had the money you could buy women’s dresses colored with walnut dye, men’s shirts that felt as tough as chair seats woven from slippery elm, or telescopes, knives, shovels, and guns. A barrel of salt, a beaded necklace, a young hog, or an oxen yoke-everything had its price. And there was always someone happy to yell out the amount if you were in any doubt.

Desperate to keep his mind from thoughts of his beloved Hattie, whom he felt sure was safe but probably scared for her life on board the Defiance, Lloyd scanned the throng. There were so many strange- and dangerous-looking folk, it would have been impossible to pick out any potential threat of the kind he was concerned with. He took it for granted that any emissary of the Vardogers would be invisible in such a tangle, and so he just let his eyes feast on the scene for color and detail, trying to distract himself from the grief of his lost love, and the fear for her safety on the lonely, risky road that lay before her.

Despite the swagger and suspicion of the loiterers or the boisterous perspiring of the workers, amid all the hagglers, speculators, and adventurers that had gathered there were many glimpses of innocence and normal life-an unleavened boy in a jerkin rolling a hoop, or a little half-naked dark girl fondling a hen. The Indians, though sometimes fierce at first glance, were by and large intent upon their own business and carried themselves with an impressive lack of self-consciousness. Lloyd thought of King Billy back in Zanesville, the supposed hundred-year-old Wyandot Indian, who lived by himself in the woods-one of the few citizens of that world that he cared for. And he thought of his own Indian heritage, which the family never spoke of.

After the Sitturds had managed to haul themselves and their few belongings up the congested road from the wharf and through the knot of the main street to a point of refuge between two of the larger stores, Lloyd found his eyes drawn to a group of people, some of whom wore bloodred cloths wrapped around their heads. “Who are they?” he asked his father.

“I don’t know,” the lame blacksmith replied, itching to get his hands back on some tools, while Rapture feared it was one of the bottles he craved. “Maybe they had a wagon accident.”

Of course, the people in question were not really the victims of some common mishap. Not exactly, anyway. They were the first Quists the family had ever seen.

The Quists, as may be recalled, were another divergent nineteenth-century religious sect afflicted with the same kind of persecution the Mormons faced. They took their name from the visionary Kendrick Quist, an illiterate young horse gelder from Nineveh, Indiana (later famous as the home of Hungarian mammoth squashes).

While returning home from a job at a neighboring farm, Kendrick stumbled upon what he called “the Headstones of the Seven Elders.” These so-called Headstones were in fact thinly sliced sections of petrified tree stump and not much bigger than a child’s writing slate. Nevertheless, Kendrick Quist was instructed in a dream to refer to them as Headstones, and he was informed that they had been set down long ago using a special tool made from the beak of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The day following this dream, Kendrick was kicked in the head by a stallion intent on remaining a stallion and went into a kind of delirium in which he was able to translate the inscriptions to a visiting cousin from the Virginia Tidewater named Buford Tertweilder, before expiring. Buford, who back home had been a failure as a clammer, cobbler, and tobacco farmer, became somewhat more successful in Indiana as the Quists’ first prophet.

Like the Book of Mormon, the Book of Buford, or the Quistology (the correct name was a matter of ongoing debate), was a blend of fiery Old Testament prophecy and adventurous but unverifiable American history regarding a group of obscure Irish Vikings, who were in fact one of the lost tribes of Israel, and who had made it to America in a longboat inscribed with sea serpents, Celtic crosses, and Stars of David well before Columbus was born. They had then set out on a holy mission of discovery deep into the interior. They arrived in Indiana (which, you would have to admit, defines “the interior”), and it was here that their leader carved and left behind the inscriptions for Kendrick Quist to find centuries later.

Although the young horse gelder shuffled off his mortal coil, in addition to the kernel of a new religion he left behind the bloody bandage that had been wrapped around his head, and many of the Quists chose to wear a ceremonial red turbanlike wrapping in his honor. Unfortunately, such head garb often called unwanted attention to them and had increased their harassment at the hands of small-minded local officials and authorities of the more established churches.

Not long after Governor Boggs of Missouri had set forth his famous Extermination Order of 1838, which drove the Mormons to Nauvoo, Illinois (where all too soon vigilante gangs lit torches and knotted nooses and sent them on their continuing pilgrimage west to Utah), similar edicts were issued against the Quists. In 1840, they were expelled from the Hoosier State and established a community at Pumpkin Creek, Illinois. A year later, Buford Tertweilder was skinned alive in what became known as the Pumpkin Creek Massacre, and leadership of the flock passed to one Increase McGitney, a lapsed Presbyterian minister who had led a heroic but inadvertent one-man charge against the marauders when his head got wedged inside a butter churn in the barn where he was hiding. In a frenzy of what was really claustrophobic terror but looked very much like a God-inspired hunger for revenge, he shot out of the milking barn and bolted straight through a clothesline, picking up a white bedsheet on the way. Along with his improvised helmet and flailing arms, the flowing white fabric created the impression in the cowardly dogs that had besieged the Quists that a heavenly demonic warrior had risen up against them.

McGitney took this new image of himself to heart and transformed himself into a brave and demanding patriarch. “Increase Charged!” became the catch cry of the Quists, and the feat did indeed temporarily stave off eradication of the faithful. But the onslaught against them continued, and their leader did not help matters by making the morally admirable but politically lamentable decision of decrying the government policy of relocating Indians, welcoming them into the Pumpkin Creek community and seeking their advice as farmers, hunters, and fishers-as well as the unforgivable stance of opposing slavery and encouraging free and equal intermarriage with Negroes (in Increase’s case, several).

The effect of this obstinacy was that barns and temples were burned, woodpeckers were ritually slaughtered, and more than a few members were impaled on stakes or hysterically kicked to death by angry mobs who feared the new faith might have a sufficiently oblique and inclusive appeal to unite fringe Christians, Jews, Indians, blacks, and the always superstitious and rabble-rousing Irish, who were arriving in ever-growing numbers. The threat of Illinois becoming a quasi-renegade Christian-Zionist-Indian-Hoodoo-Druid state had forced the second Quist diaspora. Sadly for them, Missouri, as it had for the Mormons, had proved even more hostile, and so they were forced to flee farther west. Just like the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, and other tribes and nations too numerous to mention-along with thousands of West Africans and, of course, the Latter-Day Saints. (Here was another displaced people on the move, trying to sow the seeds of their own survival in a whirlwind of ideology, emerging technology, and the culturally sanctioned greed known as eminent domain.)

“I like those things they wear around their heads,” Lloyd remarked.

“You stay clear a-dem,” Rapture cautioned, noting the number of Negroes and Indians shouldered up beside the wild-eyed white people. In her mind, the last thing they needed, other than for Hephaestus to go off on a drinking binge, was to fall in with a rebel congregation of colored misfits and crazy folk. What they needed now was to lie low-to find a place to stay and plan their supply-gathering and transportation needs for the journey across the wilds of Kansas, a lawless outland of harsh weather, savage animals, desperate people, and mysterious unknowns.

Lloyd took the opposite view. He saw the presence of blacks and Indians in the ranks of the head-wrapped and plain-dressed whites as a good sign. After all, were not they, the Sitturds, refugees from Zanesville, just as much a mixed bag? Having shared those secret moments with Hattie, he felt different about his breeding now, and he was becoming aware that there are kinships and affinities within us all that we may never know or understand, but which attempt to reveal themselves in the people we gravitate toward and the paths our lives take. Rapture, however, stood firm on the matter and focused the family’s attention on getting fed and finding someplace to stay.

For refreshment they settled on thin flour tortillas, which they bought from a stumpy old man who worked from a stone fire and a foldup table among the Spaniards. To everyone’s satisfaction, Rapture handled the whole transaction without saying a word, and Hephaestus wondered if her mind talk was working again. Accommodation did not look as if it would be so easy to find. All that passed for the local hotels and rooming houses were crammed with human body heat. German families clung to their wagons, Irish to their carts. Blacks pitched makeshift tents, Indians threw up hide-framed shelters. Some stray men just overturned crates. The excuse for the town hoosegow was full and foul, as were the grim attempts at houses of worship. Everywhere one looked, there was more canvas than lumber and more people and animals than either.

While sawmills up and down the river had been busy, the rumor mills had been frantic. In addition to tales of the latest cholera scare, there were stories going around of far stranger outbreaks. Some Kansas Indians up from the South had appeared with bizarre deformities they insisted were due to bad medicine in the water. A small hamlet south of Kansas City had been struck overnight with what appeared to be some kind of religious mania. The Sitturds listened to an earnest mail rider recount scenes of communitywide speaking in tongues and nervous spasms. Children whispered about ghostly forms that were abroad in the night, and from the German that Lloyd understood he was able to pick up hushed mentions of a “monster” that had been sighted out on the prairie. He chose not to pass this intelligence on to his parents. There was enough to worry about as it was, and from the look of the sky and the smell in the air a weather change was coming on fast.

It was in the midst of these mounting anxieties that an incident occurred which punctuated the tension with special force. At first, it seemed to be a perfectly normal affair, given the surroundings. One of the Spaniards had a dog, a large, threatening thing with a mottled coat. Its ribs were visible, but it had a big, powerful head and shoulders, and what were obviously strong, bone-crushing jaws. The cur stood guard by one of the cooking ovens, drooling and sharp-eyed for any scraps it might be offered. Out of the crowd between the wagons there appeared a much smaller black dog, short-legged and ragged of coat.

The scent of the food wafted. The two dogs’ eyes locked. No one spoke up to claim ownership of the smaller mutt. The Spaniard’s dog gave a low warning growl. Then the two dogs were at each other’s throats. All the people in the vicinity stepped back, except a man who said that he was Australian. He stepped forward and proposed taking bets. Several of the men watching were about to take him up on this idea when the dust around the dogfight swirled up in a furious blast and a yelping rose out of the haze.

Everyone assumed the Spaniard’s dog had drawn blood, but then the beasts went silent. The dust settled, and to everyone’s surprise and horror the bigger dog had gone limp and hung from the teeth of the little one. Several of the men were about to express their regret at not having a wager down, when to their further amazement and disgust the small black dog began to eat the other. There was nothing rabid about it-the stunted canine acted with methodical, almost serene ferocity. The mouths of the onlookers, most of whom had seen and even bet on many dogfights in their time, dropped open.

The Spaniard leveled a hunting rifle at the mass of bloody fur and shining fangs. The victorious critter stared back at him with composed and utter disregard. Lloyd, along with several others, was in a position to see the expression in the creature’s eyes and he felt cold inside as a result. The Spaniard shot the dog in the head. He then took the rifle and walloped the mongrel’s rib cage and smashed its skull. When his temper had been vented, he wiped the rifle butt on the fur of what remained of his dead animal, then picked it up by its hind legs and took it off to bury it. The carcass of the murderous black thing was left in the dust for the flies. No one said a word, and it was a long minute before the crowd that had formed began to disperse. In the distance, down the dock road, Lloyd heard the whistle of the Defiance, on its way upstream, laden with new passengers and cargo, and a fresh stockpile of fears and dreams about the future. His heart ached for Hattie. He had never known such a sensation of longing, and it almost swamped him with its force and poignancy.

While all this had been happening, a huge white cumulous blob of shaving lather had transformed into a darkening thunderhead just beyond the town. There was that heady, sweet, dangerous smell of heavy rain in the air, and within the half hour the sky opened up and bucketloads began falling. What a scrambling mess of jostling, lunging, scurrying labor followed. Cooking fires were extinguished, kids were swept into or under wagons, people hopped and hobbled for awnings and doorways, horses and mules bucked and snorted, poultry squawked and darted. All the hammering ceased and workmen hustled down ladders. The deluge struck with genesis force, shimmering over the roofs and canvases like a collapsed wall. Umbrellas and tents strained and tore. Wagons lurched. Oxen lumbered. Indians, Negroes, settlers, and vagabonds were all caught in the same storm, lashing down on dry timber and dust, livestock and hardware.

The downpour did not last long, but it turned the town into a slippery, squishy, tinkling bog of wagon wheel-sucking mud and overflowing gutters. Anyone who had managed to reach one of the protected plank boardwalks or covered porches braced himself there, ready to defend his refuge. The Sitturd clan had headed for the open door of one of the stables, but even so had got soaked. Like their place of residence back in St. Louis, the building was alive with mice. Water dripped down through holes in the shingled roof. The smell of damp hay, leather, and dung greeted them. Worse still, the shadows within showed signs that several other families had already had the same idea, and the stableman, a fellow with a barrel body and arms as thick as the rafters, did not look pleased.

The Zanesvilleans took the hint and inched back out into the mire of the streets. Lloyd could not help himself and went over to inspect the remains of the black dog. He found that the corpse was already badly decomposed. It was not the violence of the Spaniard’s desecration that was responsible, though; it was more like some accelerated internal process. Lloyd’s native curiosity gnawed at him, just as the black dog had ground down its teeth into the other. Despite all that they had to think of-all that lay behind and ahead of them, and the immediate difficulties they faced-he would very much have liked to save the remains of the dog to examine, but he had a feeling, which he could not explain or account for, that within but a short while there would be nothing left of the body to study, perhaps not even bones. Rapture kept the family moving.

At one of the many blacksmith sheds, Hephaestus introduced himself as a member of the trade. Although he had not regained his old strength, and it had been quite a while since he had swung a hammer or used a bellows, he showed himself adept enough to be offered employment starting the next morning. The shed owner and chief smithy was a blunt, compressed anvil of a man named Bevis Petrie. He and his wife and four children occupied the back quarters of the shed and so could not assist with the Sitturds’ accommodation needs, but he did feel charitably disposed enough toward them to recommend that they head to the other end of town and find a man named Othimiel Clutter, who happened to be his brother-in-law and one of the town’s numerous undertakers and coffinmakers.

Rapture, with a tradition of complicated relationships with the afterlife on both sides of her ancestors, was not pleased about this suggestion. But, with the autumn dark about to fall and with it the chance of more rain, she bit her lip and kept her peace. “De dead is jes like us,” she told herself. “Jes got to treat him wid rispect.”

So through the muck the family moved-or, rather, slithered. Several disputes if not outright brawls were in various stages of eruption in the streets and doorways. The saloons were busy, cooking fires had been relit, barn cats licked themselves on roof ledges, and everywhere the flow of runoff water gurgled and spilled, searching for the lowest point. The clouds cleared and a prairie-fire sky lit up the west, as if all the country that lay beyond were burning, which might have seemed menacing and more than a little apt, were it not that a red sky in the evening is a reliable omen of good weather the next day.

The Sitturds trudged through the mud, recalling the miseries of Zanesville. At last they came to a dripping, peeling storefront with a selection of crude pine caskets lined up against a covered porch like skiffs that had been washed up out of the river.

Othimiel Clutter and his wife, Egalantine, turned out to be one of those childless middle-aged couples who seem to have been middle-aged their entire lives and yet had grown alike during the course of their marriage, so that they were now hardly distinguishable, moving, speaking, and even thinking as one. Neither showed the slightest ability to express a complete sentiment without the assistance of the other-and, once voiced, every utterance needed to be echoed several times, just as the casket lids Othimiel sawed and nailed all needed sanding and a knock to be called done. He was forever tapping on the lids of the things in a way that made Rapture most uncomfortable (because she could not help thinking that soon they might be tapping back).

Nevertheless, the Clutters agreed to let the Sitturds “camp out” with them for a fee, once they were assured that the Ohioans were bound and determined to depart before the winter set in. Each member of the family was restless to get moving as soon as possible, a change of season or no.

Of course, it was obvious where the Sitturds were supposed to sleep-not just with the coffins but in them, there being no other space available. (Lloyd took particular note of the smaller-size coffins, of which there was an abundance.) Othimiel, perhaps more devoted to his surname than he should have been, had got a little ahead of himself in his production over the summer. The town had been spared some of the scourges of dysentery, fever, and cholera that many had been prepared for, and the more violent, criminal deaths had been handled without proper ceremony. Besides, given their location near the river, some bodies just disappeared, he and his wife managed to point out (each contributing a word to the finished sentence), which set Lloyd thinking again both of Hattie and of the body of the fierce black dog that had seemed to fall apart before his eyes.