Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 12

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 p.r.o.nounced 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 m.u.f.fled, 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 ill.u.s.trations of the Alps and the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, Paris, Rome, the temples of Greece. Those visions seemed so remote from their circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed for quince paste (and later pa.s.sed 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 a.s.serted at last, almost hiccupping.

"'Cause I's a girl?" Hattie retorted, chucking his cheek.

"Because...because...you're not Englis.h.!.+" 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 gla.s.s, that Sch.e.l.ling had shown him).

She named him Li'l Skunk. It was not easy for her to express affection, in spite of her pa.s.sionate 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 jos.h.i.+ng 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 are dangerous," he told her. "You are dangerous," he told her. "You are very 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." 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.signment 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 was organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-a.s.sembling, self-consuming, self-sustaining complex system in his mind. organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-a.s.sembling, 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 Sch.e.l.ling'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 suba.s.semblies 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 is the whole. the whole.

The hierograms of the Martian Amba.s.sadors 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 circ.u.mstance.

"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 Sch.e.l.ling when asked his greatest aspiration.

CHAPTER 4.

Fetish LLOYD PUT TOGETHER FOR H HATTIE A SIMPLE YET VERY FUNCTIONAL all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace ap.r.o.n, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he st.i.tched 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.) all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace ap.r.o.n, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he st.i.tched 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 flas.h.i.+ng, 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 a.s.sortment 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 shus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion-and of something so often missing in all romance, whatever the ages: true partners.h.i.+p.

Therein was the great problem. The Sitt.u.r.ds' 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 s.p.a.ce 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 o.r.g.a.s.m 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 s.c.r.o.t.u.m 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 really do?" 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 am another creature. That's the giff the old b.i.t.c.h gave to me. She didn't mean to, but she did." another creature. That's the giff the old b.i.t.c.h gave to me. She didn't mean to, but she did."

"So you'll be a wh.o.r.e?" 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, b.u.t.tercup-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 n.o.body'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 Sitt.u.r.d 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 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 pa.s.sed through many hands to reach her. 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 pa.s.sed 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 Amba.s.sadors, his uncle's letter and map, and the always watching gla.s.s eyes of Mother Tongue.

Before Hattie, he had not had the wherewithal to look upon the Amba.s.sadors' 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+pley'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.) as a fort when Osage Indians would come to trade furs and pause at the window of Agent George s.h.i.+pley'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 Sitt.u.r.ds 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 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 gra.s.s had grown to feed their animals), still others had poured in since, intending to hunker down for winter and either trade their stores or acc.u.mulate 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. 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 gra.s.s had grown to feed their animals), still others had poured in since, intending to hunker down for winter and either trade their stores or acc.u.mulate 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 s.h.i.+ft 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.