Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 9

Dumbstruck, the professor staggered out and hunkered down on a log in the slowing rain. The clothes his wives had made for them were still there. He could not imagine what had happened. The coincidence of Lloyd's earlier visit crossed his mind but could take no clear form that would explain his wards' abrupt removal. Soaked to the bone and sobering fast, he kept thinking of the whirlwind from which they had supposedly emerged.

What if something in the storm had returned for them? It was improbable. But so were they. He had always been so a.s.siduous in keeping them hidden from prying eyes-never an easy task. Perhaps they had not not been captured like runaway slaves by blood-money ruffians. Perhaps they were been captured like runaway slaves by blood-money ruffians. Perhaps they were not not wet, lost, and afraid, having been stolen away-or having, in their foolishness, fled to some mooncalf idea of freedom-but home and safe, retrieved by the weather-stricken night and taken back to the secret place of the thunder? It was not much to hold on to, but Mulrooney tried. The rain dripped from the branches around him like tears. wet, lost, and afraid, having been stolen away-or having, in their foolishness, fled to some mooncalf idea of freedom-but home and safe, retrieved by the weather-stricken night and taken back to the secret place of the thunder? It was not much to hold on to, but Mulrooney tried. The rain dripped from the branches around him like tears.

CHAPTER 4.

The Price of Surprise THE MORNING DAWNED CLEANER AND CRISPER THAN ANY IN months. (For Mulrooney, the feeling was foreboding and recalled the day that the unfortunate Vladimir had gone missing.) months. (For Mulrooney, the feeling was foreboding and recalled the day that the unfortunate Vladimir had gone missing.) There was a rustling of ledger pages and the tapping of morning cigar ash at the City Hotel-and more than a few wagers laid over breakfast at Planter's House, which consisted of arrowroot biscuits, coddled eggs, fresh trotters, and a serving of wild pigeon-the aromas of black tea or chicory-laced coffee cutting through the stale fumes of pipe smoke and brandy that had followed the coq au vin and bordeaux the night before.

It was the morning of a major sale. The auction house of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. of Chestnut Street was putting up on the block one hundred of the st.u.r.diest Negro field hands valued generally at a whisker over a thousand dollars each-seventy-five older adult males, forty-eight females, and a litter of children that one squire from Kentucky likened to "French-prattling young crows."

The event, as usual, was to take place on the steps of the proud domed courthouse on Fourth Street at noon. Typically, the public did not take much overt notice of these occasions, there being studious attention from those informed professionals either bidding or methodically recording the prices submitted by their peers. These seasoned agriculturalists and their entourages had serious business in mind and had come more than a few miles to do it. So the amateurs kept to the fringe.

Slave auctions represented significant investments in new capital equipment-gambles taken on increased productivity. An air of sober deliberation and dispa.s.sionate judgment was the rule, and for the most part an auction was no more undignified and violent than a sale of horses or cattle and easier on the nose, since the prize specimens had often been treated to a bath and an improved diet to inspire higher prices. "Beef for muscle, fresh fruit for the teeth and breath, and cod liver oil to put a s.h.i.+ne on their hides" was the recommended short-term practice advocated by the trading houses.

No, the systematic brutality of these events was more in the mind, the soul, and heart than in the flesh. But since Negroes were not credited with having minds or souls, any explicit cruelty was considered an unfortunate by-product of what needed doing. Mating a stallion or wringing a chicken's neck-life was filled with raw necessities, and people were much less squeamish then.

Naturally there were whips and guns on hand, but they were primarily ceremonial and symbolic. And of course the goods to be traded appeared in shackles (the young bucks, at any rate), but that was just common sense and economic prudence: the traders were not immune to the high spirits that some slaves felt at the thought of being separated from their wives and children. Better to secure the chains than to have to raise the whip or, worse still, fire the gun. In fact, there were few fatalities at the auctions-a testament to the efficiency that had been achieved through decades of practice.

And not all the slaves stood defiantly flaring their nostrils and rattling their manacles, dreaming of escape, either. Many of them welcomed the change that new owners.h.i.+p would bring. For some it was a chance to find a new life and the faint hope of security, or to be nearer a loved one who had earlier been prised away and sold downriver. For an attractive female who had been forced to service in unspeakable ways a Missouri master, a plantation owner in the Delta, who was less Christian but perhaps more decent, held some distinct appeal.

The upshot was, every auction was a crossroads. Money, emotions, human dignity, and the very destiny of America were all at stake. So it was no surprise that very often a fringe of loitering onlookers would form into an attempted crowd at a distance that allowed them the benefits of aspect without appearing too suspect.

The gathering that tried to take shape on the day in question was unusually large, and all the more faceless and amorphous for its size and prurient interest. Recalling the catastrophe years later in his privately printed memoir, Brookmire would speculate that it was the very size of the a.s.sembled host that so diffused the memory of what transpired (a suggestive observation, given the days of instantaneous ma.s.s communication that have followed). Perhaps the more witnesses, the less reliable their testimony-until by extension it becomes possible to deny that there was anything to witness at all. This phenomenon may go a long way toward accounting for why such abrupt and incoherent reportage was provided by the local media. Of the major regional newspapers, including The Bulletin, The Boatman, The Advocate The Bulletin, The Boatman, The Advocate, the Catholic weekly Shepherd of the Valley Shepherd of the Valley, and The Missouri Republican The Missouri Republican, only The Star The Star contained any more than a pa.s.sing reference to what resulted, and it was the sole mouthpiece to attempt a description, let alone an explanation, of the cause. contained any more than a pa.s.sing reference to what resulted, and it was the sole mouthpiece to attempt a description, let alone an explanation, of the cause.

Here another overlooked law of human nature and ma.s.s perception may have come into play. The more unexpected and unprecedented an occurrence, the more likely it is to slip into the realm of legend, which may be interpreted as a communal way of forgetting what actually happened.

Both of these factors were at work in St. Louis. And, as Lloyd would come to see, other hidden influences were at work as well. Had he not been advised that a war was being waged by secret alliances masked in the shadows of history and camouflaged in the chaos of the hour? Had not Sch.e.l.ling warned him that the capabilities involved were formidable in their reach?

If events could be orchestrated, could not their perception be manipulated, perhaps even eradicated? Personal reports and newspaper accounts of the lynching and burning of Francis McIntosh had diverged wildly and more than a few residents had clean forgotten their involvement, so in the end it was not surprising that those citizens of St. Louis who were watching on the day could not agree and many did not want to admit what they saw sailing toward the city-not on the river but in the sky. Though it came out of the heavens, it looked as if it came from h.e.l.l. Or perhaps Chicago, Mulrooney thought as he watched from the crowd in astonishment, his good heart pounding and perspiration beading under his leghorn hat.

As Lloyd had predicted, if it had been just a balloon that drifted over the city people would have known how to respond. But it was ever so much more than a balloon that detached and exploded like a slow-falling star over the esplanade. What emerged was nothing like anything anyone had ever seen before. Imagine a swirled cage made of fis.h.i.+ng net, bone-dry cane and broom straw, twined wig hair, umbrella spokes and wax, rippling with a patchwork of bandages and bed linen-with a puff of silken sail atop. The rising power of the balloon had lifted the surreal structure into the freshening breeze, where it was then driven forward by all the boiler-bursting speed that Lucky Cahill spurred his smoking steam barge to provide since lugging it out of its secluded mooring on the Illinois side.

Young Lloyd had named his creation the Miss Viola Miss Viola. Atop the domed roof of the courthouse, Hansel Snowden Brookmire squinted through a spygla.s.s when he spotted it. Fragments of American flag crackled in the wind, mirrors glinted, feathers rained like snow-and a voice called out of the blue, "All Hail the Amba.s.sadors from Mars!"

The voice was Lloyd's, projected through a huge knitting mill cone used for winding yarn, but there were other voices that might have been heard-namely, the hysterical cluckings of Urim and Thummim. Lloyd's initial plan had been to dress Mulrooney's charges in stovepipe hats and swallowtail coats, as befitting their introduction to St. Louis society and the earth at large. But he had been unable to acquire togs in their size and so had been forced to improvise again, arriving at a solution that he felt was economical and more appropriate given their supposed otherworldly origin (not to mention the wind!). The brothers were now dressed in toga-like gowns made of ladies' undergarments and equipped with tiny gold wands the boy had foraged out of a rubbish bin. Trembling hundreds of feet in the air inside a bird-delicate cell of spiral-arranged bladders st.i.tched with ba.s.s line, linen, and scavenged wharfery-and now, hovering free of the barge with no balloon to support them-the twins were literally at the end of their tether.

It was pure adrenaline that kept Lloyd from taking more notice of their consternation-that and the sheer novelty of the view. The sight of the people and the horse carriages, the packing crates and the s.h.i.+p pipes, pony carts and rooftops! He could not believe that he was seeing it all just as he had imagined. He had done what he set out to do-to rise above the hordes and sweep all attention skyward! For a moment, it seemed to him that he owned the town. And the river. Everything he could see.

When he did acknowledge the Martians' expostulations, he was upset to find that he was becoming less effective in calming them. When he had appeared in the dark of the storm the night before to lead them away from Mulrooney's camp, they had showed an instinctive sense of trust that encouraged him. Up to the precise moment of their departure in the soaking confusion (he disliked the thought of its being kidnapping kidnapping), he had harbored a concern that his plan violated the trust of his old business a.s.sociate. That it also put at grave risk the lives of the two teratological brothers was just now beginning to dawn upon the boy, for in his mania he had discounted all risk to himself as well.

Once aloft, any fear had left him, and with it all reasonable consideration of malfunction. Ironically, the very moment when his father was more absent from his thoughts than at any time in his short life, Lloyd was more in harmony with Hephaestus's blindered faith in the magic of invention than ever before. Airborne above 1845 St. Louis on the day of a major slave auction, he was not only his father's son; he felt the uncanny sense of his sister's spirit for the first time since leaving Ohio. He was going to rescue his mother from drudgery and humiliation. He was going to lead them all forth to meat, wine, and fresh linen.

This invigorating delusion did not last very long. Urim and Thummim became more agitated as the craft wisped over the humming port like a crazed eclipse heading toward the city buildings and the scene in progress on the courthouse steps. Lloyd rode in a harness that he had fas.h.i.+oned from pilfered horse tack attached to the great plume of flag-and-underwear canopy that fanned out above and behind the miraculous kite cage. His intention was to pa.s.s over the courthouse dome and heave a fine fishnet rigging line down as an anchor that Brookmire would attach, and then to cut himself and the parafoil loose and ride the wind line down and around to make a spectacular landing amid the auction. Then he and Brookmire would wind down the weird-shaped giant box kite and introduce the brothers to the stunned populace. It would be the perfect theatrical occasion to launch their show-business career. As mortified as Mulrooney might feel at their disappearance (and did), he would be speechless with delight and grat.i.tude when the crowd roared. And the fact that the entire performance would overshadow a slave auction was an inspired twist that Lloyd could not resist. The whole deranged caper sparkled in his mind.

Mulrooney would forgive him the fright he had caused and grasp the commercial opportunities the stunt would create. Although not everyone (fortunately enough!) would believe that Urim and Thummim came from the Red Planet, their singular appearance and bizarre mode of arrival would cause a sensation. Mulrooney's future as a famous showman would be a.s.sured. Lloyd himself would be hailed as a G.o.d of invention and adventure. There would be no more broadcloth and boiled-leek broth. He would have a Villa of Wonders and roast duck, and every night a lascivious lady would come to him. His father would have a workshop again, and his mother a garden, roots, herbs, sweet-smelling leaves, and healing teas always brewing.

The possibility that even if the aeronautics went off without a hitch-which was hardly likely, given the many unknown and unforeseeable factors involved-the appearance out of the sky of such outlandish-looking individuals as Urim and Thummim, and the disruption of a significant slave auction, might instigate something more like a riot rather than endless rounds of applause did not occur to the boy with anything like the clarity it should have. He was blind to everything but his own ambition and his desperate craving for adulation-the sanctuary of money and freedom he hoped would descend upon him as soon as he descended into the thoroughfares of the city. This was his moment, his chance to reverse the fortunes of his family and establish a place for himself in the history of transport, science, and entertainment. The world.

Then a sudden rogue gust rose up as they crossed through the hotter air of the cityscape. The thermal blast destabilized the Miss Viola Miss Viola after its smooth drift over the cooler water. Lloyd's parawing ripped free and swept him up to breaking point above the kite nest, the perforated panels bloated with air. Mulrooney's stomach leaped up into his throat at what he saw next. Brookmire nearly fell from his perch. after its smooth drift over the cooler water. Lloyd's parawing ripped free and swept him up to breaking point above the kite nest, the perforated panels bloated with air. Mulrooney's stomach leaped up into his throat at what he saw next. Brookmire nearly fell from his perch.

The spiral kite cell caught the updraft and surged up to graze Lloyd's swinging legs and then veered off back toward the Mississippi, the Amba.s.sadors clicking and squealing like hysterical animals in a drowning cage. The tether that Lloyd held to the kite now threatened to drag him out of control and he was forced to let go, releasing the deformed brothers to the mercy of the sky. Meanwhile, he was rising higher than he had intended, the figures below seething like ants before a rainstorm. The power of the wind billowed out his homemade wings and filled his belly with the b.u.t.terflies that a normal person would have felt long before. His whole being was alive, and terrified at the volatile elements now determining his fate. The kite was but a speck in the air. He felt the world slipping away. Then he remembered that he could steer. He had to steer-for his life. And yet even now-ruptured from the Miss Viola Miss Viola, with the Amba.s.sadors from Mars doomed to some terrible crash in heavy timber-he felt the psychological as well as the physical force of the wind lifting him, calling him upward....

Years before Sir George Cayley's hapless coachman was compelled to make his historic glider flight (which inspired him to defecate in his trousers and resign his post). Long before Lawrence Hargrave and Alexander Graham Bell experimented with their kites and Otto Lilienthal broke his neck. Before Samuel Pierpont Langley catapulted his Aerodromes-and before the bicycle-repairing Wright brothers from another small town in Ohio took their fifty-nine-second flight into history over the dunes of Kitty Hawk-Lloyd Meadhorn Sitt.u.r.d was flying, fulfilling the dreams of the Egyptians, a.s.syrians, Chinese, Indians, Norse, and Greeks. Not falling. He was riding the wind in a winged vehicle that, while neither heavier than air nor machine-powered, possessed a capacity for maneuverability that would not be achieved by others for another fifty years.

But herein lay the great shortcoming of his undertaking. Wilbur Wright's critical insight was that the secret of controlled flight lay as much in the skills of the pilot as in the capabilities of the craft. It was not enough for the machine to have the ability to maneuver; it was essential for the pilot to have the experience to utilize this potential. Without control, the solutions of lift and propulsion were meaningless. Despite the feverish pace at which he had been working, Lloyd had not had time to align his personal skill with the potential of his creation. Faced now, at approximately three hundred feet, with the combined circ.u.mstances of the failure of one half of his enterprise (the loss of the Miss Viola Miss Viola and its cargo of the Amba.s.sadors) and the success of his own means of aviation he was forced to apply all that he had learned about the wind with perilous immediacy. and its cargo of the Amba.s.sadors) and the success of his own means of aviation he was forced to apply all that he had learned about the wind with perilous immediacy.

He pulled the left steering toggle and swung left, sailing faster down and forward, whistling over the steeples and the carriage-colliding laneways to the horror and amazement of Mulrooney, Hansel Snowden Brookmire, and the people of St. Louis. Flaring slowed his driving speed and restored lift, while his body trembled in the risers. The thought of the helpless brothers breaking every bone in their bodies stabbed him with remorse and doubt. He whooshed around a smokestacked section of town, heading back toward the courthouse, but in banking the toggle tore and a puff of air stalled the edge of the parafoil.

Where the wing had been filled like a lung, it now gasped and he jostled in the rigging. The sunlight burned into his retinas. He heard a cry come up from the streets beneath him and the whinnying of crazed horses. The turbulence batted at him like a spinning leaf-his nerves were frayed like the ribbons he clung to.

He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full-which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke-the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below-the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.

Ground rush hit him-the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.

While this private drama had been playing out in the air, a rather more public debacle had been unraveling below. Representatives of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. had led their a.s.sembled offering clanking and shuffling like a parade of the d.a.m.ned from the auction house's pen on Chestnut Street to the courthouse steps, where a pompous man in a frilled s.h.i.+rt and a broad-brimmed hat read out the particulars of the sale and clarified the terms of purchase in stentorian tones. The planter aristocracy was well represented, decked out in top hats and European-tailored finery. Some had come from as far away as the black-loam bottomlands of Mississippi and Alabama, or the sugar kingdoms of Louisiana. The merchandise stood glistening and grim in the bra.s.sy sun. Errant schoolboys gapped and stretched. Idlers spat tobacco juice; skinny dogs panted under drays. Hoop-skirted women with complexions like clotted cream dabbed their throats with eau de cologne as barrel-chested saloonkeepers emerged blinking in the glare, hooking their thumbs into their braces.

Down on Fourth Street, a hatchet-faced plantation foreman watched from the saddle of a bay gelding while his tight-lipped overseer stood gripping a musket on top of the courthouse stairs. Another man in a baggy black suit, with a head as bald as a fire bell under a black silk hat, leaned over a weathered pinewood podium that had been wrestled out of a wagon, while two hulking guardsmen strolled the lines of slaves-some slumped with weariness and despair, others standing erect, both male and female, radiating the strength they had earned by long work in bright light and all weather.

The two hard-bitten white minders had hairy arms as thick as the limbs of hod carriers and skin not much lighter than the individuals up for sale. Their square-toed boots were flecked with the pale green-gold of dried dung, and faded red or threadbare white bandannas poked up under their chins as if to hide some growth. Everything as usual.

Until the Miss Viola Miss Viola appeared. appeared.

The outre vessel came across the river and the sky like some narcotic vision of the future. The sausage casing-like balloon, which had provided the initial elevation, detached and expired in what from ground level Lloyd would have considered a disappointing poof relative to the incendiary excitement he had intended. (The problem was that he could not use any true ordnance for fear of incinerating the Amba.s.sadors and himself.) But to those who were unprepared it was fireworks enough. The river-slapping force of the barge, stoked to boiler-blowing overload, hauled the beautiful abomination forward, where it was set free in a dense shower of glitter, sparks, and feathers.

It was right about then that Mule Christian glanced up from his row of chained fellow slaves and came to the conclusion that this was the sign from G.o.d that he had been waiting for. There was no other way to interpret it. This was a message from the Almighty. And he knew in his heart just what the message was.

Mule was what white plantation owners of the day would have described as a "big field n.i.g.g.e.r"-and big he was, in every way. Worth fourteen hundred dollars in St. Louis. More in Memphis or New Orleans. Six feet five inches tall and as muscled as a well-bred fighting dog. He had the mind of a child but a clear head, except when it came to his religious visions. Somewhere in the past his people had come from the Bight of Benin, that gouge in Africa that extends from Cape Verde to the Congo River. They had given him a name that sounded like Mulu, but all that was a cloudy memory. Mule he became to everyone he met in the cruel New World. An earlier owner had been known as Christianson, but it was thought that his American surname owed more to the fervent faith he had adopted. In any case, Mule Christian knew what he must do. The moment he gazed up at the terrible blue sky, he knew.

"Heee comin'!" the giant boomed in his work-gang baritone. "Heee comin' to sabe us all! Lord beee praised-heee comin'!"

This remark, uttered as loudly as it was, at the precise moment that it was, by someone not expected to speak at all-and by someone of Mule's impressive physical stature-had a profound effect. The tall-hatted white dandies in polished boots moved toward their carriages. Several of the auction items sought to plunge to the ground in fear and supplication, which, chained as they were, caused havoc among the rows. Others, in a state of understandable panic, tried to bolt. They had no clear thought of trying to escape. They had no clear thought at all-and, pulling in different directions, manacled together, they created a gibbering tangle of prostrate and floundering black flesh.

For the whites in official control, this was problem enough to loose a tide of anxieties that translated into physical force-which served only to intensify the confusion and the fear. There were also their own concerns to deal with. What had emerged out of the blue was odd enough to make even the most tough-minded of them drop their jaws and entertain the flickering conclusion that Mule Christian may well have hit the nail on the head (which had been a part of Lloyd's intention from the start).

The uncertainty flashed like flint in a caved-in mine and triggered a series of incidents of localized violence that turned into streetwide turmoil. Whips cracked, horses bucked, a carriage turned over, at least one firearm was discharged-to no effect, except to heighten the hubbub. And Mule Christian managed to break free. How he did it no one in the confusion saw, but while the overseers were busy trying to regain order and the loiterers were scattering like mice-the drunks and larrikins rolling over themselves in stupefaction-Mule Christian broke free of his chains and stood tall on the steps of the courthouse staring at the sky, waiting for the salvation that he knew was coming.

Brookmire had had all his attention riveted at the end of his spygla.s.s, staring at first with pride, then shock, and then abject devastation. Something in the course of events in the sky convinced him that things had not only gone very wrong, they were about to get much worse, and a finely tuned instinct for self-preservation sent him scurrying down from the courthouse.

There were too many other things to take interest in: ululating slaves, shouting foremen, barking dogs, wagon smashups, and the risk of being trampled-and above all else, above them all and closing fast, a magical marionette of an angry bird boy descending to wreak vengeance or enact some revelation.

The truth, however, is that if Brookmire had managed to maintain his poise and position he might have become aware that he was being scrutinized himself-from two different rooftops and two very different points of view. He would have observed that when the commotion began other men who had not been seen before appeared below and began taking charge. It was one of these men, moving with practiced skill, who hustled Mulrooney into an alley, where he woke up hours later lying in a masonry wheelbarrow with a taste in his mouth like copper wire.

By the time Lloyd overshot the courthouse and made his attempt to bring himself around to land, there were not that many people left on Fourth Street to see it. A subtle but relentless force had been unleashed to quash the slave upheaval and coerce the potential witnesses from the scene. Only Mule Christian seemed immune to these efforts. Whip leather slashed across his shoulders, but this just served to encourage him into the middle of the street, where he braced, with outstretched arms, forming a tiny post-noon shadow in the thoroughfare, as Lloyd whisked down and toward him.

Lloyd tried to swerve, which spoiled the stalling power he tried to call on-his vision blurred, his reflexes jangled. He had a faint greenish flash of his sister's face-she who had never had a living face. A rush of doom and shame whooshed through him, and his wind-filled wings ripped away as he tumbled headlong into the dark man who stood before him with open arms.

Even if Brookmire had still been at his station and watching then, he would have found it impossible to say for sure what happened next. For a few seconds, an ancient cart nag stood draped with the remnants of Lloyd's parawing. Cudgels thudded. A broad-brimmed hat lay mashed in the street. And toppled at the foot of the stairs was the auction podium, a ledger book trodden on the ground beside it. But no one saw what happened to the boy or his flying harness. Mule Christian, the most expensive field n.i.g.g.e.r on sale, had seen a miracle coming for him out of the sky, and he had stepped forth to embrace it.

CHAPTER 5.

Fleeing from Grace PERHAPS IT WAS A KIND OF BLESSING THAT M MULE FOUND. HE WAS certainly released from bondage. There was no pain. His neck snapped on impact. In giving his life, he cus.h.i.+oned Lloyd's fall and the little giant from Zanesville rose out of the wreckage of the giant black man in the hot Missouri sun, like some part of Mule Christian that had lain hidden all the hard years of his life. certainly released from bondage. There was no pain. His neck snapped on impact. In giving his life, he cus.h.i.+oned Lloyd's fall and the little giant from Zanesville rose out of the wreckage of the giant black man in the hot Missouri sun, like some part of Mule Christian that had lain hidden all the hard years of his life.

Lloyd managed to gain his feet for a moment and then crashed for true. The brick facades, the courthouse dome, Mulrooney, Brookmire, thoughts of his mother, his father, and his ghost sister-all swirled into a spiral that seemed to take him with it, and he remembered nothing more at all until the agitated face of Sch.e.l.ling yawned down into his like a pit that had learned the art of looking back.

Smelling salts were applied, hands groped and tugged at him, voices were raised and then stifled into whispers, stars-or things like stars-seemed to whiz past his head. He glimpsed his mother-or glimpsed her smell-his senses muddled. Then there was cold water and warm candlelight. He remembered one man with a face like a snapping turtle and a tall, thin white man cradling him into a pa.s.sageway of dirt behind two shuttered buildings...the aroma of pumpernickel bread.

Every so often he regained enough coherence to imagine that he was still flying, higher and higher up to heaven to meet his dead sister, who waited in the dandelions at G.o.d's feet, flying a kite with his face painted on it. Then the face on the kite would change. It would be his father, bright and ebullient as he once was ages ago back in Ohio. Then the image would change again, into the mangled bodies of Urim and Thummim. Someone stuck a rag down his throat to keep him from biting his tongue. Fragments of memory haunted him: the sight of Mulrooney's hat in the crowd...skiffs along the esplanade...the mirror burn of Brookmire's spygla.s.s.

It was nightfall by the time Lloyd regained full consciousness. He was out on the water, in a larger version of the kind of boat that Sch.e.l.ling had used to take him to meet Mother Tongue. A tallow candle beamed out of a battered lantern hanging on the side of the pilothouse. His mother was there, looking perplexed and horrified, chattering and sobbing over him in her gumbo accent, any fussy white pretense stripped away. To his profound shock and relief, his sack of personal things lay beside him on the deck, tied up tight just the way he had left it stuffed inside his excuse for a shuck pillow back at the mission house. He longed to claw it open to see if Mother Tongue's eyes and the Amba.s.sadors' box, and the precious letter from his uncle, were safe in hiding. Everything came back.

His body ached, from his skull to the legs that had slammed into Mule Christian. The slightest movement brought back sickening waves of falling. Along with Sch.e.l.ling, there were two large black men, but not the same men he had met before. His stomach felt like a mess of cogwheels and syrup. He wanted to throw up, but nothing came out of his gullet. The dark, thick air was hot and still, and smelled of wood smoke and river muck.

The joyous power of the wind came back to fill his smarting bones. He saw the city laid out beneath him...the ineffable experience of flight...then the shadows rose up to s.n.a.t.c.h him-the accusing face of the showman-and at last he did vomit, over the side of the boat, his bile mingling with the Mississippi as the launch chugged upriver.

Silently, his mother sidled over and put her arm around his shoulder. He realized that he was wearing some other boy's clothes. Whose? And what had become of Brookmire? Rapture crooned sad nonsense words in his ear, as she had done when he was wee. Why did everything go so wrong for them? Was he cursed? Would there ever be a home full of peace and belonging? Sch.e.l.ling scowled at him. The boat churned on.

They were headed north to the junction of the Missouri River, hugging the sh.o.r.e. In about two hours, they had melded into this other flow and arrived at their apparent destination, a clutter of what in the dark looked like drying sheds and some sort of chandler's warehouse at the end of a sagging pier. The boat docked and up on the bank a hound moaned. A hard-looking white woman in a plain black frock appeared, carrying a bear rifle. With her was what Lloyd first thought was a boy, perhaps the boy whose clothes he was wearing. The lad hoisted at arm's length the kind of lamp Lloyd had seen dangling on the bows of the fis.h.i.+ng boats, but when the couple got closer Lloyd saw that he was in fact a midget-with a tight dried-apple face that rose up out of dirty flannel like the head of someone who had drowned. The pair spoke not a word.

"Where are you taking us?" Lloyd asked Sch.e.l.ling.

The humpback cast a glance at him, like a chunk of gristle to a mutt.

"You will stay here the rest of the night, then be on your way tomorrow."

"Where?" the boy queried. He tried to reckon the number of days since he had last seen his old patron, but the midget's face distracted him.

"Where you were heading before you created such trouble."

Lloyd flinched at this remark but grabbed at his satchel and hugged it to his chest. Sch.e.l.ling gestured them off the boat and accompanied them down the rickety gangplank. The midget and the rifle woman led them up a cut-clay path through a tangle of unlit buildings. They pa.s.sed a chicken coop, coming to a windowless c.h.i.n.kwall cabin. A drainage trench ran around the place like a moat they had to step over-and when they did, a towering but emaciated deerhound ambled out of the shadows, a.s.suming horselike proportions up against the midget. One of the black men who had been with them on the boat was left outside on guard.

Inside, the floor was packed dirt and the only light came from the hearth, where a s.p.u.n.k of resiny pine was smoldering and popping. The cloistered air was oppressive with mosquitoes. Lloyd's eyes shot around the room. A pewter jug and a stack of scratched tin plates stood on a turned-leg table with two milking stools beside it. Another chair was a rocker like the one he had sat in during his interview with Mother Tongue and, next to it, a pathetic-looking child-size wheelchair. In the corner rose a jailhouse bunk with a patchwork comforter laid over each bundle of ticking. A polished cherry-handled dueling pistol lay on the bottom bunk.

Sch.e.l.ling spoke to the woman and the midget in some language that sounded to Lloyd like German but was not. A cold leg of poached chicken, corn pone, and some black-eyed peas were served to him and Rapture, along with a lopsided bottle of birch beer to share. He felt as ravenous as the insects and as dry as the air. When he had finished gnawing his bone, Sch.e.l.ling ordered him toward the bunk. Carefully, the boy laid the dueling pistol on the hardened mud floor, which had been swept smooth by a stiff broom and strong arms.

Lloyd lay back on the ticking but kept his eyes on Sch.e.l.ling and his ears open, the mosquitoes whining around his head. The humped man whispered to Rapture for quite some time as the woman and the midget crouched in their respective chairs, staring hypnotically into the fireplace as if they were all by themselves. At last the bookseller reached into a pocket and produced a sheaf of paper money. The notes he pressed into Rapture's hand. Lloyd caught a hint of the calcium-stained tooth, and then his old patron's face marbled over into blankness once again.

Soon after, Sch.e.l.ling left without saying anything more to Lloyd. The beer had softened and slowed the boy's thinking, and the whirring of the skeeters and the hissing of the sap in the lump of pine eased his alertness away from its moorings and out into the current of slumber. Only once did he stir-some upsetting dream about the midget watching him in his sleep-but fatigue and despair got the better of him again, and it was not until the light of a sullen morning spilled through the open doorway that he woke up properly.

His mother squatted on one of the milking stools, and beside her, hunched over the table, was what might have been a scarecrow that had been plucked out of the river and left to dry on a line. Sch.e.l.ling glowered at the boy.

"Here is your father," he announced acidly. "Or what is left of him. Very soon now a steamer will put in. You are all going to be on it. Do you understand?"

"Where are we going?" Lloyd mumbled, rubbing away the crust of sleep.

"Far away, I hope," Sch.e.l.ling said, shrugging. "And never to return. Don't you remember you were going to Texas-before you took to trying to fly? Or did your brains get scrambled when you crushed that poor fellow?"

Rapture squirmed at this remark, but the huddled figure beside her did not respond. The woman and the midget were nowhere to be seen. Despite Lloyd's native self-possession, he felt that he might cry. He climbed to his feet instead, too curious about the derelict plopped on the stool.

"Keep to your cabin as much as you are able," the bookseller commanded. "Use the money I have given you and pay the bursar direct. Talk to as few people as you can, and tell no one your plans. You are a little boy, after all, Lloyd. A dangerous, selfish,foolish little boy. In spite of your genius, your stupidity is matched only by mine for watching over you and not taking action before you did. I thought I was protecting you. Already it seems the better question is who will protect the world from from you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess." you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess."

Rapture sat speechless, propping up the figure that Sch.e.l.ling had called his father-rousty with chiggers and alcoholic delirium (a condition that Mother Tongue's lieutenant treated with an injection from a horse needle). The skeletonized tramp slumped with the shot as a riverboat whistle tooted in the distance.

"He will rest for a while now," Sch.e.l.ling rasped, his hump twitching. "I recommend that you restrain him-and keep his head turned. Plenty of water and time can get him through this. Now go. And be gone."

Moving toward the gray light, Lloyd could see a paddle steamer pulling into the ramshackle wharf, where a man in a buckboard loaded with sacks of flour waited. The air was greasy-warm and smelled like dead fish.

He tried to imagine where Mulrooney was at that moment, but he could not bring the showman into focus. What would Brookmire tell his father? And what of the Amba.s.sadors?

The steamboat let out another whistle that reminded him of the screech owl in the slave cemetery the night that Sch.e.l.ling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue-a cry from out of the stillness, between the land of the living and the brilliant darkness of the dead.

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. 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 Sitt.u.r.d 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 rea.s.suring. 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 s.h.i.+ns 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 acc.u.mulate 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 gla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 grat.i.tude. 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 carca.s.s 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.