“It won’t be the last one I make,” Lloyd said to console him. The old man may occasionally have been miffed at the boy’s precocious abilities, but he had always been proud of them, too. Or, perhaps, just in awe.
At last there came a hint of spring. For the Sitturds it brought an eviction notice for failure to pay their land tax, threats of seizure of property and chattels to repay debts-and a gut-shot Anglo-Nubian goat. There was no mistaking that sign. Perhaps Miller had been right after all, at least as far as the family was concerned.
That same week a traveling Methodist minister came to town, or at least a man who called himself a minister. He delivered no sermons. He did, however, deliver a packet that took their minds off all other matters, for its contents were exceptional in the extreme: a small knotted bag of gold, a hand-drawn map, and a letter addressed to Hephaestus from Captain Micah Jefferson Sitturd of the Texas Rangers, dated eight months earlier, from “Forever the Great Republic of Texas.” It read:
Dear Brother,
I pray that this missive will promote kind thoughts towards myself. If you have heard little from me in recent years, or if the little you have heard has caused you unhappiness, it is with my regrets.
The fruits of my labors have been few and bitter, but I have at last built for myself a kind of home, a simple property of some three hundred acres that lies halfway between the western border of the Indian Territory and the settlement known as Kixworth, northeast of Amarillo.
Some would think it barren, bleak country, but it has some artesian water and soil that suits a committed agriculturalist experiment such as a hardy drought-resistant strain of cattle. I have named it Dustdevil, on account of the sudden funnels of wind that appear. I have a deed in perpetuity for this land, signed by Sam Houston himself and countersigned by Juan Herrero and the great Chief Buffalo Hump, leader of the Comanches. Of course, no title to any land can ever be secure, especially in this troubled region-and not without heirs. Hence this letter to you.
You are my only living relative, and should anything happen to me I would desire that you take possession of the property. I have found within it something of extraordinary interest but far beyond my poor powers to interpret or explain. My training has been as a soldier, not a scientist. Faced with such a riddle, I am out of my depths.
I know that you are rooted in Ohio and that perhaps you have a family now and a bright, happy life you would be hard put to abandon. But perhaps not. Perhaps something of our father’s restlessness, which I seem to have inherited in disproportion, is also at work in your heart. If so, I offer you and yours a chance for a new beginning, and the guarantee of something exceedingly curious that will stir your excellent mind. If not, then I still ask you, as my brother, to consider coming.
It is not an easy task I set for you. It is a long and difficult route and not without danger. Yet I still ask. Come, Hephaestus. Beyond my own selfish desire to share something of this life with you before I am gone, I have a suspicion that if you were to take up residence on this property and hold it you would find that it holds more value than I can speak of here. I have enclosed what money I have to offer to help you afford the journey, or to use as you see fit. Set out as soon as you can if you are able, or forget me and carry on with your life with my blessings.
MJS
PS. You may inquire of me at the trading station in Perryton and head south to the Canadian River. A man named Bloxcomb will assist you.
CHAPTER 3. The Necessity of Adventure
HEPHAESTUS CONFIRMED THAT BOTH THE LETTER AND THE MAP were evidence of his brother’s handwriting. None of the Sitturds could sleep or eat (which was just as well, because there was precious little for the pot). The proposition that the letter advanced, with its combination of familial support and an invitation to adventure, was, in their current state of finances and mind, irresistible. Still, it left them with what Rapture could not stop describing as a “big’un recishun!”
Despite their avowed intention of mulling over the matter in detail, come the next morning, by the time Rapture had prepared their daily dose of tansy bitters to keep off the ague, Micah’s proposal had been embraced by the whole family with the unquestioning conviction that desperation can bring. There was no “recishun” to be made. They had to leave Zanesville. That Texas lay a long distance away, and a war with Mexico could break out any day, did not dissuade them. This was an offer and a request that could not be refused. Not in their present circumstances-and not in Hephaestus’s heart, either. There was about the communication a suggestive timeliness and a hint of redemptive possibility that hooked him as cleanly as the sturgeon he used to pull from the head of the falls.
With a door of refuge open, it was their lot “ta tek ’e foot een ’e han,” as Rapture put it (which was not a concept that Lloyd thought was sound from an engineering point of view). What to try to salvage was not so clear. The gold that Micah had sent was sufficient to cover only the debts they felt most honor-bound to pay, and, given the financial claims their neighbors wanted to impose upon them, removing any of their remaining possessions would technically have been stealing. None of their farm animals would make it out of Ohio except the draft horse Pegasus, and the one suitable vehicle was an old humdinger night-soil wagon that Hephaestus had traded for a pile of corncob coal. The wagon had been airing out among the snares and spring-loaded traps of Lloyd’s minefield maze garden all winter, but it still retained a pungency that announced its history well before arrival. No matter. If embarking on a journey to a promised land (however “sabbidge” and under threat) had to be started in a cart that reeked of dung, so be it. Better to risk life, limb, and olfactory discomfort than remain in Zanesville as outcasts and debtors.
They considered rafting down the Muskingum to its intersection with the Ohio River at Marietta and catching a steamboat to Louisville and then St. Louis (if they could earn some money along the way). Hephaestus could get work in the cities, and with any luck they could save enough to take a steamboat along the Missouri River to somewhere like Independence and head south across the wild Indian country from there. But the Muskingum was a difficult river to navigate in spring, running high with ice melt and prone to flood, plus unsavory folk were rumored to live along its banks waiting to prey upon the flatboats and their cargoes of grain, lumber, and livestock. The other obvious alternative was the National Road, or the Old Pike, as it was called-the original interstate-which ran through Columbus all the way to Vandalia, Illinois.
Fearing that their creditors might try to pursue them on so open a route, they opted for the more difficult but less predictable plan of making for Cincinnati overland via the Great Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, which had been a place of good luck for them in the past-the place where Lloyd and Lodema were conceived, back when nothing but love seemed to be in the air and hope grew like the sparrowgrass. Pegasus and the humdinger could get them that far, Hephaestus felt. After that, they were in God’s hands.
They took blankets and oilskins and the drunkard’s path quilt Rapture had made. For provisions they took a sack of cornmeal and one of flour, a small side of bacon, a bag of snow apples, one jug of wolf-mint tea, one of homemade whiskey, a bottle of taproot beer, coffee, sugar, salt, some bottled preserves, and taters. They took their old Kentucky rifle and the horse pistol that Parson Shide had used in his famous duel with the alcoholic tobacconist Daniel Christ (who later cut his own throat with a razor in his smokehouse), which Hephaestus had been paid in return for repairing a mill wheel, along with powder and shot, and what Rapture called, “de t’ings fuh mek we libbin’.”