In addition to the richness of Rapture’s phraseology, they took Hephaestus’s blacksmith tools (except for the anvil), his main woodworking tools, an ax, some rope and drag chains, a bolt of twill plus needles and thread, and matches, candles, a lantern, Rapture’s midwife bag, and Lloyd’s notebook. The rest of his dreams and inventions the boy had to leave behind-but, unlike Hephaestus, he felt that he carried them with him in his mind. All these provisions they loaded on the humdinger, but Lloyd’s mind was more loaded still.
Early one morning, while the mist was still rising from the pastures, like the ghosts of all their memories, they each said a silent goodbye to the family farm that was no longer theirs. One last look behind the muddy, rutted road that led either into town or into the woods and the past was gone… a final farewell to the animals buried on the property, the vegetable patches, and the shrouded fruit trees… to Lodema… the hidden Time Ark and its tragic treasure trove.
Even with the promise and the challenging journey ahead of them, Lloyd’s mind lingered behind long after the bend that took the farm out of sight. He vowed that he would rebuild Lodema’s shrine in Texas. He would one day build a city in her honor-a city of cyclones, so full of energy and life it would be. A place where only marvels were allowed.
If anyone saw the family leave, they didn’t shout or wave. The whole countryside had a sleeping, dead stillness to it, so that the wheels of the humdinger and the steady clop of Pegasus’s heavy hooves echoed in the mist.
By the time the sun was high enough to burn away the dewy fog, they were on the poor excuse for a post road through the rolling Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, corduroy at the best of times, now sloppy and treacherous with the slow spring thaw.
Calamity after inconvenience beset them as they made their way through pastureland into thin forest and then into rugged stretches of hardwoods. Sometimes they had to chop down small trees and hitch them to the hind part of the wagon to slow their descent down hills (an endeavor that left Rapture “skaytodet”). Skirting creeks and ravines, they passed mounds and prehistoric earthworks. The trees and undergrowth were fleeting with reemerging wildlife-white-tailed deer, gray foxes, pileated woodpeckers, and hosts of woodland songbirds-but they saw few people: an Indian who vaporized into the budding trees and a mean-looking white man in dirty clothes, who looked as if he had been startled answering the call of nature. Whenever they grew tired or afraid they pulled out the letter from Micah (which Lloyd was given charge of) and savored the enticing conundrum of promise that lay ahead for them in Texas-if they could get there.
It was this hope that got them through the woods and back into farmers’ fields and pumpkin patches and down to the Great Serpent Mound, which was in what is today Adams County, near the town of Locust Grove. Three times the cart had threatened to overturn. At every moment they expected trouble. But they arrived.
Still, it did not fill them with the joy and renewal they had hoped for. Both parents were shy and bumbling, recalling the passionate lovemaking that they had once known there-that had brought Lloyd into being, and Lodema almost.
Lloyd, meanwhile, went into a deep funk after their visit to the Mound, which Rapture attributed to some hypersensitive connection with his “sperit” twin. Hephaestus was of the view that constipation was the cause, and that a large dose of cod liver oil would help. In truth, both parents noticed that the boy was less fixated on Lodema-as if the connection had been broken by their removal from Zanesville. Perhaps that was a good thing, Hephaestus thought. Rapture was less sure, knowing from her own experience how helpful a relationship with ghosts could be. Lloyd kept his thoughts to himself and said not a word to allay their apprehension. In truth, he did not know himself what bothered him. It was some indefinite form of foreboding-as if they were being followed by something of much greater concern than had ever plagued them in Zanesville.
The rains came and they got bogged down for two days, only to pull free of the sucking mud and resume their journey to be struck with another violent thunderstorm and a lashing downpour that forced them to huddle on what high ground they could find while they watched their possessions get drenched. Several they were forced to leave behind. They had overpacked and did their best to keep their optimism from being ejected, along with soaked salt beef and ruined tea leaves.
Back on the road, a filthy-faced man with a spongy goiter and a woman without teeth tried to beg from them. Rapture made hardtack for them, but they continued lurking about, so that Hephaestus had to take a potshot at them with the horse pistol. By lantern light they discovered weevils in the flour.
The next day the horse pistol wasn’t enough. Coming into a clearing, they were surrounded. It was more an extended backcountry family than an organized gang of robbers, but robbery was what the interlopers had in mind. As outraged and aggrieved as the Sitturds felt, they were all in silent agreement that it was a blessing that the clan had no more malicious intent, for given the number of them and their pocky, lice-ridden appearance, their desires might have taken a very different and considerably nastier turn.
The leader, a gnarled salt-and-pepper-bearded git with a scar that ran from his left temple deep into his mess of grizzle, spoke in a broken-toothed accent they could barely understand, like a wild hill preacher, directing with a musket a weasel-quick boy of about sixteen and two older men with gopher teeth and eyes like toads, each armed with long, cruel skinning knives shoved in their rope belts.
With an unsettling politeness, they plundered the wagon of food and the best and most important of Hephaestus’s tools as three moonfaced women in sack dresses and threadbare shawls, and another fidgety male with an eyepatch, looked on without expression down the long barrels of well-used squirrel guns, and then melted back into the woods as suddenly as they’d appeared.
When it was over, Rapture burst into tears and stamped her feet, while Lloyd’s locked jaws clicked with fury. Hephaestus summed up the situation. “We’re still alive. Let’s keep moving. While we can.”
And so they did, making do with what they had left, eating wild game they caught along the way, and pushing hard to get through the hill country.
Easter found them in Cincinnati, or Porkopolis, as it was being called-a booming new metropolis of 150,000 energetic souls, many of them German immigrants, Irish, Scots, and Poles. The family was able to find temporary lodging and employment with a man named Schloss, who made knockwurst and sculpted pigs’ heads of offal and jellied marrow. Lloyd’s grasp of German came in handy, and he was assigned the task of taking orders and assisting with deliveries. Rapture did laundry and cooking, while Hephaestus got work with the Cincinnati Steamship Company repairing machinery. At night they snuggled amid the pork fat and candle smoke and pored over Micah’s letter, which Lloyd kept hidden in his precious bag along with his notebook.
For three weeks they lived above Schloss’s meaty-smelling slop kitchen in a frame-house-and-vegetable-plot district running up from the river, where the smell of kettles full of boiling shirts mingled with the fumes of schnapps. The sounds of polka music (which was relatively new then) alternated with the lieder and the occasional hatchet fight. During that time they sold Pegasus and what was left of the humdinger to an Irish-Shawnee giant named Mulligan Hawk. Despite his fearsome appearance, he gave the impression of knowing horses and appreciating animals. Their goodbye to this, their last living friend from the farm, was less moody as a result. Old Pegasus would be looked after-perhaps much better than they would be.