The combined sale, along with a good word from the giant, yielded enough money for rough-deck keelboat passage in the company of a cable-armed Serb named Holava, who carried a bowie knife strapped to his belt that he called a “genuine Arkansas toothpick,” and made his living hauling coal, nails, timber shake, and sacks of milled corn to Louisville.
Just over 110 miles of twisting river, it was. Sometimes swollen and foaming around them, other times snagged and vicious with overhang from the banks. The flow could rise three feet in the night, frothing with driftwood, fallen timber, and rubbish. And the bizarre people! Jug-swilling maniacs calling out from fortified bluffs-the last of the beaver trappers drifting like leaves in long birchbark canoes-flatboats covered in skins, writhing with children and clattering pots.
Hephaestus read, whittled, and chewed to pass the time (trying to keep ideas for new inventions from filling his mind),while Rapture would point out to Lloyd the hollyhocks and the yellow spikes of toadflax.
By the time they reached Louisville and Holava had traded in some of their Ohio cargo for a load of burley tobacco and cured meat, Lloyd had filled his notebook with elegant scribbles of ospreys with shad clutched in their talons and an idea for a huge barge to be pulled by swimming buffalo.
But the farther the family got from Zanesville the more strained their sense of family became. Hephaestus missed his tools and his inventions. Rapture missed her herbs and concoctions. Lloyd missed his secret link with his dead sister, and the ability not just to draw things but to make them. Texas seemed a world away. They reread the magical letter and hardened themselves for the next phase of their journey, each of them wondering where the elusive presentiment of deepening shadow came from-whether it came from within them or moved on larger, darker wings across America itself.
There was something in the wind that no one quite understood, and so could not talk about in any of the mélange of languages that swirled around like junk in the river.
The Sitturds were puzzles to themselves even. Were they intrepid adventurers reaching out for the bounty of a new day? Or cowardly bankrupts fleeing like frightened beasts?
It is sometimes hard to tell the pilgrim from the fugitive, just as dawn always has a hint of the gloaming. In every opportunity, there is an invitation to failure and defeat. And in every defeat there is an opportunity… for…
CHAPTER 4. River of Secrets, River of Mercy
LOUISVILLE WAS A TOWN OF EXTREMES. THE THICK SMELL OF horse piss alternated with gentle sniffs of blooming wisteria. Newly rich planters mixed sugar into their bourbon while slaves hauled tobacco and cotton crops to market, and the streets flurried with open-air stalls that sold live animals along with dried catfish, mud turtles, and skinned rabbits swarming with yellow jackets-a sight that fascinated Lloyd and disgusted Hephaestus (stirring memories of Phineas the rabbit). There was a friend left behind in Zanesville that the family never spoke of, and the blacksmith rather feared that Lloyd gave more thought to the mechanical beaver he had made than to the life he had taken.
Desperate again for funds, the family hocked most of their remaining possessions for food and lodging, and for raising enough money to cover waterline passage on a stern-wheeler called the City of Paducah all the way to Cairo, where the Ohio melds into the Mississippi. There they found planks and piers, mule-lined dust streets, and frame houses peering across the river to Kentucky.
Amid hanging sides of bacon and buckets of nails that smelled like dirty rain, the Sitturds negotiated passage to St. Louis on board a paddle wheeler that had been christened the Festus in a Memphis shipyard but which its prudent new owners had renamed the Fidèle. The steamboat was crowded with all manner of unusual passengers, but none who intrigued Lloyd more than the man with the silver hand.
The possessor of the mechanical prosthesis was supposedly named Henri St. Ives and while he claimed to be from Vicksburg, he had the aura of those who habitually obscure their origins. It was at a card table in one of the parlors on the upper deck, surrounded by a stack of coins and greasy notes, that young Lloyd officially made his acquaintance.
The boy had been attracted to the drawing room by the smoky male voices of the players, punctuated by the ping and rustle of money and cards on the thick felt cloth. Once in position, Lloyd had refused to leave, standing so steadfast that the general conclusion around the table was that he was simpleminded.
The game was straight poker, and it was clear that St. Ives’s fellow players were becoming disgruntled and a little suspicious about his run of luck. After he swept another pot, several unkind remarks were made, to which the maimed man replied, “Gentlemen, please. Good and bad fortune finds us all in its own time.” He then raised his shining left mitt with a flourish and, one by one, the other men at the table grunted their acceptance and chipped in their money.
Another hand was dealt and then another, both won by St. Ives. By this time, one of the men had suffered such losses that the presentation of the artificial appendage and its suggestion of some past catastrophe was no longer sufficient to ease the tension. The man, a plump horse doctor named Fundy, lurched up, almost capsizing the table, and shouted, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but I know a cheat when I see one!”
St. Ives remained impassive, save for a lightning wink at little Lloyd.
“Good sir. Here you’ve been allowed to play at the gentlemen’s table, which, given your level of skill, is a gift. Now sit down and wager or make a dignified retreat.”
A roped vein in the accuser’s forehead began to throb and his skin reddened. “Retreat?”
The blustering quack then drew from his coat a tendon scalpel, which he carried for protection. The lethal nakedness of it gleamed for all to see.
St. Ives’s face did not blanch, but his silver hand came alive. With a click like the lock in a drawer, from out of the index finger snapped a dagger that doubled the length of the digit-and then, with a flick of the wrist, as if he were flipping a card into a hat, St. Ives doubled the length of the blade yet again, so that he was able to slice the ribbon that held the man’s pocket watch in place without stirring from his chair.
Flabbergasted, Fundy clutched his paunch as if to make sure his entrails had not spilled out across the table. St. Ives laid his cards facedown and nudged the severed timepiece forward.
“Now, my friends, if any of you feel similarly discomfited I am prepared to meet you man to man on the afterdeck to settle this affair with honor. Alternatively,” he rasped-and the silver hand clicked and expanded again to reveal a set of razor-sharp claws, one from each finger-“you can learn what justice comes from molesting a helpless cripple. It’s your call, gentlemen. I am at your pleasure.”
This last remark was uttered through an unwholesome smile that the pudgy accuser would never forget. Faced with such an unexpected display of weaponry, the poker players decided in unison to yield the table, and when their chairs were empty the claw blades retracted and the gambler eyed the young boy.
“You think I cheated? You think me a scoundrel?”
Lloyd shook his head. “You count the cards. You calculate in your head. You have a method. It merely gives you an advantage.”
“Hah! Do you know how to play the gentlemen’s game, then?”
“I think I do now,” the boy replied.
“How do you mean?” St. Ives puzzled.
“I watched. I listened.”
“That you did, lad. I could feel your glance penetrating me like one of my own fingers. But have you ever played? Do you know the rules?”
“You just taught me. All of you… by how you played,” Lloyd answered.