“Oh, they write, too-if you can call it that,” the professor remarked.
“Could I see?” Lloyd cried, unable to hide his interest.
“My boy, you’re as curious a specimen as they are in your own way,” the professor replied. He went to a trunk, which made Lloyd wince with the recollection of Miss Viola, and produced a large handful of paper scraps all covered with a tiny but precise cuneiform-like writing. Holding the dense lines of unknown symbols together was a repeated icon that resembled the spiral shape of a tornado.
“Now don’t be telling me you can read this!” the professor scoffed.
“Well, not yet,” Lloyd agreed. “But maybe…”
“Son, all the clever men in the world would be a long while in unraveling the secret of this doodling. And it may well be that there is no secret-that they’ve just scribbled and scrawled to please themselves and what looks good is good enough.”
Lloyd noticed a wooden matchbox, or what he first thought was a wooden matchbox, edging out from under the Ambassadors’ bed. It was in fact triangular in shape, rather like a hand-size metronome, and when he picked it up he was surprised by the almost total lack of weight. Its surface, which had the smoothness and hardness of metal, not wood, had been covered, but here the writing had been engraved. The weird ciphers flowed in their swimming lines, but the lines took on a larger shape of the cyclonic spiral.
“Could I have this?” the boy asked. “I want to study it.”
Urim and Thummim exchanged determined clicks and grunts.
Lloyd nodded at them, and they seemed to nod back.
“I take it they approve,” the professor said. “That’s how I’ll take it, anyway. You may keep the box, young Lloyd, as a souvenir to reward your sagacity and a memento of the amazements you have seen. Learn its secret if you can.”
The boy tucked the talismanic object into his shirt. Then he said goodbye to the professor and his unexpected family, not knowing how much trouble lay ahead for his own.
“What an unusual lad,” the professor said when Lloyd had departed. He was unable to recall what he had intended to lure the boy’s thoughts away from the tiger powder with when he invited him inside the tent.
The Ambassadors clicked and burbled.
CHAPTER 6. A Lust for Learning
LLOYD WAS A LONG TIME TRACKING DOWN HIS FATHER AND mother, because Hephaestus, when he discovered that he had lost the money, began combing the market, hoping against hope that it might just have fallen out of his pocket. Beside himself with anger about the loss, the reformed inventor limped out of the square and into a district of warehouses and then down a brickbat alley where he was waylaid by some toughs and might well have been beaten to a pulp had not one of them had a gimpy foot himself, and so called off the assault out of sympathy.
Meanwhile, Rapture found that haggling for bargains amid the produce merchants was exhausting work (and they sometimes found that talking to her was not so easy, either, even though she put on her whitest accent).
When Hephaestus and Lloyd were not at the agreed meeting point, she too went searching the adjacent streets and, following the commotion of a carriage accident, got lost for a time amid the dust heaps and sale yards, where it was lucky she did not get jumped. Or worse. While she could pass for white most of the time in Ohio, St. Louis was a more sensitive, volatile environment. She sensed that, but concerns about her menfolk made her bolder than she should have been.
So it was well after the professor had gathered a crowd and performed his magic show with the help of Mrs. Mulrooneys 1 and 2 (who were, of course, thought by the spectators to be the same woman) that the Sitturd family was finally reunited. And the mood was not pleasant when Hephaestus confessed what had happened to the money-or, rather, what he did not know had happened.
“How could you?” snapped Lloyd, thinking back to how hard he had to work and scheme to make it and, even worse, how honorably the rogue St. Ives had treated him, always dividing the money on equal terms. He was so put out and let down, in a way, he wished the gambler had been his father. However wounded he might have been, he was at least a man with backbone and cunning-and style-and knowledge of the world. Lloyd knew from having prowled the market himself just what had happened-and he knew that it would have been a very sorry sneak thief to have attempted such with St. Ives.
“I-I’m sorry,” Hephaestus whimpered. For the first time, Lloyd felt a cold and pure disdain for his father, which was made even worse, for it brought with it a premonitory fear of further dissolution and foolishness. I am too young to be made to lead this family, Lloyd thought. But what other choice is there if this is to happen?
They took shelter in the rodent-busy stable, with the smell of the glue boiler mingling with the smoky red grease lamps down in the street, and the collard greens and charred pigs’ feet rising up from the shacks and shantyboats.
It was a miserable night despite the butter beans and cinnamon that Rapture managed to serve, along with a slice of smoked fatback, a loaf of day-old flatiron bread, followed by a variation on apple pandowdy and quick mud coffee.
The mice were so insistent-and when they weren’t running wild across the rafters and the floor the rats in the walls and the birds in the roof sounded even louder-and Hephaestus was so disgusted with himself for losing Lloyd’s money that no one much enjoyed their food. Rapture tried to console her husband by reminding him that Lloyd had found the wad of notes, which meant it had been lost by someone else and so was “bad luck ’n’ kemin home.” Lloyd kept his mouth shut at this, although a part of him longed to tell them both the truth. He wanted the praise he was due for his resourcefulness and knack. There was more Zanesville in his parents than he liked.
But the important fact was that they could no longer afford their stateroom on the Spirit of Independence. A new life with Micah seemed farther away than when they were in Ohio. They were stranded and disheartened, and just before they tried to go to sleep Hephaestus started blubbering. It was not an easily stomached sight, and filled Rapture with fear. Lloyd felt his disdain turning to shame. Suddenly, the family was outright foundering-and a long way from home.
“Listen, Hephaestus,” he said in a dark, calm voice, the first time he had ever called his father by his first name. “You have to pull yourself together. Tomorrow I will go out and bring some more money in. I don’t know how yet, but I will. But you can’t be a machine that breaks down now. You’re supposed to be the father in this family.”
There was an almost chilling sobriety to the boy’s words that shook both parents-perhaps because they each suspected that the money that had been lost had not been found. In any case, the next morning while the sun was still low, at the tender age of six, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd went to seek employment with the one person he knew in the river city.
“A job?” Mulrooney sighed. “My boy, you overestimate the financial fertility of my little enterprise. I regret to disinform you of this misconception, but last night, despite significant audience attention, the like of which any entertainer in any city of substance would be pleased to inspire, I ate fish-head soup. This morning I dined on oatmeal and brine. Please accept my apology for having to deny your request.”
“Why don’t you exhibit the Ambassadors?” Lloyd asked.
“They are not yet ready,” came the answer.
“Then why don’t you let them go?”
“Where?” the showman countered, and Lloyd saw that beneath the apparent flabbiness of his character Mulrooney was a victim of his own soft heart.
“But I can do things!” Lloyd insisted. “Things that will stir the crowd.”
“Such as?” the showman queried.
“What about long division-in my head?” Lloyd demanded.