“Yes,” Lloyd answered. “Of course.”
The proprietor gave a sniff of disbelief and strode over to the nearest shelf and whisked out a volume of Catullus’s poetry. “All right,” he said, handing the open book to Lloyd and pointing. “Tell me what this says.”
Lloyd glanced down at the selected page and read, “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. It means ‘I hate and love. You may ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it and am in torment.’ ”
“Hmm.” The man smiled, showing his calcium stain. “And what did I say before in German?”
“ ‘Only the dose insures the thing will not be a poison.’ ”
“Correct!” snapped the bookseller. “And in reference to education you may already have had too much-at least of a certain kind.”
“I hardly ever go to school,” Lloyd corrected. “But I am quick.”
“Perhaps,” the man said, flexing his hump. “But you are slow to leave. I believe you were sent by one of the local dilettantes to goad and annoy me.”
“I wasn’t sent by anyone!” Lloyd insisted. “I’m here on my own.”
There was something about the emphatic way the boy uttered this last remark, combined with his unexpected erudition, that made the bookseller change his attitude, for he brushed some of the dust from his suit and said, “All right, my learned young friend. Since you are so committed, you may remain here and read. I close at four, and you are not to wander outside this room. Understood?”
“Thank you!” Lloyd beamed. “Thank you. But… is there any key to how the books are organized?”
The humped man stroked his mustache.
“The key is right here,” he said, pointing to his shining forehead. “I know where every book is in the entire shop. Does my young sir have special interests?”
“I am interested in science. And magic,” Lloyd answered. “And… secrets.”
“I… see,” the bookseller said, arching his woolly eyebrows.
The humped man disappeared into the next room and Lloyd heard him foraging among the piles. He returned with an armload of Euclid’s Elements and a book concerning Hooke’s microscopy and an alchemical folio titled “Tract on the Tincture and Oil of Antimony,” by Roger Bacon.
“Feast your mind on these. But mark what I say about staying in this room.”
So saying, the man spun around and retreated back into the gloom of maps and tomes, taking the delicate astringency of the witch hazel with him. To the boy’s surprise, other people did enter the shop. Those that he glimpsed passing by in the hall did not look much like buyers to him, but as they did not take any notice of him he paid them little mind and burrowed deeper into his reading. Once he heard the bookseller speaking in French in low tones to someone in the back. At five minutes to four, the humped man reappeared carrying a heavy set of keys.
“What is your name, young scholar?” the man asked.
Lloyd told him his name and swallowed a clump of dust and phlegm.
“My name is Wolfgang Schelling,” the bookseller informed him. “I must say, you look more likely to pinch an apple than to go to the trouble of finding a book to read. But perhaps I don’t know very much about boys. I was never allowed to be one myself, and I have no children of my own. In any case, it’s time for you to go wherever you call home. Would you like to come back here again to study?”
“More than anything,” Lloyd cried, and this was almost true.
“All right,” Schelling purred. “Here are the rules. You are not to rummage about. Ever. I will select the books or find ones of interest for you. Do your parents or family know you came here? Does anyone know?”
“No,” Lloyd answered.
“Then let’s keep it that way. Trouble is easy to find these days, and I have no need of it. If I find that you have told anyone about your visits here, your privileges will be terminated. Always come in by the back door, which I will show you now, and you must always leave whenever I tell you to. And I do not want to hear anything about your life and problems-your family or the lack thereof. I will not tolerate either disrespect or private confidences. Understood?”
“Y-yes,” Lloyd answered.
“You may come tomorrow at either ten or one but not in between, and you must be punctual.”
“Yes, sir,” Lloyd said, nodding. “And may I bring my notebook?”
“You may. Buy you must not leave pencil shavings or do anything untidy,” Schelling replied-a remark that struck Lloyd as amusing, given the thick fur of dust that haunted the shop.
“And to resolve any unpleasant curiosity you may have, the hump on my back is a benign growth that is too close to my spine to be removed. No surgeon has the skill to remove it without endangering my life. So you need not stifle any impertinent questions on that score. Now follow me, and do not return except at the times I have indicated. Oh, and do consider bathing. You reek of fried catfish and the honey bucket.”
Lloyd flinched at this remark but picked himself up off the floor and followed the bookseller down the long hallway to the back door. Outside was an alleyway jammed with crates and excelsior, but he knew the way back to the stable and sprinted down the jagged cobblestones, leaving the humpbacked man watching him from the doorway. Once the boy was gone, Schelling returned to the room he had been reading in and took a mental inventory. The bookseller noticed that a treatise on the Greek Archytas of Tarentum’s mechanical pigeon, the first model airplane, was missing. Then, on the back of an old newspaper advertising a slave auction, he spotted something that made his bespectacled eyes bug out. Using but a hardened clump of street mud, the boy had managed to scrawl a rather fine imitation of one of Hooke’s microscopic drawings.
“I wonder…” Schelling murmured.
CHAPTER 7. Wild Science
THE SITTURDS’ MORALE COLLAPSED IN ST. LOUIS. THEIR WORLD always seemed to be ending. Rapture felt degraded and confused by the “w’ich en w’y talk” of the metropolis. She had lost her ability for “sperit voicen” and seemed fatigued at heart. Hephaestus teetered into the gutter. Where up to this point the trials of travel had brought them together in their quest to reach Texas and learn the secret of the “salvation” letter, now all the distractions and pressures of the city and their changing roles seemed to bring them undone. Each in a private way was homesick for their old life, as much as that had seemed a burden in the past. Each felt somehow to blame, especially Hephaestus.
The lame patriarch’s dalliance with Chicken Germain had been his first betrayal of marital fidelity and had been instantly apprehended by his wife the moment he staggered back to the stable. In Rapture’s mind there was an unbridgeable difference between chugalugging moonshine and doing the jellyroll with an “oagly” cathouse madam who consumed fried chicken by the plateful. The root witch in her was quick to take retaliatory action, concocting a noxious salve and applying it to Hephaestus’s manhood when he fell asleep. The next morning he experienced the kind of profound contrition that only a severe mix of pain and embarrassment can elicit. Since then his condition had improved but had not cleared, and his mood remained sullen and dejected. He was angry with himself for what he had done, angry with his wife for what she had done to him, and angry with Lloyd for keeping his head and becoming the family breadwinner. It was not right, and undermined what fragile dignity he had left.
Lloyd’s answer to this tension was to throw himself with full force into his work on the medicine show and into his secret studies at Wolfgang Schelling’s bookshop. While back in Zanesville Mabel Peanut and Irma Grimm battled to teach their students the multiplication tables, Lloyd considered the implications of a pendulum being perfectly isochronous when describing a cycloidal arc. In one sitting, he consumed and appeared to understand a complex dissertation on celestial mechanics. Even the densest algebraic equations were soon rendered in exact visual form on a graph. In Schelling’s experience, for sheer power of processing and retention the boy had no equal.