The next phase started with a caged dove, a lamb, and a rooster. While gathering his things to leave Schelling’s bookshop one afternoon, Lloyd stumbled upon a volume on the history of ballooning, which began with the story of the Frenchman Pilâtre de Rozier launching the first animals in a balloon of paper and fabric, then making a solo ascent himself a few months after-followed later by a true free flight in a balloon designed by the famous Montgolfier brothers in 1783.
In the early hours of the next day, Lloyd launched his own straw fire-fueled balloon made of butcher paper and hat wire, sending aloft one of the stable mice he had nabbed. He watched with pride as it disappeared in the vicinity of the Nicholson grocery store. (Unbeknownst to the boy, the balloon bounded about in the framing of a rooftop water tank before crashing near the Wheaton drugstore, to the mystification of a clerk named Balthus Tubb, who would go to his grave puzzling over the singed vermin that fell from the sky and hit him in the head.)
Reading how kites had been used in ancient China to elevate fireworks for military purposes set off fireworks of its own inside the boy’s mind. With funding from Mulrooney, Lloyd began constructing, demonstrating, and selling kites as big as himself along the levee as part of the medicine show’s new program. The sight of the creations trembling on their tethers over the river brought whistles from the packet steamers and cheers from the freight-loaded flatboats. The size of the kites grew, and so did their efficiency. When the Fourth of July came, Lloyd incorporated his emerging capabilities into a pyrotechnic display along the riverbank. Mulrooney handled the ticket sales and was delighted at the takings. Schelling was circulating in the crowd that night, too, but he was far from delighted.
The next day at closing time, the humpbacked bibliophile buttonholed the wunderkind and said, “My boy, I have someone who would like to make your acquaintance. Someone I think it would be very strategic for you to meet. She is known as Mother Tongue. She is elderly and eccentric, but if favorably disposed toward you-and I believe she will be-she could become an invaluable… sponsor.”
“Why?” Lloyd asked.
“Because of your unique abilities. And because she is eccentric. I would like you to meet me at the old ferry landing at midnight tonight.”
“Midnight?” Lloyd cried. “What will I tell my mother and father?” Although he protested, he was beginning to think that he did not owe his parents any explanation for his actions anymore.
“You must not tell them. You must wait until they are asleep and slip out.”
“But why so late-and where does this Mother Tongue live?”
“I can only say that she is eccentric, as I have told you. But she is worth meeting. Trust me,” the bookseller replied, and the lump on his back twitched.
“All right,” Lloyd agreed, and turned to head home, thinking all the while that his own fortunes seemed to rise in proportion to the fall in his parents’. It stung him, though, how they were forever undermining his elation, flinging filaments if not cables of guilt and responsibility at him, needing him yet holding him back. But from what? Perhaps the answer to that question was about to take more than a dream’s shape.
CHAPTER 8. Midnight Is a Door
LLOYD ARRIVED AT THE OLD FERRY LANDING DEAD ON THE APPOINTED time. A full moon reflected off the wharf and the chimneys of the docked boats, giving the Mississippi a sickly silver sheen. Schelling was waiting for him. Two stevedore-muscled black men were on board a cramped, decrepit steam launch with him-one at the helm, one standing guard. Despite the warm summer night, the boy shivered.
Stoked with cottonwood and cypress, the boiler of the dilapidated boat powered the craft out into the current. The telltale silhouette of a yawl rowed off south beyond them, and a beaming coal barge loomed out toward the Illinois side. Beyond that, no one appeared to be on the water except for them and the moonlight.
Schelling handed Lloyd a strip of dark muslin. “Please blindfold yourself.”
“Why?” Lloyd asked, the hair rising on the back of his neck.
“You will see,” Schelling replied. “Trust me.”
Lloyd flopped down on a crate and wrapped the cloth around his head as he was instructed. This was not at all what he had expected, but the familiar sounds of the boat surging through the river filled him with a confused sense of resignation and anticipation. Surely this man meant him well.
He listened hard, trying to picture their progress away from St. Louis. The hiss of the gauge cock. The low rumble of the mud valves. At first he was sure they were headed upriver, and then they turned, and perhaps again. Twice Schelling raised him up and spun him around, as if to further disorient him. Not a word was spoken between the humpback and his dark-skinned crew. On and on the boat plowed. Then drifted.
At last it became clear that they were docking. There were all the sounds of pulling into a wharf: the change in the rhythm of the machinery… backwash… scrambling of hands and legs… ropes heaved. Lloyd was lifted onto some sort of pier (by one of the Negroes, he surmised) and pushed gently but forcibly into a seated position. After several minutes, he heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves and the clump of a wagon. He was hoisted again in one graceful maneuver and set down in what felt like a dogcart. He could tell that Schelling was beside him by the scent of the witch hazel. Reins jingled. The cart rattled off on a rutted, hard-packed road.
They rode for perhaps twenty minutes. When the blindfold at last came off, and Lloyd’s eyes had got used to seeing again, he saw that they had come to a dismal clearing back off from the river, set on a cliff. A forbidding wall of pines ringed the lumpy open ground, which was studded with shapes that brought to mind his chapel cove back in Zanesville.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“A slave cemetery,” Schelling answered. “At least, it appears to be.”
He stepped down out of the dogcart and helped the boy to the ground. With his eyes growing more alert, Lloyd saw that the moonlight rained down across a field of primitive graves-rock markers, splintered wooden crosses, and iron bars. The eerie call of a screech owl echoed through the trees.
“Why are we here?” the boy asked, feeling a ghostly presence rising like mist from the stumps and stones.
The antiquarian did not respond but instead looked around the perimeter of pines, listening hard. Then he lit a lucifer match and held it above his head. In the still, soft air it glowed white-gold for a few seconds before he shook it out. A moment later, a flicker of light answered back from the cliff side and a whip-poor-will called from a tangle of rosemary to the west.
“All right,” Schelling decided, and directed the boy toward a grave marked by a slab of granite that in the glare of the moon Lloyd saw had gouged into its surface the words HIC JACET. With unexpected agility and strength, Schelling bent down and heaved the slab to one side, revealing a sturdy wooden ladder descending into the blackness beneath the burial ground.
Lloyd was alarmed at this discovery, but intrigued.
“Wait a moment,” Schelling commanded, and disappeared down the ladder.
Lloyd heard another match crack and saw a faint flare from below. There was the clunk of a chain, then a lock clicking, and a door being pried open. Schelling’s head reappeared out of the ground. “Come,” he whispered.