Soon after, Schelling left without saying anything more to Lloyd. The beer had softened and slowed the boy’s thinking, and the whirring of the skeeters and the hissing of the sap in the lump of pine eased his alertness away from its moorings and out into the current of slumber. Only once did he stir-some upsetting dream about the midget watching him in his sleep-but fatigue and despair got the better of him again, and it was not until the light of a sullen morning spilled through the open doorway that he woke up properly.
His mother squatted on one of the milking stools, and beside her, hunched over the table, was what might have been a scarecrow that had been plucked out of the river and left to dry on a line. Schelling glowered at the boy.
“Here is your father,” he announced acidly. “Or what is left of him. Very soon now a steamer will put in. You are all going to be on it. Do you understand?”
“Where are we going?” Lloyd mumbled, rubbing away the crust of sleep.
“Far away, I hope,” Schelling said, shrugging. “And never to return. Don’t you remember you were going to Texas-before you took to trying to fly? Or did your brains get scrambled when you crushed that poor fellow?”
Rapture squirmed at this remark, but the huddled figure beside her did not respond. The woman and the midget were nowhere to be seen. Despite Lloyd’s native self-possession, he felt that he might cry. He climbed to his feet instead, too curious about the derelict plopped on the stool.
“Keep to your cabin as much as you are able,” the bookseller commanded. “Use the money I have given you and pay the bursar direct. Talk to as few people as you can, and tell no one your plans. You are a little boy, after all, Lloyd. A dangerous, selfish,foolish little boy. In spite of your genius, your stupidity is matched only by mine for watching over you and not taking action before you did. I thought I was protecting you. Already it seems the better question is who will protect the world from you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess.”
Rapture sat speechless, propping up the figure that Schelling had called his father-rousty with chiggers and alcoholic delirium (a condition that Mother Tongue’s lieutenant treated with an injection from a horse needle). The skeletonized tramp slumped with the shot as a riverboat whistle tooted in the distance.
“He will rest for a while now,” Schelling rasped, his hump twitching. “I recommend that you restrain him-and keep his head turned. Plenty of water and time can get him through this. Now go. And be gone.”
Moving toward the gray light, Lloyd could see a paddle steamer pulling into the ramshackle wharf, where a man in a buckboard loaded with sacks of flour waited. The air was greasy-warm and smelled like dead fish.
He tried to imagine where Mulrooney was at that moment, but he could not bring the showman into focus. What would Brookmire tell his father? And what of the Ambassadors?
The steamboat let out another whistle that reminded him of the screech owl in the slave cemetery the night that Schelling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue-a cry from out of the stillness, between the land of the living and the brilliant darkness of the dead.
Part 3 – United We Escape
CHAPTER 1. Awakening West
IT WAS NOT THE SLURPING OF THE PADDLE-WHEEL WOOD WHACKING the water that first penetrated his consciousness. It was another softer, nearer sound. After all the horrors and the tremors-the weevils burrowing into his flesh and the clam-sweat-salt-dry-throat retching and gulping of buggy water-he now heard a persistent nibbling rasp just above his head. At first he thought he was back in the stable in St. Louis, but the stench of the urine-soaked hay and the wafts from the glue renderer’s were different. Instead, he smelled the odor of damp hemp and warping lumber, with traces of vinegar and gunpowder-and somewhere the scent of a woman’s underthings. He blinked, trying to focus-to both remember and forget.
Gradually, Hephaestus Sitturd came to accept that he was lying in the dingy waterline cabin of a steamboat, going where he could not yet fix in his brain. The noise he had been hearing was an industrious little mouse, pecking at something in a hammerhead-size hole just above a bent-slat rail that ran across the wall behind the rope-hinged excuse for a bed. The creature’s nose poked out at him once or twice, sniffing for news of danger or sustenance. After the insidious roaches and the rats, and the other beady-eyed nameless things that had tormented him in his delirium, the affront of this actual rodent might have seemed a cruel reality to awaken to, but it struck the stretched-thin blacksmith instead as innocent and reassuring. Despite the wagon wreck he had made of his life, he was still in the world-and not alone. There were others struggling just as precariously as he. He held out his right hand and the mouse’s nose twitched at the lip of the hole, then withdrew in a scurry of tiny-clawed feet.
Hephaestus recognized that, humble though they were, his surrounds were much more gracious and hygienic than where he had been previously, even though he could not summon a precise image of what that had entailed. He noted the presence of his son’s and his wife’s things. They had been huddling on the floor, it appeared, while he had occupied the narrow bunk. Inching back the sheet of nubbled muslin, he saw that he was naked. One of his shins sported a livid bruise, which brought to mind a baby bluebird he had found at the door of the forge back in Zanesville one spring. A boil on his left thigh had been lanced and dressed, and a purulent sore on the ankle of his deformed foot was sealed and calming beneath a dab of lanolin. His arms were flaky and pocked, but his body did not stink. Rapture, he guessed, had managed to bathe him in his trials. He thought that he could recall her firm hands pouring over him like tepid water.
His ribs stuck out like the skeleton of an abandoned boat; he seemed to remember blacking out with an old boot full of mash. The beard he had managed to accumulate more than grow had been trimmed, and the lump of pig iron that had been his gut had managed to relax back into sausage skin and digestive juice. He felt right hungry. For pickled eggs and black loaf bread, a stuffed squab or a nice piece of charred fish.
He would have given himself over to an imagined banquet had he not become aware of another kind of longing rising up between his legs. The insistent appendage was as thick as a scrubbed yam and as stiff as one of his old farrier implements, but with a peeled, raw quality that reminded him of a flayed squirrel. He stared at it. A tear formed in the glass of his rifle eye, one pinched branch-water pearl of thankfulness and disbelief. It was in this condition that Rapture discovered her husband. Lost forever for safekeeping and now returned, home to his fugitive family, sheltering in a mouse hole of their own and steaming west. West!
She jetted out a whisper that might have been “Mussiful Gawd” but which sounded as hopeful to Hephaestus as a kettle just beginning to purr on a flame. A rough swish of linsey-woolsey and his tight stone tear became a river to soak her bosom when she stepped over the piled garments on the floor to first embrace and then slip astride him.
After a while the kettle began to rattle, and at last whistled, then stilled to a riffling sob. Wherever it was they were right then, Hephaestus knew that he was indeed home-returned from the haunted wilderness of himself to the vagrant sanctuary of their lives together. Whatever scraps they would have to scrounge and whatever risks and rapids they had yet to run, he knew that he would remain, and remain himself. Hurt but healing.
Many tears were shed then by both husband and wife. Tears of anger and tears of gratitude. When the last cascade had run dry, the grief and celebration still seemed to seep from the pores of their two hushed forms, like the last residual drops of alcohol that had poisoned Hephaestus and the desperate, shamed memories of what Rapture had had to do to survive in St. Louis-and all that she had done to keep her mate alive and her family from foundering irrevocably since their departure under weird and watchful eyes.