seventeenth-century Dutch text on using kites to lift fireworks that he had referred to before), George Pocock’s sketches of his carriage-pulling kite system, a book on bird anatomy, the best physics manual he could find-and the published works to date of Sir George Cayley, the English aeronautical pioneer who had identified the separate properties of lift, thrust, and drag.
From initial experiments with kites, Lloyd read that Cayley had moved on to gliders (a progression that would lead to the first recorded manned flight from the top of a dale in Brompton, England, with his terrified and soon-to- resign coachman as the pilot guinea pig). Eight years before the English baronet, the so-called father of aviation, would achieve this first fragile success, young Lloyd Sitturd, on the outskirts of slave-era St. Louis, was on the verge of another order of breakthrough all his own.
He began by building models, trying to understand and outline the precise sequence of events involved and therefore the technical problems he would need to overcome, in the exact order that he would confront them- collecting the materials he needed for assembly from his different roundabout journey each day to what he called the Field of Endeavor. The summer heat rose like his hopes, and Hephaestus still did not return to the mission house.
One night he found his mother talking to herself via a string sack of onions that she often consulted with in the cool room. He knew that she despised the “sweetmout” rot doctor she worked for, and that coming back to the gristly “bittle” of the long-plank church dinners was too close a reminder of things she had witnessed during the day. She had to “tie up me mout,” as she put it, around the other women, and the “she-she talk affer praisemeetin’ ” always left her silent in a grim, hurricane a-comin’ Gullah way. The onion sack at least provided some consolation.
“Dey, dey,” she mumbled. “He naw be attackid. Naw capse. Jes gone ’way.”
Lloyd could see that she was “bex vexed,” and he did his best to console her. To help her “ ’traight’n.” The last thing he needed just then was for her to slip her chain, too.
Where had that image come from? St. Louis was getting to them. More of the ominous words of Mother Tongue came back to him. He tried to hold Rapture’s hand, something he rarely did and had not done for quite some time.
“Saw a blackbu’d attuh brekwus widda bruk-up wing,” she said with a sigh.
“That’s just superstition,” he said.
“Eb’nso. Fell down a chimbly. Buckruh seen it, too.”
“But that doesn’t
“Seen a plateye affer!” she hissed, by which she meant an apparition.
“Murruh, you can’t go around thinking you see ghosts all the time,” he told her, but he thought that his voice seemed to lack conviction. The ghost of his lost sister, Lodema, had been very real to him back in Zanesville. And now he was coming to think of ghosts in a new way yet again, as that familiar ghost slipped further into the past. The trouble was, it was in a ghostly way-not fully formed, just out of clear sight. Yet present somehow. Active. Intent.
“He be haa’dhead. A hebby cumplain. Bit Ah’s sponsubble.”
“No more than I am,” Lloyd replied solemnly. He knew that his father resented his talents, even as he so very much appreciated them. The old man was like a crib-sucking mule you forgave for doing damage. But the boy did not like to see his mother ornery and blue at the same time. And he did not think it was wise for her to lapse so completely into her native dialect, even if she was addressing a sack of onions. The walls in St. Louis had ears. Strange things were afoot.
“Here,” he said, reaching down to the floor. “Here’s your hengkitchuh.”
His accent was authentic and sharp. She bristled at it.
“Ain’t gwine crya!”
He made a move to embrace her, but she shoved him away.
“Git ’way, l’il swellup!”
That hit Lloyd in the lights. He would rather have fallen from a rooftop.
But his own tar boiled up inside and he struck at her, landing his child-boy blow just about where she had given birth to him.
Rapture gave out a dreadful wheeze but still retained her “tan’ up.” Then they both gave into hugging and crying-softly-for fear of the church matrons in their Balmoral skirts and their shush-shush disapproval of anything vaguely human.
“It’s going to be all right,” Lloyd heard himself saying. “It will. I will make it all right.”
They kissed, for the first time in a very long while, and he slunk off to the chaos of the dormitory to prepare for another night of alley-cat scavenging.
Like his mother, Lloyd wanted to believe that Hephaestus was passing the jug and sopping gravy maybe two miles below, but he could not escape the possibility that an accident had befallen him. Of course, even if this was the case, it did not mean that the followers of the Claws & Candle were involved. His father was, after all, more than capable of doing himself harm. And there were always the knife houses to consider-floating brothel- saloons based in firetrap launches and decommissioned steamboats that renegade whites ran or that freed blacks were able to negotiate, smoke-filled mobile roach pits where men of all colors gambled on barrels and dance girls would put their legs up to knock over the whiskey. Then the razors would come out. There were rumors that a gargantuan woman named Indian Sweet ran one of the most popular and violent boats on the river. After his father’s foray with Chicken Germain-and given his weakness for sour mash, blackened fish, and raucous music-Lloyd could imagine all too clearly his sire facedown in the Mississippi as the morning sun rose.
It was then that he would take from their hiding place Mother Tongue’s terrible green eyes. He could not return them. He could not discard them. Some moments he thought that he should just accept her offer of help and be done with his family-perhaps that was the way to really save them. The problem was that he did not believe he could trust the old witch-or Schelling, either, for that matter. Mother Tongue might give him gifts of education and money, but then he would be forever beholden to her and her hidden officers. Once initiated into either the Spirosians or the Vardogers (assuming there was any true difference between them), he knew that he could never leave.
Rapture became more and more distraught, muttering to herself and to the onions, which sometimes sprouted long green shoots, and which in his troubled dreams Lloyd imagined stretching out to strangle her. He did not like to see how carefully and methodically she washed her hands and arms in the tin basin after returning from work each night. Where else did she wash so diligently when no one was looking?
And so he redoubled his efforts, skulking in the small hours through the factory lanes, the holding pens, and the residential enclaves, searching for abandoned items amid the ash-hopper-sleeping-porch-outhouse-junk-lot backstage of St. Louis. What he did not find in these places he went looking for down on the docks at night-sneaking out of the male dormitory, with its bedlam of tubercular coughs and alcoholic dementia. Throughout the day he read, sketched, pondered, and paced. Then he began making and breaking, dismantling and reconfiguring-sewing, pasting, running, chucking, checking, measuring, and reassessing-driven to the brink of madness by his dream of flight and his yen for female flesh.
On his nocturnal hunting expeditions he witnessed things that opened dark new doors in his longing: a white woman in a rose arbor behind one of the well-to-do houses, kneeling down to her black houseboy, whose pants she lowered. Through another window he chanced to see a wattle-chinned oldster disrobe and allow a bare-breasted harlot in creased trousers and pointed boots to insert a bridle bit in his mouth and flail his wobbling buttocks with a riding crop. These visions fired his fantasies and made him all the more desperate to take to the sky.
Not only had his knowledge of physics and mechanics deepened; his understanding of people was sharper and subtler. He knew that he could not fulfill a project of the scope and magnitude he had in mind without the help of others. Yet he could not afford to fall into the clutches of either of the twilight leagues that Mother Tongue had told him about. As he could not avoid experimenting, or the need to gather equipment and materials, he had to run the constant risk of being seen-whether by some hired whisperer or by a trained agent and perhaps assassin (who would no doubt be skilled in the arts of camouflage and deception). Was it the peanut peddler? The ink-and- parchment lawyer, or the coffeehouse Romeo? It could even have been one of the slatternly wash girls or the Negro boys in their tow-linen shirts. Sometimes Lloyd thought that the notion that he was surrounded by emissaries of a powerful occult order would drive him around the bend. Yet his intuition remained keen. If the ghost of his dead
