The Sitturds’ fellow passengers included such a motley assortment of failures, fanatics, coarse-shirt dirt growers, and the odd silk-hatted scoundrel, they had been able to go relatively unnoticed so far, and God willing might yet arrive at their destination without drawing unwanted attention, despite the endless delays. They had a dwindling but sufficient number of provisions that Schelling had supplied, and with Hephaestus regaining clarity, and more money in their pockets than they had had in a long while, there at least appeared to be cause for some little optimism. There was also before them again the prospect of Micah’s legacy of Dustdevil, a tarnished star that had renewed in luster.
“We have a whole new life ahead of us now,” Hephaestus announced, as if he had just found the money that had been stolen by the pickpocket back in St. Louis.
“Hopen net wus’den ’ebbeh,” Rapture remarked.
“Now, don’t be thinkin’ like that, Murruh,” the revived souse insisted. “Who knows but that the jerkiest part of the road is well behind and that maybe a treasure awaits us. The treasure of a fresh start, if nothing else-which seems mighty valuable to me.”
“No moa saa’bints en slabes,” his wife answered, as if that would be good enough for her.
No, thought Lloyd. No more servants and slaves-at least not the way she meant. He thought again of the wretched thing he had done on Fourth Street. Did anyone know what lay ahead for them? A trap? Prosperity? Safety? Damnation?
His mind once more moved to the uncle he had never met, the man they hoped to find still alive… the cryptic words of his letter, which had set their rickety wheels in motion. So many enigmas-and that made him think once more of Mother Tongue, hiding like a spider, feeling for the trembling in her web. Was she another shape the darkness took-or an angel of deliverance, a guide to the labyrinth? He had no answers, and so he said to his parents, “Well, it will be good to have a home again-that’s ours. If we get there.”
The Missouri is now and was then a wilder river than the Mississippi, requiring more alertness from its captains and crews, especially since the
The Sitturds were once more embarked on a journey, and so had rediscovered their place together. Even Lloyd could not ignore the change in mood since seeing his father’s remorseful but lucid eyes greet him across the cabin. Like sleepers awakened from a communal nightmare, they reunited now with a common will. And if it was a delicate task getting the sobered drunkard out of the bunk and dressed again, and then to limp-a stealthy expedition up into the open air, lingering in the shadow of the pilothouse on the hurricane deck with the escape pipes belching-they all rose to the challenge.
It was just on sunset, and they were halfway on their voyage west to the frontier-fueled outposts of western Missouri. A fresh autumn breeze strengthened as the blood sun sank. A lone chicken hawk circled beneath high smoke-signal clouds, and the artery of muddy green river lapped up to the ravaged base of rampart sand cliffs that flowed and smeared out like time itself into the starved suggestion of lonely prairie beauty that lay beyond the shoreline chains of surging settlement. Voices echoed in the speaking tube, but the family from Zanesville was listening farther away. Rapture was trying to hear the spirits of her lost parents, the ghost music of places she knew that she would never see again. Hephaestus was trying not to hear the demons of backsliding degradation and oblivion, and to catch some whisper on the wind of his brother and the promise of what awaited them in Texas. Young Lloyd, who no longer looked young-at least not the way a child should look-was listening for pursuit, still reeling from his attempt to mate with the sky: the terrible inviting softness of death, the fatalities he had caused. Somewhere, out there in the distance, or perhaps as close as on board the same boat, were forces that he barely understood, if at all. But the piles of cloud above the river gave no sign of collusion with anything other than the setting sun and the strident smashing of the wooden wheel in the current.
It was this pervasive sense of doubt that had kept the boy sharp enough to stay free of the clutches of a deep depression from which he might not have recovered-a survival instinct channeled through the fine filaments of his heightened intellect, which kept him linked to the world despite an anguish and a regret that made his father’s look paltry. The voices of the past-Zanesville bullies tormenting him, St. Ives and Miss Viola, the professor, Schelling, Mother Tongue, Brookmire, the black man beneath the courthouse crying out to heaven, and the insane chatter of the doomed Martian Ambassadors-they were all stilled in the splash of the steam-driven wheel and the new look of longing in his father’s eyes.
Lloyd reasoned that he must maintain not just his mother’s pretense about what had caused them to leave St. Louis but the much larger and more complex fantasy of a world without the Spirosians and the Vardogers. “I cannot tell them about what I do not understand myself,” he admonished himself. “They have lost innocence enough, better to keep these other, longer shadows to myself.” And so he did.
Both adults experienced a wave of reassurance in the few remarks their son offered before they all slipped back down to their cabin for refreshment and rest. They chose to forgo the dining saloon (as much to avoid what passed for the “boiled meat” as to avoid questions). There was still a span of river to survive, not to mention the so-called Indian Frontier, which at that moment in history extended from the Lake of the Woods in the north to Galveston Bay in the south (and, of course, was being pushed inexorably west).
All the known routes to the Pacific were alive with white settlers. The great thrust of migration along the Oregon Trail had commenced in earnest, making mad boomtowns of places like Council Bluffs and Omaha. The Potato Famine in Ireland and the war with Mexico were about to send more shock waves rippling out through the long grass. Then the insanity of the gold rush. Once peaceful relationships with tribes of Indians across the continent had already strained to the point of bloodshed and were building in intensity, just as the tensions over slavery and the great ideological and cultural differences between the North and the South were mounting to what would end up being a sprawling red mountain of corpses in the years to come.
Farmers, freed slaves, miners, Mormons, and families like theirs came spilling domesticated animals and heirlooms in the hope of finding some semblance of home, disrupting cycles of wild game and dispossessing native tribes on a scale and at a speed unseen on the planet before. The newspaper editor John O’ Sullivan was about to coin the phrase “manifest destiny.” It insinuated itself into even the Sitturds’ cloistered cabin, and began to make Lloyd restless.
Rapture and Hephaestus, quite content to have some moments alone, allowed the boy to slip out after darkness fell. He had made a habit of this late at night, when his mother collapsed in discomposed sleep on the floor beside the tortured patriarch, always on the lookout for some stranger who might know more about them than he would like. Gorging on the sustenance of rediscovered intimacy, his parents allowed him to exit on the last stroke of the eleventh bell, imagining that he would slink around the boat like their cabin-mate mouse.
It was in fact a very different plan the boy had in mind now that his father had arisen from his stupor. But this plan was to be subverted, and it was a little after yet another midnight when Lloyd found out that there was indeed a stranger worth knowing about on board the
CHAPTER 2. A Different Kind of Darkness
THE WIND HAD DIED DOWN, BUT THERE WERE NO STARS OR MOONLIGHT visible, for a low ceiling of cloud had fallen over the river, warming the air and dulling all sounds. Almost all the other passengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the poop-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars.
The Sitturds’ fellow travelers were a furtive lot in Lloyd’s view, a ragtag of prayer-sayers, blue-sky believers, runaway thieves, and would-be saints mixed up like nails and raisins in a jar. On nights before, he had heard the men playing. He had smelled their smoke and cheap whiskey, and caught the occasional loud oath or imprecation giving way to murmured bluffing and wagering. More than once he had felt the pang of memory, pondering where St. Ives and Miss Viola were-itching to be able to join the game and clean the shaving brush-bearded simpletons out
