with a hint of a smile. The size of a marble, it nonetheless contained an undeniable radiance. It had been given to her by her mother a few weeks before her death. The girl was told that the icon came from Africa and had been passed through many hands to reach her.
“Mama called it a fetish,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s good luck agin enemies. It means Death smiles on you.”
Clutching the talisman in his own hand, Lloyd had no doubt that it held some unusual power, for it seemed to retain the vitality of all those who had held it before, and the suggestion of the smile imbued it with an eerie optimism, however grim its appearance.
The moment he cupped it, he was charged with a realization that had been waiting for him since birth. He, too, had black blood in his veins. Though it sometimes may have taken a light-skinned Negro to spot it, and this had often been to his advantage, he saw the truth, whole and clear. He remembered every taunt from the Zanesville hooligans he had ever heard. Every sidewise glance from the children in St. Louis. He was not a mongrel, for the Europeans he had encountered in the family travels were as mongrel a bunch as you could imagine. He was part white, part Indian, and part black, and each of those breeds carried its own unique burden and heritage, especially in the America of those times. Something in him connected back to Africa-to the dark magic and turmoil of that faraway continent. He felt the literal truth of this course through him when he gripped the skull. This was a piece of his own puzzle handed back. It daunted and augmented him all at once, and he placed it with extreme, gentle care deep in his little knapsack next to the box with the hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors, his uncle’s letter and map, and the always watching glass eyes of Mother Tongue.
Before Hattie, he had not had the wherewithal to look upon the Ambassadors’ box since leaving St. Louis. Now, nurtured by the girl’s devotion, he could and did examine the container again-and saw in the intricate alien characters that it displayed a message for his life that he knew he must do everything in his power to understand. So Hattie’s gift, no bigger than a berry, served both to free him from his horror of losing her and as a seed. He cried when it dawned on him that he must say goodbye to her. But when the tears were gone he felt refreshed and full of her spirit, as if she had given not only her body to him but all that she had-all that she was. And so, he gave her a gift to remember him by, to watch over her and link her to him.
“Is this a jewel?” Hattie asked when Lloyd put one of Mother Tongue’s eyes in her hands.
“It’s a species of jewel, I believe-and a very great mystery,” he answered. “A very powerful, very old white woman who helps the slaves gave it to me. It’s a match of this,” he told her, holding up the mate.
“They’re eyes!” Hattie cried. “Made eyes!”
“Yes, but who they were made by is the thing. The old woman, who is a kind of witch, you’d say-before she took them out she could see with them, I swear. And I’ve thought I’ve seen things in them, too. There’s some sort of magic to them, just like there is to your fetish. I want you to keep this, then we will each have one.”
Hattie had no doubt about the sincerity of the gesture, and was warmed inside to have something of Lloyd and his past to take with her. There was indeed something touched about the sphere, a talisman to match her skull. She cupped it lovingly in her hand, then hid it away inside her clothes.
The steam whistle blew.
“Do we say goodbye?” Lloyd asked.
“Not folks like us,” Hattie replied.
Lloyd did not look for her when the family stepped off the gangplank at their destination, for he knew that she would not be seen, but that she was moving forward with a will stronger than any river current could ever be.
But God he missed her. The Brown Recluse.
CHAPTER 5. Reliable Omens
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI, IS A PLACE RICH IN HISTORY. IT BEGAN as a fort when Osage Indians would come to trade furs and pause at the window of Agent George Shipley’s house to listen to his daughter play the piano. A little log courthouse was later built, which doubled as a pig pen and became so infested with fleas that it was necessary to invite sheep inside while the court was in session, to give the bloodsuckers something else to feed on. In the 1830s, the Mormons settled here and for a time prospered, only to be tarred and feathered and eventually burned out. Much, much later, Harry S. Truman would go to high school here, the man whose middle initial stood for nothing-“Mr. Citizen,” who became a judge without ever having been a lawyer, the first and the last United States president to run a failing men’s clothing store, and the man famous for his belief that “the buck stops here.” (He apparently gave the two most important military orders in the history of Western civilization, carried through on August 6th and 9th of 1945.)
What the Sitturds found when they landed was, of course, a very different scene. As the family disembarked, there were a few raised eyebrows about Hephaestus’s appearance, but there was so much activity in this western Missouri “jumping off place” (where many folk, indeed, looked as though they had hurled themselves off the precipice of reason and restraint) that no one in the family, including Lloyd, worried much about who might be watching them just then. There was too much happening.
It was midafternoon and saddles and harnesses poured off the
What was more, another cholera scare had encouraged still more pilgrims and strangers to seek shelter in Independence. While the disease did all too often wreak genuine devastation along the western routes, as well as up and down the Mississippi, it was not an uncommon practice among unscrupulous promoters and shopkeepers to spread rumors about such outbreaks in other settlements, because towns like Independence vied with the likes of St. Joseph, Omaha, and Council Bluffs for trade money. Recently, the nearby haven of Westport had been chosen, and now there was an epidemic of fantastic reports that “folks there is droppin’ like horsetail flies.” This panic precipitated a shift in an already itinerant population and put still more pressure on scarce accommodation and inflationary-priced supplies. The result was a cacophonous hammering and banging, as new and often ill-made buildings were erected as if by indefatigable insects, and the hawking of wares in loud voices for absurd sums.
The first steamboat to venture up the Missouri had stopped here in 1819. Now it seemed that nothing would stop for long, and any signs of the famous personages who had passed through, like Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, or John James Audubon, were lost in a carpentered frenzy of plank, tank, and chicken dirt. Hephaestus had never seen so many blacksmith sheds or wagons that needed repairing. There looked to be a mule for every man and at least a bottle of whiskey (which was perhaps not a good ratio in a locale where each adult white male more than likely also carried a loaded firearm).
Smitten with sorrow about Hattie, Lloyd dragged his feet forward, his eyes blinking at the populace that swirled around them, every bit as turbid as the river had been. Wary-looking Spaniards, their faces shadowed by broad hats, cooked over both open fires and buried ovens. Smells of corn bread, charred rabbit, pulled pork, and bubbling beans surrounded them, as if they had concocted a fortress of aromas to defend against the pipe smoke, forge fires, and manure. Travel-weary Baptist women as stiff as split-oak rails peered out from under sweat-stained blueberry bonnets, stirring great boiling kettles of laundry with fence pickets. Negroes lounged under sagging awnings, eyes peeled raw for trouble, and more Indians than Lloyd had ever imagined lurked and bartered or tethered shaggy ponies to flagpoles and barber poles and poles that held up signs saying not to tie up horses there.
There were Foxes and Sauks, some with shaved heads and painted faces. Others with visages that looked vaguely Mexican wandered in and out of the shops wrapped in old blankets, muttering. Germans mingled with Scots decked out in plaid pantaloons and hobnailed boots. Methodist-looking ducks paraded about. Children’s faces peeped out from the covers of the heavy French carts called mule killers. A grizzled loner leading a buffalo horse on a rope shared a water trough with a busty Mexican lady beneath a battered parasol astride a white donkey, just like
