a man. And everything was for sale-from a rotgut alcohol whose origins lay in homemade sorghum to apple butter, corn pones, and fresh brown eggs in hickory-bark baskets.
If you had the money you could buy women’s dresses colored with walnut dye, men’s shirts that felt as tough as chair seats woven from slippery elm, or telescopes, knives, shovels, and guns. A barrel of salt, a beaded necklace, a young hog, or an oxen yoke-everything had its price. And there was always someone happy to yell out the amount if you were in any doubt.
Desperate to keep his mind from thoughts of his beloved Hattie, whom he felt sure was safe but probably scared for her life on board the
Despite the swagger and suspicion of the loiterers or the boisterous perspiring of the workers, amid all the hagglers, speculators, and adventurers that had gathered there were many glimpses of innocence and normal life- an unleavened boy in a jerkin rolling a hoop, or a little half-naked dark girl fondling a hen. The Indians, though sometimes fierce at first glance, were by and large intent upon their own business and carried themselves with an impressive lack of self-consciousness. Lloyd thought of King Billy back in Zanesville, the supposed hundred-year-old Wyandot Indian, who lived by himself in the woods-one of the few citizens of that world that he cared for. And he thought of his own Indian heritage, which the family never spoke of.
After the Sitturds had managed to haul themselves and their few belongings up the congested road from the wharf and through the knot of the main street to a point of refuge between two of the larger stores, Lloyd found his eyes drawn to a group of people, some of whom wore bloodred cloths wrapped around their heads. “Who are they?” he asked his father.
“I don’t know,” the lame blacksmith replied, itching to get his hands back on some tools, while Rapture feared it was one of the bottles he craved. “Maybe they had a wagon accident.”
Of course, the people in question were not really the victims of some common mishap. Not exactly, anyway. They were the first Quists the family had ever seen.
The Quists, as may be recalled, were another divergent nineteenth-century religious sect afflicted with the same kind of persecution the Mormons faced. They took their name from the visionary Kendrick Quist, an illiterate young horse gelder from Nineveh, Indiana (later famous as the home of Hungarian mammoth squashes).
While returning home from a job at a neighboring farm, Kendrick stumbled upon what he called “the Headstones of the Seven Elders.” These so-called Headstones were in fact thinly sliced sections of petrified tree stump and not much bigger than a child’s writing slate. Nevertheless, Kendrick Quist was instructed in a dream to refer to them as Headstones, and he was informed that they had been set down long ago using a special tool made from the beak of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The day following this dream, Kendrick was kicked in the head by a stallion intent on remaining a stallion and went into a kind of delirium in which he was able to translate the inscriptions to a visiting cousin from the Virginia Tidewater named Buford Tertweilder, before expiring. Buford, who back home had been a failure as a clammer, cobbler, and tobacco farmer, became somewhat more successful in Indiana as the Quists’ first prophet.
Like the Book of Mormon, the Book of Buford, or the Quistology (the correct name was a matter of ongoing debate), was a blend of fiery Old Testament prophecy and adventurous but unverifiable American history regarding a group of obscure Irish Vikings, who were in fact one of the lost tribes of Israel, and who had made it to America in a longboat inscribed with sea serpents, Celtic crosses, and Stars of David well before Columbus was born. They had then set out on a holy mission of discovery deep into the interior. They arrived in Indiana (which, you would have to admit, defines “the interior”), and it was here that their leader carved and left behind the inscriptions for Kendrick Quist to find centuries later.
Although the young horse gelder shuffled off his mortal coil, in addition to the kernel of a new religion he left behind the bloody bandage that had been wrapped around his head, and many of the Quists chose to wear a ceremonial red turbanlike wrapping in his honor. Unfortunately, such head garb often called unwanted attention to them and had increased their harassment at the hands of small-minded local officials and authorities of the more established churches.
Not long after Governor Boggs of Missouri had set forth his famous Extermination Order of 1838, which drove the Mormons to Nauvoo, Illinois (where all too soon vigilante gangs lit torches and knotted nooses and sent them on their continuing pilgrimage west to Utah), similar edicts were issued against the Quists. In 1840, they were expelled from the Hoosier State and established a community at Pumpkin Creek, Illinois. A year later, Buford Tertweilder was skinned alive in what became known as the Pumpkin Creek Massacre, and leadership of the flock passed to one Increase McGitney, a lapsed Presbyterian minister who had led a heroic but inadvertent one-man charge against the marauders when his head got wedged inside a butter churn in the barn where he was hiding. In a frenzy of what was really claustrophobic terror but looked very much like a God-inspired hunger for revenge, he shot out of the milking barn and bolted straight through a clothesline, picking up a white bedsheet on the way. Along with his improvised helmet and flailing arms, the flowing white fabric created the impression in the cowardly dogs that had besieged the Quists that a heavenly demonic warrior had risen up against them.
McGitney took this new image of himself to heart and transformed himself into a brave and demanding patriarch. “Increase Charged!” became the catch cry of the Quists, and the feat did indeed temporarily stave off eradication of the faithful. But the onslaught against them continued, and their leader did not help matters by making the morally admirable but politically lamentable decision of decrying the government policy of relocating Indians, welcoming them into the Pumpkin Creek community and seeking their advice as farmers, hunters, and fishers-as well as the unforgivable stance of opposing slavery and encouraging free and equal intermarriage with Negroes (in Increase’s case, several).
The effect of this obstinacy was that barns and temples were burned, woodpeckers were ritually slaughtered, and more than a few members were impaled on stakes or hysterically kicked to death by angry mobs who feared the new faith might have a sufficiently oblique and inclusive appeal to unite fringe Christians, Jews, Indians, blacks, and the always superstitious and rabble-rousing Irish, who were arriving in ever-growing numbers. The threat of Illinois becoming a quasi-renegade Christian-Zionist-Indian-Hoodoo-Druid state had forced the second Quist diaspora. Sadly for them, Missouri, as it had for the Mormons, had proved even more hostile, and so they were forced to flee farther west. Just like the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, and other tribes and nations too numerous to mention-along with thousands of West Africans and, of course, the Latter-Day Saints. (Here was another displaced people on the move, trying to sow the seeds of their own survival in a whirlwind of ideology, emerging technology, and the culturally sanctioned greed known as eminent domain.)
“I like those things they wear around their heads,” Lloyd remarked.
“You stay clear a-dem,” Rapture cautioned, noting the number of Negroes and Indians shouldered up beside the wild-eyed white people. In her mind, the last thing they needed, other than for Hephaestus to go off on a drinking binge, was to fall in with a rebel congregation of colored misfits and crazy folk. What they needed now was to lie low-to find a place to stay and plan their supply-gathering and transportation needs for the journey across the wilds of Kansas, a lawless outland of harsh weather, savage animals, desperate people, and mysterious unknowns.
Lloyd took the opposite view. He saw the presence of blacks and Indians in the ranks of the head-wrapped and plain-dressed whites as a good sign. After all, were not they, the Sitturds, refugees from Zanesville, just as much a mixed bag? Having shared those secret moments with Hattie, he felt different about his breeding now, and he was becoming aware that there are kinships and affinities within us all that we may never know or understand, but which attempt to reveal themselves in the people we gravitate toward and the paths our lives take. Rapture, however, stood firm on the matter and focused the family’s attention on getting fed and finding someplace to stay.
For refreshment they settled on thin flour tortillas, which they bought from a stumpy old man who worked from a stone fire and a foldup table among the Spaniards. To everyone’s satisfaction, Rapture handled the whole transaction without saying a word, and Hephaestus wondered if her mind talk was working again. Accommodation did not look as if it would be so easy to find. All that passed for the local hotels and rooming houses were crammed with human body heat. German families clung to their wagons, Irish to their carts. Blacks pitched makeshift tents, Indians threw up hide-framed shelters. Some stray men just overturned crates. The excuse for the town hoosegow
