CHAPTER 2
Ascension and Deception
WHEN LLOYD LEFT THE BOOKSHOP, HE WAS FOLLOWED. THE MAN wore a black flat hat and was dressed like a Friend or Quaker in a dark single-breasted collarless coat without buttons. Two perspiring Negroes emerged from a furniture store trundling a sideboard, and Lloyd used their cover to slip behind a butcher’s wagon. He waited until the man tailing him was just pulling even before darting out and snatching the big black hat. The man uttered an oath, but Lloyd was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the flat hat flying under an ambling oxcart, where it became flatter still, and then shot off back down the street the way he had come, his little legs working like steam pistons. Once around the corner, he ducked down the glassblower’s lane and then back around to the glue renderer’s over a tomcat fence. He did not spot the man in the buttonless coat again, although the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was possible that the figure had been female.
That night, at Lloyd’s uncompromising insistence, the Sitturds decamped from the stable and took refuge in a boiled linseed oil–smelling mission house operated by the Temperance Society (where, to Rapture’s relief, Hephaestus was forced to swear off his drinking and men and women were not allowed to sleep together). The next morning, on the way to see the showman, Lloyd learned that a fire had broken out in their former abode. Only one of the bony nags that had been stabled there (and was not long for the gluepot anyway) had died in the conflagration. No one else was injured. “Trust your intuition,” St. Ives had advised him.
Maybe it was just a coincidence, Lloyd thought. The building was a tinderbox just waiting for a spark. But maybe not. Mother Tongue had warned him that he was being watched, and he knew for himself that he had been followed. Of course, it was possible, he reasoned, that the spy in the buttonless coat worked for Mother Tongue and Schelling, whoever they really were. In any case, arson—if that was what was involved—was a big step up from being tailed. The safe thing to do was lie low until the family had enough money to leave town. Lloyd had made up his mind that he was not going to accept Mother Tongue’s proposal. Nor, if he could help it, was he going to fall into the hands of the Vardogers—supposing that they were real and were really after him. He was going to go his own way.
He never returned to Schelling’s bookshop, and the next morning he told the still weak but recovering Mulrooney that he intended to take a break from the soaring toys in preparation for an entirely new kind of venture that would be noteworthy and lucrative beyond any of their previous ambitions. This latter note cheered and “bewondered” Mulrooney, but the “unfortunate intelligence” that the boy would not be present to stimulate further sales in the flying gizmos when the local interest was running “so heartwarmingly hot” provoked boisterous resistance.
Lloyd took pains to point out that a little time off, and the resulting suspense this would create, would be good for business. Besides, he needed time to perfect his new innovation and, as the showman knew so well, magic did not just happen.
Mulrooney plunged into the dumps over Lloyd’s news, believing that the lad, in an attempt (probably encouraged by his parents) to show that he was wise to the ways of show business, was holding out for a larger share of the takings. The old salesman sensed that he had reached the terminus ad quem of their commercial relationship and began making mental preparations to depart the city before the summer heat became any more oppressive (which did not seem possible). For the moment, however, he did not feel safe buttoning his pants all the way. Lloyd said goodbye without further comment or any questions about the condition of the wives or the Ambassadors. It was clear to Mulrooney that the boy had some pet scheme of great pitch and moment in mind, but his curiosity was temporarily overmastered by digestive discomfort.
Life in the mission house brought the Sitturds to serious grief. For Lloyd there was a constant threat from the inmates, many having bounced between the jail and the insane asylum. For Rapture there were endless smiles to fake, chamber pots to clean, and boils to lance. But Hephaestus suffered the worst in the Cold Water Army. While he craved succulent hams glazed with brown sugar and sweet fat orange-peel muffins, he was served sinewy gruel and biscuits as hard as musketballs—then told to wash the dishes. Lloyd would spare him no pocket money from his accumulating savings, and Rapture refused to sneak into the pews with him after lights-out to spoon and nuzzle. The gimpy blacksmith found himself brooding over the providential letter from his brother—and dreaming of his forge in Zanesville, of toad-sticking and fishing in the Licking River with a jug of his elderberry wine beside him. There was no place for him in St. Louis—no place for him in the family anymore. He had sold what tools he had left from their earlier misadventures. Little Jack Redhorse’s mash was pestering his kidneys and giving him the shakes. Now all the prayer-meeting hubbub and the sudden interruption of his escalating alcohol consumption drove him into a hallucinatory frenzy, so that Brother Dowling was forced to threaten him with ejection from the refuge. Then he was gone. Just like that, one morning.
Rapture, who felt that all her “speritual” links and secret skills had run dry (in the same way that Lloyd’s mystic connection with his ghost sister had been severed), returned from a foot-swollen day of drudgery for the sawbones who patted her rear end to find that her husband was not curled in his sweaty cot in the men’s dormitory and in fact had not been seen since what passed for breakfast (which often did not pass for several days). How I hate my father sometimes, Lloyd thought. If only I did not love him.
Rapture cried herself to sleep that night, missing the garden back in Zanesville, her herbs and remedies, the cooking, the animals, the life they used to have. Lloyd took the news in apparent stride, keeping his hurt and worry to himself. He dared not tell her about the Spirosians or the Vardogers, and if his father was bent upon his own destruction he saw nothing that he could do at the moment save what he was trying to do—one final show that would be remembered forever in St. Louis. One grand performance that could rescue her.
From the platform of his modest celebrity, he would leap into the rarefied blue of legend and newfound wealth. Statesmen, speculators, and the captains of industry would woo him. He would save his mother and father, and they would not need to go to Texas to live off his uncle’s charity. They could stay in St. Louis. They would eat French cheeses and broiled chicken. They would have a Negro footman and drawers full of patent medicine and ready-made clothes, a snooker table and brass spittoons, and decanters of absinthe, the Green Fairy that St. Ives drank. One day he would track the gambler down and invite him back to work for him. The rooms of their white-pillared mansion would be lined with books, telescopes, armillary spheres, and oil paintings of naked women with breasts like rolling waves. It would be “up tuh de notch,” as his mother would say. If the Spirosians and the Vardogers wanted his loyalty, then let there be a bidding war—not a war of nerves but one that he could win, with negotiations out in the open, and with buckwheat griddle cakes, sirloins, and giant influence machines into the bargain.
When Hephaestus did not return the next morning, Rapture grew even more morose, but Lloyd assumed that he had sought refuge with the mud and root dwellers of the shantytown below the docks. It was true that there were razor fights and fisticuffs down there, but there was also boiled crawfish and banjo tunes, so perhaps the old man was not so crazy after all. In any case, Lloyd had bigger birds to fly, and he turned all the strength of his being toward his goal.
Via a circuitous route to throw off any pursuit, he went each day out to a rolling stretch of open land to the northwest of the city and began experimenting. Long before 1894, when Lawrence Hargrave was lifted from the ground by a chain of his cellular kites, or 1903, when Samuel Franklin Cody crossed the English Channel on a vessel towed by kites, the young genius from Zanesville was contemplating the logistics of his own ascension. It was what Mulrooney would have described as a “hurculanean task,” for his imagination sought to integrate balloon, kite, and glider design to create an aerial display that would leave the people of St. Louis aghast.
He recognized that the issues involved in powered flight could not be solved in his present circumstances. The development of an internal-combustion engine both effective and light enough to drive an aerocraft would require tools, time, access to a machine shop, money, and fuel that he did not have. His idea was not to try to invent something new from scratch but to perfect what he already knew about. For background and inspiration, he had taken from Schelling’s shop The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of the famous ornithopter, The History of Ballooning, and the book of Chinese kites (a slender 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 mean anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn’t be anything to fly if it was easy,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Even for birds.”
“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 twin was not as present to him anymore, he retained his sensitivity to what passed below the surface of daily life, and his time on the medicine-show wagon had made him a wiser judge of character than he would otherwise have been. It was this skill that allowed him to see the possibilities presented by the timely emergence of the figure of H. S. Brookmire—what his mother would have called a “spishus” arrival.
But desperation is both the mother and the father of invention and, for better or for worse, Lloyd saw no way around trusting in the man’s assistance. Not if his dream was to be realized. What had Mother Tongue said? His intention was to travel right far.