CHAPTER 1
Awakening West
IT WAS NOT THE SLURPING OF THE PADDLE-WHEEL WOOD WHACKING the water that first penetrated his consciousness. It was another softer, nearer sound. After all the horrors and the tremors—the weevils burrowing into his flesh and the clam-sweat-salt-dry-throat retching and gulping of buggy water—he now heard a persistent nibbling rasp just above his head. At first he thought he was back in the stable in St. Louis, but the stench of the urine-soaked hay and the wafts from the glue renderer’s were different. Instead, he smelled the odor of damp hemp and warping lumber, with traces of vinegar and gunpowder—and somewhere the scent of a woman’s underthings. He blinked, trying to focus—to both remember and forget.
Gradually, Hephaestus Sitturd came to accept that he was lying in the dingy waterline cabin of a steamboat, going where he could not yet fix in his brain. The noise he had been hearing was an industrious little mouse, pecking at something in a hammerhead-size hole just above a bent-slat rail that ran across the wall behind the rope-hinged excuse for a bed. The creature’s nose poked out at him once or twice, sniffing for news of danger or sustenance. After the insidious roaches and the rats, and the other beady-eyed nameless things that had tormented him in his delirium, the affront of this actual rodent might have seemed a cruel reality to awaken to, but it struck the stretched-thin blacksmith instead as innocent and reassuring. Despite the wagon wreck he had made of his life, he was still in the world—and not alone. There were others struggling just as precariously as he. He held out his right hand and the mouse’s nose twitched at the lip of the hole, then withdrew in a scurry of tiny-clawed feet.
Hephaestus recognized that, humble though they were, his surrounds were much more gracious and hygienic than where he had been previously, even though he could not summon a precise image of what that had entailed. He noted the presence of his son’s and his wife’s things. They had been huddling on the floor, it appeared, while he had occupied the narrow bunk. Inching back the sheet of nubbled muslin, he saw that he was naked. One of his shins sported a livid bruise, which brought to mind a baby bluebird he had found at the door of the forge back in Zanesville one spring. A boil on his left thigh had been lanced and dressed, and a purulent sore on the ankle of his deformed foot was sealed and calming beneath a dab of lanolin. His arms were flaky and pocked, but his body did not stink. Rapture, he guessed, had managed to bathe him in his trials. He thought that he could recall her firm hands pouring over him like tepid water.
His ribs stuck out like the skeleton of an abandoned boat; he seemed to remember blacking out with an old boot full of mash. The beard he had managed to accumulate more than grow had been trimmed, and the lump of pig iron that had been his gut had managed to relax back into sausage skin and digestive juice. He felt right hungry. For pickled eggs and black loaf bread, a stuffed squab or a nice piece of charred fish.
He would have given himself over to an imagined banquet had he not become aware of another kind of longing rising up between his legs. The insistent appendage was as thick as a scrubbed yam and as stiff as one of his old farrier implements, but with a peeled, raw quality that reminded him of a flayed squirrel. He stared at it. A tear formed in the glass of his rifle eye, one pinched branch-water pearl of thankfulness and disbelief. It was in this condition that Rapture discovered her husband. Lost forever for safekeeping and now returned, home to his fugitive family, sheltering in a mouse hole of their own and steaming west. West!
She jetted out a whisper that might have been “Mussiful Gawd” but which sounded as hopeful to Hephaestus as a kettle just beginning to purr on a flame. A rough swish of linsey-woolsey and his tight stone tear became a river to soak her bosom when she stepped over the piled garments on the floor to first embrace and then slip astride him.
After a while the kettle began to rattle, and at last whistled, then stilled to a riffling sob. Wherever it was they were right then, Hephaestus knew that he was indeed home—returned from the haunted wilderness of himself to the vagrant sanctuary of their lives together. Whatever scraps they would have to scrounge and whatever risks and rapids they had yet to run, he knew that he would remain, and remain himself. Hurt but healing.
Many tears were shed then by both husband and wife. Tears of anger and tears of gratitude. When the last cascade had run dry, the grief and celebration still seemed to seep from the pores of their two hushed forms, like the last residual drops of alcohol that had poisoned Hephaestus and the desperate, shamed memories of what Rapture had had to do to survive in St. Louis—and all that she had done to keep her mate alive and her family from foundering irrevocably since their departure under weird and watchful eyes.
Jolted to the core by the half-fathomed report of her son’s undertakings—fearing news every day of her husband’s drowned and bloated corpse wheeled to greet her on a donkey cart by some hogshead Samaritan with a hand out for compensatory silver, and then to be confronted with the miraculous abomination of Hephaestus’s rum-keg carcass still breathing—she had been hard pressed to keep her wits about her. So much had happened to unhinge her. The dandy with the humped back and his dark henchmen. The midget and the woman with the hairy mole. That fetid cabin with its guns and torches, and the signals to unseen overseers—they swirled in her thoughts like backwash around a towhead.
Leaving the Mississippi, they had not left their tribulations behind. Far from it. For what seemed like the worst part of her whole life, Rapture had been forced to nurse her sodden, mumbling husband at close quarters with no relief. Bullboats, canoes, Mackinaws, and keelboats were all used on the Missouri, which was notorious for its obstacles and its obstreperous nature, but the vagaries of the spring and autumn high water, along with increased demand for goods and transit west had favored the rise of the steamboat, which flourished.
Now, in between the dry of summer and the heavy fall rains, the going was particularly difficult and muddy, even for a boat with iron muscle. Three times they had been forced to halt, once for an entire day, because of treacherous snags and sandbars. Then a wild downpour after a thunderstorm unleashed a flash torrent that dredged up keel-killing logs and the debris of old wrecks, making progress slower still. A “wood hawk,” one of the local shore dwellers hired to help the fueling parties find timber to feed the ravenous boilers, had turned out to be in cahoots with a ruffian gang who tried to board the steamboat and were repelled by gunfire, which left a crew member wounded and two of the villains dead. A fast boat at the time could have reached Independence in eight days. They had already been gone five and were not even as far as Jefferson City.
Hephaestus had been racked with fever and visions while all this was happening. Meanwhile, Lloyd had remained locked in a catatonic state of retreat and denial. In all the years, Rapture had never seen her son so remote, so enclosed. She had managed, because she had had no choice, to accept that he had endeavored, by some means that remained mysterious to her, to attempt to fly. In a dirt-floor cabin, from a man with a lump on his back the size of a feather pillow, she had gathered in some uncomprehending way that her son had been the perpetrator of a deliberate and unnatural spectacle that had cost at least one wretched slave his life and had permanently jeopardized their safety in St. Louis and perhaps all America.
But these bizarre intelligences had not shed any light that she could see by. With the demonic, muffled counterpoint of Hephaestus’s ravings, they had just served to make the voyage they were committed to now seem more amphibious and ghostly, until she began to doubt her own sanity, and the pain in her feminine heart began to strain her resilient will to live. The tears and the lovemaking released her. It was Lloyd’s return to the cabin that wrenched the couple back to reality and the tenuous situation they found themselves in once more.
“He better now,” Rapture announced, trying to adjust her dress and bodice back into place.
“I see that,” the boy sniffed, his eyes as green and hard as old Chinese jade.
Hephaestus craned his neck, fearing for an instant that he had been under some dire spell longer than he imagined, so much older and cynical did his young son seem.
Lloyd wore a knitted skullcap that Schelling had stuck on his head to make him less recognizable, with an orphanage long shirt over short cotton sack pants and rough leather shoes. The blacksmith’s mind flitted back to the horror in the eyes of Phineas, the vivisected rabbit. At last he found his voice.
“I’m sorry, Lloyd,” he said. “I’ve—I’ve made a mess of things. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I do,” the boy returned, but despite the blankness of his tone his father spied a flicker of something warmer and human in the cold green eyes.
“It won’t ever happen again,” the scrawny blacksmith vowed with a clearer voice. “Now, tell me what has happened and we will make a plan. A new plan.”
Rapture’s eyes darted to her son, and then and there she decided an issue that had been weighing on her soul since boarding the boat. They would say nothing about Lloyd’s misadventures in St. Louis. There was nothing she could say that she understood herself anyway. Maybe the black times behind them would drift into obscurity like some washed-away raft they passed in the night. There was at least no use in troubling her troubled husband with uncertain details now. Now was the time for simple known things, and for coming together.
She was relieved when Lloyd assumed an Indian squat on the floor amid their few belongings and remained still but far more attentive than she had seen him in days, as she recounted in broad, general terms her conclusion that getting them out of St. Louis and back on their way to Texas and whatever lay ahead for them was their best course, and so had brought about their departure. Lloyd’s face betrayed no emotion as she steered around the prickly matters, hoping that her husband’s clouded memory would stay clouded. The money they had now, she said, she had stolen from one of her employers—a desperate act that she was not proud of but which seemed necessary given Hephaestus’s fragile condition. His discovery and retrieval were credited to a free Negro who frequented the fish market in town, who had found him passed out in a shack downriver. The senior Sitturd seemed too exhausted from his ordeal and too ashamed to inquire further. Like his wife, all he found himself caring about and able to face up to was where they were at the moment, and where they were going.
In truth, their current position had to be deemed a significant improvement over the near-end of the world in St. Louis. They had lower-deck cabin passage paid to Independence, Missouri, on board a side-wheeler called the Defiance, built in Louisville fifteen years before and overhauled one too many times. Just under two hundred feet long, with a thirty-five-foot beam and a cargo capacity of five hundred tons and carrying six hundred, it was a “floating palace” that had been forced to earn its keep. In its heyday the Defiance had transported explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, mountain men, and missionaries, but more recently it had given passage to settlers and would-be western travelers, some laden already with overloaded wagons and visions of vast expanses of free land to turn into farms. Its cargo manifest was as miscellaneous as its passengers: Hudson’s Bay blankets, indigo cloth, frock coats, flannel shirts, Marseilles vests, and fancy calico shirts; Indian trading trinkets (like wampum moons and medals featuring a representation of John Jacob Astor on one side and peace and friendship on the reverse), horse bells, yellow bullet buttons, gun worms, awls, padlocks, oval firesteels, black-barley corn heads, octagon brass barrel pistols, hunter’s clay pipes, tinned rivets, iron kettles, refined borax, powder horns, oakum, pitch, pilot bread and Havana sugar; violin bows and Manila rope, emery paper, twist tobacco, sealskin trunks and sealing wax, rattail files and trap chains, sturgeon twine and silver gorgets; ladies’ Moroccan heel pumps and men’s thick brogans, ivory combs and silk handkerchiefs, bags of shot and pounds of chalk-white beads; butcher knives and boxes of thimbles, ground ginger, Seidlitz powders and lucifer matches; cod fish and pepper sauce, lime juice, Lexington mustard, bacon, rosin, foolscap paper, salted mackerel, and barrels of molasses (and, for Fort Atkinson and Fort Benson, plenty of alcohol and gunpowder).
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 Defiance was a tawdrier vessel than her competitor cousins. Like a dusky maiden lurking on the edge of a debutante’s ball, her attempt at Gothic finery was too soiled by hard circumstance to afford much grandeur anymore. And perhaps she heard, in the escapements and the jeering bells of the stern-wheelers that were beginning to gain prominence, that her days were numbered. In any case, her piston rods were well greased and her heavy heart thumped in time to the deeper rhythm of pioneer expectation, as if there was something animate and fulfilled in her to be again heading west.
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 Defiance. Someone stealthier than any mouse.