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 Defiance in piles. Goats, mules, horses, and oxen raised a thick cloud along the long dock road running alongside the mule-drawn railroad link leading to the actual town. Barrels rolled, crates trundled, dry hides flopped. While huge numbers of western emigrants bound for Oregon to the north or Santa Fe to the south had departed months earlier in the year (the moment sufficient spring grass had grown to feed their animals), still others had poured in since, intending to hunker down for winter and either trade their stores or accumulate more for a prompt decampment come the first thaw the next year. It took six months in those days to make the two-thousand-mile trek to Oregon, and planning and provisioning for such an expedition was no small matter, given the number of thieves and scalawags always eager to prey on the unwise.
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 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 Defiance, Lloyd scanned the throng. There were so many strange- and dangerous-looking folk, it would have been impossible to pick out any potential threat of the kind he was concerned with. He took it for granted that any emissary of the Vardogers would be invisible in such a tangle, and so he just let his eyes feast on the scene for color and detail, trying to distract himself from the grief of his lost love, and the fear for her safety on the lonely, risky road that lay before her.
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 was full and foul, as were the grim attempts at houses of worship. Everywhere one looked, there was more canvas than lumber and more people and animals than either.
While sawmills up and down the river had been busy, the rumor mills had been frantic. In addition to tales of the latest cholera scare, there were stories going around of far stranger outbreaks. Some Kansas Indians up from the South had appeared with bizarre deformities they insisted were due to bad medicine in the water. A small hamlet south of Kansas City had been struck overnight with what appeared to be some kind of religious mania. The Sitturds listened to an earnest mail rider recount scenes of communitywide speaking in tongues and nervous spasms. Children whispered about ghostly forms that were abroad in the night, and from the German that Lloyd understood he was able to pick up hushed mentions of a “monster” that had been sighted out on the prairie. He chose not to pass this intelligence on to his parents. There was enough to worry about as it was, and from the look of the sky and the smell in the air a weather change was coming on fast.
It was in the midst of these mounting anxieties that an incident occurred which punctuated the tension with special force. At first, it seemed to be a perfectly normal affair, given the surroundings. One of the Spaniards had a dog, a large, threatening thing with a mottled coat. Its ribs were visible, but it had a big, powerful head and shoulders, and what were obviously strong, bone-crushing jaws. The cur stood guard by one of the cooking ovens, drooling and sharp-eyed for any scraps it might be offered. Out of the crowd between the wagons there appeared a much smaller black dog, short-legged and ragged of coat.
The scent of the food wafted. The two dogs’ eyes locked. No one spoke up to claim ownership of the smaller mutt. The Spaniard’s dog gave a low warning growl. Then the two dogs were at each other’s throats. All the people in the vicinity stepped back, except a man who said that he was Australian. He stepped forward and proposed taking bets. Several of the men watching were about to take him up on this idea when the dust around the dogfight swirled up in a furious blast and a yelping rose out of the haze.
Everyone assumed the Spaniard’s dog had drawn blood, but then the beasts went silent. The dust settled, and to everyone’s surprise and horror the bigger dog had gone limp and hung from the teeth of the little one. Several of the men were about to express their regret at not having a wager down, when to their further amazement and disgust the small black dog began to eat the other. There was nothing rabid about it—the stunted canine acted with methodical, almost serene ferocity. The mouths of the onlookers, most of whom had seen and even bet on many dogfights in their time, dropped open.
The Spaniard leveled a hunting rifle at the mass of bloody fur and shining fangs. The victorious critter stared back at him with composed and utter disregard. Lloyd, along with several others, was in a position to see the expression in the creature’s eyes and he felt cold inside as a result. The Spaniard shot the dog in the head. He then took the rifle and walloped the mongrel’s rib cage and smashed its skull. When his temper had been vented, he wiped the rifle butt on the fur of what remained of his dead animal, then picked it up by its hind legs and took it off to bury it. The carcass of the murderous black thing was left in the dust for the flies. No one said a word, and it was a long minute before the crowd that had formed began to disperse. In the distance, down the dock road, Lloyd heard the whistle of the Defiance, on its way upstream, laden with new passengers and cargo, and a fresh stockpile of fears and dreams about the future. His heart ached for Hattie. He had never known such a sensation of longing, and it almost swamped him with its force and poignancy.
While all this had been happening, a huge white cumulous blob of shaving lather had transformed into a darkening thunderhead just beyond the town. There was that heady, sweet, dangerous smell of heavy rain in the air, and within the half hour the sky opened up and bucketloads began falling. What a scrambling mess of jostling, lunging, scurrying labor followed. Cooking fires were extinguished, kids were swept into or under wagons, people hopped and hobbled for awnings and doorways, horses and mules bucked and snorted, poultry squawked and darted. All the hammering ceased and workmen hustled down ladders. The deluge struck with genesis force, shimmering over the roofs and canvases like a collapsed wall. Umbrellas and tents strained and tore. Wagons lurched. Oxen lumbered. Indians, Negroes, settlers, and vagabonds were all caught in the same storm, lashing down on dry timber and dust, livestock and hardware.
The downpour did not last long, but it turned the town into a slippery, squishy, tinkling bog of wagon wheel—sucking mud and overflowing gutters. Anyone who had managed to reach one of the protected plank boardwalks or covered porches braced himself there, ready to defend his refuge. The Sitturd clan had headed for the open door of one of the stables, but even so had got soaked. Like their place of residence back in St. Louis, the building was alive with mice. Water dripped down through holes in the shingled roof. The smell of damp hay, leather, and dung greeted them. Worse still, the shadows within showed signs that several other families had already had the same idea, and the stableman, a fellow with a barrel body and arms as thick as the rafters, did not look pleased.
The Zanesvilleans took the hint and inched back out into the mire of the streets. Lloyd could not help himself and went over to inspect the remains of the black dog. He found that the corpse was already badly decomposed. It was not the violence of the Spaniard’s desecration that was responsible, though; it was more like some accelerated internal process. Lloyd’s native curiosity gnawed at him, just as the black dog had ground down its teeth into the other. Despite all that they had to think of—all that lay behind and ahead of them, and the immediate difficulties they faced—he would very much have liked to save the remains of the dog to examine, but he had a feeling, which he could not explain or account for, that within but a short while there would be nothing left of the body to study, perhaps not even bones. Rapture kept the family moving.
At one of the many blacksmith sheds, Hephaestus introduced himself as a member of the trade. Although he had not regained his old strength, and it had been quite a while since he had swung a hammer or used a bellows, he showed himself adept enough to be offered employment starting the next morning. The shed owner and chief smithy was a blunt, compressed anvil of a man named Bevis Petrie. He and his wife and four children occupied the back quarters of the shed and so could not assist with the Sitturds’ accommodation needs, but he did feel charitably disposed enough toward them to recommend that they head to the other end of town and find a man named Othimiel Clutter, who happened to be his brother-in-law and one of the town’s numerous undertakers and coffinmakers.
Rapture, with a tradition of complicated relationships with the afterlife on both sides of her ancestors, was not pleased about this suggestion. But, with the autumn dark about to fall and with it the chance of more rain, she bit her lip and kept her peace. “De dead is jes like us,” she told herself. “Jes got to treat him wid rispect.”
So through the muck the family moved—or, rather, slithered. Several disputes if not outright brawls were in various stages of eruption in the streets and doorways. The saloons were busy, cooking fires had been relit, barn cats licked themselves on roof ledges, and everywhere the flow of runoff water gurgled and spilled, searching for the lowest point. The clouds cleared and a prairie-fire sky lit up the west, as if all the country that lay beyond were burning, which might have seemed menacing and more than a little apt, were it not that a red sky in the evening is a reliable omen of good weather the next day.
The Sitturds trudged through the mud, recalling the miseries of Zanesville. At last they came to a dripping, peeling storefront with a selection of crude pine caskets lined up against a covered porch like skiffs that had been washed up out of the river.
Othimiel Clutter and his wife, Egalantine, turned out to be one of those childless middle-aged couples who seem to have been middle-aged their entire lives and yet had grown alike during the course of their marriage, so that they were now hardly distinguishable, moving, speaking, and even thinking as one. Neither showed the slightest ability to express a complete sentiment without the assistance of the other—and, once voiced, every utterance needed to be echoed several times, just as the casket lids Othimiel sawed and nailed all needed sanding and a knock to be called done. He was forever tapping on the lids of the things in a way that made Rapture most uncomfortable (because she could not help thinking that soon they might be tapping back).
Nevertheless, the Clutters agreed to let the Sitturds “camp out” with them for a fee, once they were assured that the Ohioans were bound and determined to depart before the winter set in. Each member of the family was restless to get moving as soon as possible, a change of season or no.
Of course, it was obvious where the Sitturds were supposed to sleep—not just with the coffins but in them, there being no other space available. (Lloyd took particular note of the smaller-size coffins, of which there was an abundance.) Othimiel, perhaps more devoted to his surname than he should have been, had got a little ahead of himself in his production over the summer. The town had been spared some of the scourges of dysentery, fever, and cholera that many had been prepared for, and the more violent, criminal deaths had been handled without proper ceremony. Besides, given their location near the river, some bodies just disappeared, he and his wife managed to point out (each contributing a word to the finished sentence), which set Lloyd thinking again both of Hattie and of the body of the fierce black dog that had seemed to fall apart before his eyes.