Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 13

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 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 Sitt.u.r.ds 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.r. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 hara.s.sment 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 Ma.s.sacre, and leadership of the flock pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter churn in the barn where he was hiding. In a frenzy of what was really claustrophobic terror but looked very much like a G.o.d-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, woodp.e.c.k.e.rs 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 superst.i.tious 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 Sitt.u.r.ds, 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 pa.s.sed 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 Sitt.u.r.ds 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 pa.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 a.s.sumed 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 ma.s.s of b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.u.t.t 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 carca.s.s 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 Defiance, on its way upstream, laden with new pa.s.sengers 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 c.u.mulous 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 Sitt.u.r.d 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 a.s.sist with the Sitt.u.r.ds' 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 Sitt.u.r.ds 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 a.s.sistance 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 Sitt.u.r.ds "camp out" with them for a fee, once they were a.s.sured 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 Sitt.u.r.ds were supposed to sleep-not just with the coffins but in in them, there being no other s.p.a.ce 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. them, there being no other s.p.a.ce 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.

CHAPTER 1.

Strange Languages HEPHAESTUS AND R RAPTURE PROPOSED A PAYMENT TO THE C CLUTTERS that they felt they could afford for the time period they thought they would require (which the reformed inventor and drunkard optimistically estimated as a week). Once the older couple had nailed, sanded, and knocked these negotiations into an agreement that they could echo and be sure of, they took a handful of the green coffee Egalantine had browned in their oven in the back room, ground it in a mill, and boiled it up with some tin-tasting water and they all shared a bitter but celebratory cup. that they felt they could afford for the time period they thought they would require (which the reformed inventor and drunkard optimistically estimated as a week). Once the older couple had nailed, sanded, and knocked these negotiations into an agreement that they could echo and be sure of, they took a handful of the green coffee Egalantine had browned in their oven in the back room, ground it in a mill, and boiled it up with some tin-tasting water and they all shared a bitter but celebratory cup.

Without children and but the coffinmaking and undertaking trappings and each other to keep them company, the Clutters seemed somewhat deprived of stimulus, and so quite delighted (in their own tapping, echoing, uncertain way) to have some live bodies under the same roof. How else would they have learned, for instance, that it was at all noteworthy that the two rooms that pa.s.sed for their living quarters behind the shop were as crowded with music boxes as their official business s.p.a.ce was with coffins?

The boxes were in themselves quite beautiful to look at, the size of snuffboxes and made of a variety of woods: burl walnut and elm, rosewood and bird's-eye maple, while others had lids inlaid with tortoisesh.e.l.l. Fascinated by anything mechanical, Lloyd asked if he could inspect them and found them to be disappointingly simple devices comprising a metal barrel of about three inches with a shiny-toothed steel comb inside. He understood the mechanics and the musical principles at a glance.

All the music boxes played the same tune for a little less than a minute, a rather pedestrian arrangement of the French children's song "Au Clair de la Lune," which was nonetheless quite engaging and ended with a gentle, invigorating flourish. Rapture, in particular, was taken with the contraptions, and after some sanding and tapping the Clutters were able to present her with one as a gift. But this just raised another question in the Zanesvilleans' minds.

Given that small lovely boxes that could make music were ever so much more interesting than plain pine boxes big enough to house the dead, and given that the Clutters had so many of them, why did they not contemplate another kind of business, or at least a separate enterprise? It was clear from their humble standard of living that some extra money would come in handy. Surely, even out here on the frontier of Missouri, there would have been at least some demand for items that were so visually appealing, so charming to listen to, and so portable. Rapture put the question directly, as she always did.

"Dissuh hice de chune. Hoa comen ees doan graff de good-fashin? Fsuttin exwantidge!"

The result was such a commotion of gapping, filling, sanding, and knocking, it became uncomfortably apparent that a nerve had been touched. Finally, after another round of coffee and more half-finished sentences than the Sitt.u.r.ds had ever not heard, the truth at last came out.

Outside, the brick-kiln sun had set and pale watery stars had appeared, glinting down in rutted puddles of rain in the street before the whole of the story was thoroughly sanded, tapped, and echoed-but the gist was that a settler from the East had left the boxes with them a year before. He said he had found them in a crate floating in the river, stuck up under some tree roots five miles below. He had the idea of selling them himself, he said, but had left them with the Clutters for the time being in payment for their a.s.sistance regarding his dead little boy. He had never returned.

"So you made his child a coffin and he left you with all these?" Hephaestus queried.

After still more sanding and tapping, Mr. Clutter and Mrs. Clutter managed to convey that it was not a coffin that had been required. The man, whose name they had never learned, had asked for his child to be embalmed and he had taken the body with him. This admission led to yet another digression, this time regarding the broader spectrum of funereal services the Clutters felt it necessary to provide, and concluded with Othimiel Clutter producing a brace of jars that contained the embalmed cats he had practiced on (and, ostensibly, succeeded with).

Lloyd was excited by the embalmed cats and, coming so soon after the investigation of the innards of the music boxes, they threw him into a fit of inquiry that removed him for the moment from all other thoughts and doubts, except, of course, Hattie.

He rose from the slat floor where he had been sitting and began examining the room. That was when he found a music box that was different from all the others. Mr. and Mrs. Clutter were still gapping and filling about the cats they had come by-or, rather, how innocently they had come by them-when the boy's attention fixated upon one of the music boxes, which was not housed in a wooden box but made of a sleek, almost wet-looking metal. It was a margin larger than the rest, but what caught his eye was the design on the lid. Neither inlaid nor etched, there was nonetheless the image of a candle-with the suggestion of a flame rising above it. A pair of crab claws extended from the candle. Lloyd felt the breath sucked out of him.

He had never seen such an emblem before, but he recognized it instantly as the mark of the Vardogers-and quite intriguing it was to look at, too. Whoever had designed it had suppressed any presence of the crab's body, choosing instead to arm the candle with crustacean claws, a bold and striking abstraction.

While all the other boxes opened with a quiet but definite click that would set the music playing, the box with the Vardogers' emblem remained steadfastly shut, no matter how much pressure Lloyd applied.

"Don't fuss yourself, son," Mr. Clutter said, shaking his head. "It twon't ever open. We've tried."

Lloyd turned the box over to examine its underside and discovered a row of precisely etched letters that were so small even he had to ask for a magnifying lens, to read the words YOU MUST SAY SOMETHING THE BOX UNDERSTANDS YOU MUST SAY SOMETHING THE BOX UNDERSTANDS.

"It is curious," Hephaestus agreed, noticing the intensity of Lloyd's consideration.

"Witched!" Rapture decreed.

Lloyd, on the other hand, held the box up close to his mouth and said as clearly as he could the word "Something." To the sheer dumbfoundment of the adults in the room, the smooth metal lid clicked open to reveal not a bright barrel cylinder and sharp-toothed comb, or even the more intricate componentry of a musical clock. Instead, what met their eyes was a detailed, miniaturized orchestra. It was impossible to tell what the figures were made of because they were so small, but a heartbeat after the lid had opened by whatever unseen mechanism, the exquisitely tiny artificial musicians began to play-and the music rose to fill the room with a volume and a depth of presence that exceeded all the other music boxes put together. It began like the fugue from Mozart's Magic Flute Magic Flute overture, but then evolved into a kind of marching rhythm, and then gradually shifted once more into a bell-like tune or a blend of tunes like nothing the Zanesvilleans had ever heard before. The effect was hypnotic. Transporting. And also disturbing. overture, but then evolved into a kind of marching rhythm, and then gradually shifted once more into a bell-like tune or a blend of tunes like nothing the Zanesvilleans had ever heard before. The effect was hypnotic. Transporting. And also disturbing.

Lloyd noticed that he was no longer marveling at the exact.i.tude of the mechanical innovation inside the box but drifting in his mind. Fabulous, half-formed scenes and visions came into his head, like his dreams of old. He could not say what he was seeing, but it made him feel woozy. With an exertion of will, he slapped down the lid and the music died. The expressions on the other faces worried him. They were each dazed in their own way and somewhat hostile, as if he had cut short their fun. There was an oppressive closeness to the atmosphere in the room, which was so p.r.o.nounced that Egalantine Clutter went so far as to open a window all on her own initiative to dispel it. Hephaestus seemed to have slowed and turned a bit surly, as if someone had waved a draft of pungent-smelling rum under his nose and then pulled it away. But Lloyd could see that his mother had regained her alertness, and was agitated, as if the coffee was just kicking in. He felt convinced that they had experienced something unwholesome.

As pleasing as the box was to look at, as satisfying as it was to fondle, and as badly as he wanted to speak to it and have the lid open, to have the microscopic orchestra perform again, he sensed a presence that was not benign. Beguiling, perhaps, but not benign. His own curiosity and need were so great, it turned around on itself and stared back at him.

Then he noticed the clock on the Clutters' crowded mantelpiece and the breakout of sweat on his hands made him drop the box. Unless by some infernal magic the music had tampered with the operation of the clock, more than half an hour had pa.s.sed since he had spoken the pa.s.sword and opened the lid. The other music boxes with straightforward mechanical means had played for forty-five seconds or less. No one had noticed the time that had pa.s.sed.

"How did you know how to do that?" Othimiel Clutter demanded, when at last the spell had lifted.

"It was easy," Lloyd answered. "What you were reading as one sentence is really two, so the direction could not have been clearer. Those are often the most difficult riddles to solve-the ones you mistakenly make for yourself."

This observation, coming from one so young, provoked much discussion among the childless Clutters and the other two adults, although, of course, Rapture and Hephaestus were long inured to Lloyd's perspicacity. While the older folk nattered on about what seemed transparent to him, Lloyd was more interested in the fact that, despite the amazing mechanico-musical phenomenon they had witnessed, no one now seemed at all eager for him to open the box again, not even himself anymore, Lloyd realized, which he could not account for logically but only in terms of the disquieting intuition he had had before. It seemed like such an elaborate folly to be listened to but once. Already the sense of the music was slipping away. Only a faint memory remained, like a dream.

The prolonged distraction had upset the Clutters' normal dining schedule. On this evening, with "guests" in attendance, Egalantine insisted on laying out "a spread." Said spread consisted of a large plate of cold small meats (which, of course, was a rather sensitive choice, given the surrounding jars of embalmed cats and the coffins), an exceedingly odd-textured goat cheese, hunks of shack-smoked bullhead, and a mound of jellied offal, which bore an unappealing resemblance to trifle. Unexpectedly, all the food on the platter soon disappeared, and Lloyd remarked on how hungry everyone seemed, eating with an almost mechanical urgency, verging on trance. He missed his mother's fresh corn bread, but he, too, hoed in.

Seeing that the spread had been enjoyed (engulfed was more like it), Egalantine set about reheating a cast-iron pot of mutton-and-vegetable stew. This was how the dish was described at any rate, but the aroma that rose from the coals of the hearth, where the pot sat farting like a petulant mud pool, strongly suggested something else (for instance, the renderer back in St. Louis). Indeed, the atmosphere that filled the room was such that Rapture even wondered if the Clutters might not be inclined to create their own customers. Amid chunks of parsnips and what looked to be some highly suspect carrots were bits of bonelike knuckles and a film of what might have been a long-soaked doily but which Mrs. Clutter insisted had recently been red cabbage. A bowl of wax beans with a fine fungal fuzz brushed off at the last minute rounded off the repast. This, too, was consumed. We must be very hungry, Hephaestus told himself. We must be foolish proud, thought Rapture, hoping they would not become ill. What if this all has something to do with that music box, Lloyd puzzled?

Normality of interaction returned come cleanup time and the Clutters resumed their eccentric stop-start mode of conversation. Once some order had been restored to the kitchen area and the cooking fire damped down to embers, the Sitt.u.r.ds were shown to their grim beds in the main shop (with visions of the embalmed cats curled in their jars and the music boxes lined on shelves in the other room). General comments were made regarding plans for provisioning the next day and rea.s.surances given that their stay would not be long, and that they would do all in their power not to disrupt the Clutters' day-to-day lives and business. Then the candles were extinguished and the Zanesville refugees were left to themselves, each in a coffin packed with old mothball-smelling bedding.

Lloyd found it hard to sleep. Thoughts of Hattie filled his mind, and even without a lid on it was impossible to forget where he was lying. His restlessness set him floating back down a dark river of memories...to the trunk in Miss Viola's cabin...to the trapdoor graveyard that Sch.e.l.ling had led him to the night that he met Mother Tongue...to the box of the Martian Amba.s.sadors...and the secret hold where he had hidden in Hattie's arms, making the love a child his age should not have understood. Then there were thoughts of the man who had brought the music boxes-his embalmed child-and the box with the Vardogers' symbol, which seemed to contain an unnaturally suggestive music embedded in the workings of the miniature metal orchestra. It was a lot for him to think about. Just missing Hattie was enough.

Rapture had similar problems getting adjusted, but after a couple of dozy nightmares that startled her sheer exhaustion took hold and she collapsed into a deep slumber, grateful not to have been seized by stomach cramps. Hephaestus, who in his time on the bottle had grown accustomed to blacking out and waking up in unusual places, gave himself over to sleep with the peace of a baby after the satisfaction of the nipple-every so often releasing a pop of flatulence.

Lloyd listened for a while to his father's regular snoring and fluffing, his mother's shallower but soothing respiration, and he began to be aware of faint strains of music. The sadness he felt at losing Hattie-the need to know where she was and if she was all right-would not let him alone. And then, the very moment he experienced any reprieve from his pain, some wriggling other anxiety sneaked in-like music he did not want to hear.

At first he had a bizarre fear that the music boxes in the next room had opened of their own accord, but then he realized that the melody he was hearing came from outside, somewhere down the mud-and-plank streets, and was familiar to him. He picked out a banjo, a fiddle...and a squeezebox...folks singing. He recognized the song "The Pesky Sarpent" and then "Rosin, the Beau." He crept out of the coffin and tiptoed to the window to listen.

A tall hatted figure pa.s.sed outside, then a thin white cat. In the starlit s.p.a.ce between two buildings across the street, he glimpsed the reflected shadows made by a small fire. He was seized with curiosity to explore the night town-as much to escape the stultifying atmosphere of the coffin room and the lingering smell of supper as anything-but he had trepidations about the safety of venturing out alone in the dark without a lantern or any definite idea of who might be abroad. He would have resigned himself back to a stiff attempt at sleep in the wooden box, when he heard a song that made his hair needle up on his neck.

There's a place I know Where I always go There to dream of you And hope that you'll be true And someday I pray That you'll find your way Back to the secret place Within my heart.

It was a female voice coming in on a cooling night breeze, which even through the plate gla.s.s carried with it the odors of charred wood and burned beans-but it was not, his keen ears told him, the voice of Viola Mercy. The poignancy of the melody made his head swim, though, wondering where the chanteuse might be. Louisville? Memphis? New Orleans? And what of St. Ives, his first business partner? Or the professor, the partner he had lied to and cheated? Or proud, scarred Hattie, his partner in a deeper way. His mind and soul reached out to them all, and through them to the phantom at the far edge of his field of inner vision: His sister, Lodema. Stillborn in Ohio and still being born inside himself.

No, it was not the steamboat entertainer he heard singing in the storm-rinsed, clearing Missouri night. Still, it seemed an omen that he could not ignore, and so he unlatched and unbolted the shop front door, unsure why anyone would break into an undertaker and coffinmaker's place of business, anyway (unless, of course, it had something to do with the music boxes). He stepped lightly out into the gloom, leaving his parents breathing in their open coffins.

He glanced up and down the hog trough of the dark street. The moon was almost full and cast a spectral glaze over the town and the skeletons of buildings in the works. Most of the folk sheltered within the limits of Independence were either already abed or struggling by lantern and hearth light to repair ruptures, rips, and leaks, pluck weevils from biscuit flour, air out sodden fabric, comfort squalling infants, pack tobacco in a pipe, or take another slug from a fired earth jug. The church believers, the diligent, the indigent, the exhausted, and anyone whose guts were clogged with beans and salt pork had called it a night. But others, and there are always those, had different ideas. It was to these sounds and shadows that Lloyd was drawn.

Silhouettes fluttered over plank walls, and in the distance a hound howled, which made Lloyd think again of poor Tip, buried back in Zanesville along with their old life. Lodema.

He stepped between the ruts and puddles, moving in the direction of the music, remembering the evil that had befallen him in that laneway in St. Louis at the hands of the man with the harelip. Hattie had cured him of the shame, but the anger remained. And the wariness.

Squishing through the mud, which his mother would no doubt be angry about, he reached the shelter of a buckboard leaning down on its. .h.i.tch across the street. Then in between the buildings. Somewhere he could hear horses jostling and whinnying in a stable.

The music, however, proved to be elusive. Where he had thought to find people gathered around a fire with their instruments, a couple of wagons and oil lanterns propped on casks, there was but an empty lot and the skeletal frame of a building going up. The camp where the music was coming from, and now beginning to die out, lay farther on, behind a row of makeshift sheds and a cl.u.s.ter of willow trees. The shadows he had seen earlier must have been made by other people and had melted away. Yet there were still some lights. The nearest and brightest came from a crude brick storehouse on the other side of a drenched pea patch. Someone had taken a spade and dug several runoff trenches to direct the water into the lumpy garden, and he had to mind his step. The light in the storehouse grew dimmer as he approached, as if the building were beginning to doze.

Now that the notion of investigating the source of the music had pa.s.sed from his mind, Lloyd was without a plan of action and had half a mind to return to the Clutters' and try to go to sleep, but there did not seem any harm in at least having a peek in the storehouse to see what was going on. Picking his way through the pea patch he became more intrigued, as from its exterior the storehouse appeared to be abandoned, and he had not seen buildings that were not being used in the town. Something was going on inside, though.

He crept up close to the yawning, empty window frame, which, with the softness of the mud underfoot, was infuriatingly just a little too high for him to see into. There was no choice but to stand on tiptoe and hold on to the ledge. By hoisting himself up just a few inches, he would be able to peer inside. Of course, his fingers might be visible from within, but there was no other way, short of trying to sneak in the heavy barn-width door, which might well have been barred anyway.

As quietly as he could, he reached up and grabbed hold of the rough-troweled masonry and dragged himself into the square of light cast from inside the storehouse. In the blend of moonlight and diffused gleam from within, he could see that the c.h.i.n.ks in the slapdash brickwork had been patched with mortar and mud, and were flecked with old desiccated wasp nests and cobwebs. He tried to brace his boots against the c.h.i.n.ks without making a sc.r.a.ping sound. What he saw at first surprised him as much as the sight that had greeted his eyes when the Vardogers' music box had opened.

It was the Quists, all gathered together in a circle around a group of tallow candles arranged in a Star of David pattern atop a cross, which from his point of view was upside down. There were perhaps twenty or thirty adults, with a couple of older kids and a few mother-cradled infants. Everyone, even the babes in their mothers' arms, were swathed in red turbans and staring with rapt attention as a man straddling the candle flames rising from the sod floor pa.s.sed around what looked to Lloyd like pieces of sun-dried tree bark with funny markings etched into them. He struggled to maintain his hold on the ledge and to strain up a bit higher to get a better look.

The man who held sway in the center of the group was none other than Increase McGitney, lately arrived in Independence under cover of darkness with an armed escort, to lead his people west and south to a promised land they knew they would recognize when they came to it. The surviving Quists had congregated in this unusually derelict building at a late hour in a ritual of renewal, hoping to find the strength and focus to lead them forward, beyond the reach of their persecutors, to some green valley that lay on the other side of the wolf-roaming plains and scorching deserts. They had turned back to the sacred scriptures upon which their beliefs were founded, not the Book of Buford but the very Headstones that Kendrick Quist himself had uncovered on his way home from the fateful horse gelding in Indiana.

The sections of petrified wood were produced from a strongbox that McGitney's guards carried, but, unlike the relics and holy texts of other less democratically minded faiths, they were not h.o.a.rded away as they had been back in the days of Buford's prophetic leadership. Truth be known, McGitney had many personal reservations about the Book of Buford, and was privately of (the arguably heretical) opinion that the Headstones held a deeper mystery than either the great Kendrick or his relative had fathomed. In any case, ever since his inadvertent moment of courageous abandon, McGitney had grasped an often overlooked element of effective leadership: the sharing of authority whilst never shirking from responsibility. And so, at this crucial juncture in his people's journey, he had deemed it appropriate to renew their collective sense of awe and devotion.

It was a risky move, for at first nothing could have seemed plainer or humbler than the old bits of engraved bark that came out of the box. Lloyd gripped like a cat to the ledge, eyes probing through the gla.s.sless s.p.a.ce-not, of course, knowing what it was he was witnessing but perceiving, in the quality of attention in the shining eyes of the turbaned group, that it was something important.

Then, very gradually, the effect McGitney had counted on began to manifest itself. What before-at least, at the distance from which Lloyd was viewing them-had looked like the vehement gnawings of insects or the scratchings of some demented child in the ancient bark now began to glow. Over the course of a minute, the glow deepened and brightened as if magnetizing the moonlight. The unexplained phenomenon caused the desired stir around the circle of the Quists and set Lloyd wriggling to gain a clearer view. There was an inexplicable aura of bioluminescence about the markings now, as if they had come to life in the candlelight and indeed outshone the tapers with a weird green phosph.o.r.escence that revealed a new level of detail in the figures. To Lloyd's amazement, he found that he recognized the radiant markings as the unmistakable likenesses of the hierograms of the Martian Amba.s.sadors! The shock sent him tumbling to earth outside the window.

"Wait!" called Increase McGitney, becoming hypertense. "Go see what that was!" he instructed the guards, who bolted out between the candles. Trouble had followed the Quists wherever they had gone and they were prepared for more before they made their departure across the prairie. Three burly men in red turbans stormed out of the storehouse, one carrying a torch, the other two cudgels. Before Lloyd could scramble to his feet, they were upon him.

CHAPTER 2.

The Blinking of an Eye MCGITNEY'S GUARDS PLUCKED L LLOYD FROM THE MOON-SOAKED mud and hauled him inside the storehouse like a sack of spuds. For all his fearsome intellect, the boy was powerless in their hands. When he recovered from his shock, he was standing, forcibly propped between two turbaned men on the perimeter of the candles that he had been observing moments earlier, with the face, or rather the dense red beard and glittering eyes, of Increase McGitney poking down at him. mud and hauled him inside the storehouse like a sack of spuds. For all his fearsome intellect, the boy was powerless in their hands. When he recovered from his shock, he was standing, forcibly propped between two turbaned men on the perimeter of the candles that he had been observing moments earlier, with the face, or rather the dense red beard and glittering eyes, of Increase McGitney poking down at him.

"Who are ya, boy?" the Quist headman demanded.

"He's a spy!" a woman cried out.

"I'm Lloyd Meadhorn Sitt.u.r.d," the boy answered, and shook the big hands off his shoulders with an authority or an arrogance that made McGitney pause.

"Am I to know that name?" McGitney asked, hoping to raise a chuckle among his agitated congregation.

Lloyd instantly regretted proffering his name, but as he could not retract it he let the statement stand and sent his eyes out around the group.

"What brings a lad like you out so late, then?" the Quist leader tried, concerned about this disruption in their ceremony but not afraid. He doubted that any terror gang would send so young a child to scout them.