Enigmatic Pilot (31 page)

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.

H
EPHAESTUS AND
R
APTURE PROPOSED A PAYMENT TO THE
C
LUTTERS
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 passed for their living quarters behind the shop were as crowded with music boxes as their official business space 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 tortoiseshell. 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 Sitturds 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 assistance 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.