Enigmatic Pilot (36 page)

“So, you maintain,” Soames piped up (his eyes still smarting), “that the Book of Buford is not based on an interpretation of these symbols?”

“I know nothing of your Buford,” Lloyd said, shrugging. “I gather from what you have said that you think these writings make up some lost book of the Bible, and that you trace some connection with the people you think it describes. I say again, I do not know what this secret writing means, but I doubt very much that it has anything to do with the Bible—unless it is some interpretation made by the twin brothers, which from what I know of them seems unlikely.”

“What about the woodpecker?” a sleepy knock-kneed lad called out.

“What woodpecker?” Lloyd puzzled. As distinctive as the story behind the Ambassadors’ language was, these people had even more peculiar ideas of their own.

“All right, then,” McGitney said in his summing-up voice. “The truth you have to tell us is that our theology is based upon a lie.”

“A misunderstanding,” Lloyd interjected.

“Kendrick Quist and his relative Buford were frauds.”

“They may honestly have believed what they said and taught.”

“In that case, dupes. They may have duped themselves, but they certainly have duped us—and we have endured persecution and exile because of it!”

“So it would seem,” Lloyd was forced to agree.

“The real source of the sacred writings is a couple of mooncalves from Indiana, where Quist was from. He may even have known them. Do you know anything more about them?” McGitney asked, as members of the group frowned and whispered.

Lloyd considered recounting the brothers’ experience with the tornado, but decided against it. The Quists had had enough miracles and unexplained phenomena. He shook his head.

“And what became of these weird brothers?” McGitney queried. “Where are they now?”

“They disappeared,” Lloyd answered. “I believe they are dead now. A tragic accident.”

“Hmm,” McGitney said, pondering. “If we are to believe you, then the true authors of our sacred texts are gone from this earth—and, with them, any hope of penetrating what it seems that you would call the real mystery.”

“I would not say
any
hope,” Lloyd replied. “The problem is having enough of their writing to examine. I have had but the symbols on this box and little time or privacy for study. Your so-called Headstones are much more extensive samples. There is also the vital matter of the glowing. If my box has never done this before but does so now, it suggests some association or intercourse between the pieces.”

“The markings change!” a young horse-faced girl sang out.

Lloyd took this comment as a reiteration of his point and continued. “Proximity may influence the luminosity. Cause unknown.”

“What about you—when you touch them?” asked a man with a mustache that curled in a way that reminded Lloyd of the “f” hole in a violin.

“There may be several other factors at work, which we do not comprehend as yet,” he answered.

“Fools, fools, fools we are!” an old dark woman gibbered.

“I would not say that,” Lloyd barked (somewhat surprised at himself). “The Headstones are not what you thought them to be. But while they may not be sacred in the way that you have believed, they are worthy of great interest and perhaps much more than that, if their secret were fully understood.”

Lloyd had intended his comments to be consoling, but, coming after all that had transpired, they were more than the
Quists could bear. A woman in a sunflower calico dress and a knitted shawl thrust her googling baby into her husband’s arms and began unwinding her turban. Several others started to do the same.

“Ah,” McGitney lamented, remembering his moment of cowardice in the barn back in Illinois and his mad dash through the laundry line. He felt once again on the run, his vision clouded. Could he emerge to advantage once again?

“Dark night of the soul!” he mourned. “A messiah comes to us at last, who says he is not our messiah and yet calls the lightning down to aid our members. Then he tells us that our faith is based on false teachings—that our prophetic forebearers are in fact lunatics or lusus naturae suitable for naught but display alongside the sawdust and hogskin mermaid, and the two-headed calf at a village fair!”

There followed much grumbling and argument and more than a little weeping and wailing. Lloyd could find nothing to say that he had not already said and, in being there to witness the unraveling of the Quist theology, regretted the effect his knowledge had imposed, although he was canny enough to realize that without his performance with the Eye they might well have talked their way around his words. Truly, faith is a kind of blindness, he told himself. But, then again, so is being too sure of what you see. The first pale light of dawn began seeping into the storehouse. It was time for him to get back to his coffin, and for the Quists to mobilize.

“I must go,” he told them. “And so must you. Whether you take off your head wraps or not, you will not so easily lose your reputation.”

McGitney, who had been comforting one of his wives, turned to Lloyd.

“You are right again, young warrior. We must carry on and come to terms with this new revelation at a safe distance.”

“Why? What’s the point?” one of the young people hollered.

“I’m a-goin’ back to Indy-anna!” an old codger croaked.

“What say you, Brother McGitney? What in God’s name do we do now?”

“Who said he’s leader now?” A scraggly man choked and started snuffing the candles with a square-toed boot.

“Silence!” McGitney bellowed, recalling that moment of exhilarated surprise when the contents of the clothesline were removed from his head and he had found himself a hero. “Here is what I say. We must try to see the blessing in what has happened here. We are all still alive and unhurt, and if our pride and our faith have been challenged, perhaps in another way it has been renewed. If we are to put stock in what this boy has said—and it seems that we do—then we must remember that we have in our possession these things that have no less meaning than we supposed, just different. Perhaps we are more pioneers and pilgrims than we supposed. I say that we forge on as a family, as a clan and as a community, committed to freedom, industry, and the search for the significance of these tablets—an endeavor we can all participate in without the need for prophets or messiahs. It strikes me that I myself have never looked more closely at the symbols than tonight because I had some inkling, I believe, of what they represented. The Book of Buford was a kind of curtain, not an exegesis. I say that what we leave behind in this meeting place is our arrogance of special providence, not our loyalty to each other or our fascination and reverence for these enchanted characters. It was them that brought us all together—that made us risk life, limb, and old ties. That is powerful significance indeed, worthy of many lifetimes of devotion and study. Other beliefs and sects have but copies or imagined texts, relics and articles of faith. We at least have originals, whose meaning is as undiscovered and untapped as the wilderness waiting for us outside that door. I say we should wipe our eyes and gird up our loins and be grateful. For tonight we have been saved. We have been released and we have been refreshed. From the dark night of despair, we have been given a new dawn!”

Lloyd considered McGitney’s speech an example of both sod-level wisdom and true poise under pressure, worthy of both Hattie and St. Ives. If nothing else, the Quists had chosen the right leader, he was sure—a fact that contrasted sharply with the mesh-hatted bigot who had been incinerated. Perhaps an even brighter future lay ahead for the Quists than the one they had envisioned. He hoped so, for all their sakes.

McGitney had much to do now, holding the flock together, repairing breaches in trust and confidence, and trying to organize the group off to their hidden horses and wagons—to reassemble and disperse, or to bid farewell to those insistent members who had lost faith forever and were now determined to return East to their old lives or to team up with other settlers headed West. But still, he made sure that Lloyd was sent off with, if not consensual thanks, then at least an acknowledgment of respect.

“Young Lloyd,” McGitney said. “I know you would seek to have these tablets to assist your own inquiry. But these we must keep, because for better or worse they have been entrusted to us. You have your box, and in some way that we may yet decipher, our fates have been connected and may remain so. Go forth with what new blessings we have to give. You will not be soon forgotten.”

Soames and Drucker together gave Lloyd a deep bow, which he returned. Then he stowed the box under his garments and stepped out through the door into the ghostly morning, taking a longer, more circumspect route back to the Clutters’. After his earlier performance with the vigilantes, it was deemed that he needed no escort. He thought Hattie would have been proud of the Li’l Skunk.

He glimpsed many shapes and shadows along the way, and smelled the smoke of early cooking fires, the salivatory tang of bacon, and the glug of grits but garnered not a hint of any particular malice or intent toward himself or anything relating to either the vigilantes or the Quists. By the time he reached the
undertaker and coffinmaker’s establishment and had scraped the mud from his boots, the sky was streaked with bloody color. Softly, he cracked the door, relatched, and bolted it—and had just snuggled back down into his coffin to think of Hattie when his father rose, stretched and farted simultaneously, which almost set him giggling. Hattie could change pitch! Moments later, Rapture squirmed awake.

“Yeh all fine?” she cooed to her husband.

“Lord, I feel like the risen dead!” Hephaestus exclaimed. “I have a crook in my back that will need a poultice. Or, better still, a knee and a yank. But we need to be shoving on. I’m hankering to be gone now. On our way.”

“I be there,” his wife promised, swallowing a yawn. “How’s Lloyd?”

“Ah, just look!” Hephaestus gestured. “A-peace like a suckling. You’d think there were no troubles a’tall in the world. He probably hasn’t changed position the whole night. Leave the rousting to me. We have tracks to make.”

W
E HAVE ALL HAD THE EXPERIENCE OF FALLING ASLEEP FOR A
minute and then having what seems like an entire night of dreams. Often, these dreams act as a solvent to our day-to-day consciousness—a disbursing, confronting carnival of images and incidents that take us out of our familiar being and into fantastic new (or suddenly remembered) realms. Other times, we find ourselves not swept away from what we had been focused on before falling asleep but drawn closer, so that we seem to pass straight through the matter that was on our mind, merging with it. Such was the experience Lloyd had in the few short minutes of refuge and release that overcame him when he slipped back into his coffin as his parents were rising.

His mind was so aroused by what had transpired with the Quists and the vigilantes, the secret writing of the Ambassadors, and the lethal force of the Spirosian Eye (all of which, of course, had come close on the heels of the time-distorting effect of the Vardogers’ music box and the questions raised by the accelerated decomposition of the cannibal dog), that even though he was drained of physical energy, his thoughts ran back over his night episode. The conundrum of the Eye seemed momentarily impenetrable, so he ended up sifting through the things he had said to the Quists—the idea that the twins’ symbol
system may have been treated by some process to create the illuminated effect. This, at first, had seemed to be the most logical explanation. He had even offered suppositions about what type of materials might be involved. Then he heard again in his sleep the remark made by the equine-countenanced girl:
“The markings change!”

At the time, he had been aware of some taut string of conjecture her words had stroked in him, but there had been too much happening to address it. Now, in the serial stream of hypnologic clarity, this assertion began to resonate more explicitly. He realized that her remark was like the instruction on the Vardogers’ music box. Initially, he had thought it said one obvious thing—referring to the glowing effect of the writings. But it may have meant something both more literal and miraculous. Since he had first come into possession of the box, a vague thought had passed back and forth in his mind—
that the symbols and characters seemed to move or shift with different examinations
. Without the technology to duplicate the markings, it was impossible to decide the matter objectively. All he had was a foggy but needling impression that he had so far not had the energy, leisure, or privacy to explore.

The Quist girl had called his attention to it again, and now, in the twilight morning of half-sleep, he was able to at least contemplate the notion without prejudice. The idea of markings carved on a box, which were able to be altered—or to somehow alter themselves—was on the surface absurd. But suppose one had the suspicion that they did. What if this idea lingered and no matter how many times the writing was consulted one could not with absolute certainty feel as if the suspicion had been dispelled? This alone said something important about the symbol system, Lloyd felt. This was, in fact, a fundamental part of its uniqueness—that every time you confronted it, it seemed new and all the more indecipherable.

Yet if it were just a matter of impressions one could argue that the sense of change and movement was due to the foreignness
of the markings. The whole world was like this. Birds arrange themselves like musical notes on the rope between trees where you hang washing. Are they the same birds you saw yesterday? Are they
all
the same? Do all humans appear as un-differentiated and interchangeable to other undomesticated species? This question sent him down a long corridor of speculation, and at the end of the corridor was a painting.

The impression one had that the Ambassadors’ writing underwent some kind of alteration (perhaps continuously, perhaps not) struck him as no more extraordinary than a painting that seems to change color and mood depending on the light, which brought to mind again the story that St. Ives had told about the paintings in Junius Rutherford’s possession. These apparently innocuous works of art, when observed over time, possessed very odd properties. It was not the effects their surface created that changed but the deeper structure, the very subject matter—or so his friend with the mechanical prosthesis had insisted.