Enigmatic Pilot (6 page)

G
RADY
S
MEG DID INDEED LEARN A LESSON, AND
L
LOYD WAS CORRECT
in his prediction that the bully would say nothing. The story that went into circulation was that Grady had been angry with his father for a licking and so had lit out on an adventure. Then, dirty and tired of living on carp and branch water, the dumb nut had slunk home to take his medicine, only to find that his razor-strop father was too glad to have him back to whip him.

Lionel Smeg never made good on his threat to burn down the Sitturds’ barn, but he did stir up a hornet’s nest about the money Hephaestus owed, and racial tensions that had long been suppressed began to simmer. The lame inventor’s creditors knew of his Millerite leanings and the talk around Zanesville began to suggest that maybe the oddball blacksmith was going to run up as big a bill as he could, and then he and his brood were going to drink hemlock on the End of the World Day (a sensational fear implanted by anti-Adventist forces throughout the country), leaving everyone he owed high and dry.

The autumn harvest came early, and a snake-oil salesman showed up in a bright wagon covered in pictures of rajas and angels. He said his name was Professor Umberto, and he had
two assistants, a squirrel monkey in a black swallowtail coat, and a fancy house woman he called Anastasia, who wore a champagne-colored ball gown. She never said a word, but strutted around playing a squeezebox and helped out with the magic tricks he did between pitches. She was especially clever at disappearing and then reappearing someplace else. Even Lloyd was impressed by that feat. He also liked the way her bosom always seemed ready to burst out of her gown.

The professor sold Indian root pills, white-eye alcohol in bottles with a picture of Saint George skewering a dragon on the side, and some expensive jars full of stuff for men that he claimed came from “the business end of a Bengal tiger.” It didn’t help or heal anyone for long, of course, but it made a big dent in Rapture’s income. Every time Hephaestus went to town he got cold stares and dirty looks. Legal-looking notices started piling up, and a man who claimed to work for the town council came out to the property and prowled around. After that, Rapture started insisting that anyone who rode past the house was a “puhlicitor.” It was humiliating and posed severe problems for the completion of the Time Ark (which, with so many people poking around, Hephaestus was forced to roll inside the forge). The mood grew darker as the days counted down.

Hephaestus had held such high hopes for the Ark based on the “magnetic properties” of the material, some of which had come from bits of what he thought were meteorites that he had unearthed. Lloyd’s concept was to build a spiral track and to mount the sphere on a shaft set into a swiveling frame so that it was capable of spinning 360 degrees, driven by the force of an elaborate series of sails and windmills. While rotating thus independently in one axis, the frame, which was attached to flanged wheels that sat on the rails, would propel the entire sphere along the spiral track.

Between comments from his father regarding gyrostats and luminiferous ether (which Lloyd was disinclined to believe in),
the boy produced a number of foolscap pages with fine duckquill blueprints and infinitesimal calculations, as well as several attempts at working models—along with the pregnant speculation that “seen from the sphere, the past might lie beyond the future.” But it was all to no avail. The iron of the Ark was hopelessly heavy and dense. It was all wrong. Everything.

Frustrated to the point of violence, Lloyd could not work out how to maintain a constant speed along the track, or the more difficult technical issue of how to sustain the spiral motion of the sphere without the source of power, the sails and windmills, impeding the action. He needed more and better equipment—more tools, more resources—more than what the rank barn and the dust trap of Zanesville had to offer. Ever so much more. In his young heart, he raged for precision instruments, a proper assembly space, books (books!), ideas, materials, money—and, most of all, someone to talk to, someone who truly had his wits about him. Someone of his own ilk.

Most infuriating of all, he thought he had seen the solution in a dream. Hephaestus was sympathetic in this regard. How often had he woken just before their rooster in a helpless panic at the fading vision of some grand new invention! That was what had happened to the High Speed Chicken Plucker and the Musical Millet Grinder.

Being a blacksmith who fancied himself an engineer, and a modern man of fire and steel, once he had recognized the need for power and motion Hephaestus felt that the question could be resolved with steam, and so set about collecting boilerplate and rocker arms and designing a shining piston-driven beast that looked like a cross between a grasshopper locomotive and a calliope. But the harder he worked and scratched his head, the thirstier he got for elderberry brandy and the more he realized that time was running out. Their money already had. He was trying to build the prototype for a new form of power, and day by day the hourglasses emptied themselves, the beeswax
candles burned down—and one day the grandfather clock fell over in an exhausted clash of chimes, glass, and splintered wood.

But where it all came unglued once and for all was the fair to mark the reopening of the local school (which Mabel Peanut, the earnest Episcopalian school marm, dubbed “A Celebration of Progress”). The owners of the flour mill, the pottery factory, and the new tool-and-die works had all chipped in to offer a cash prize in honor of Brazilla Rice, the first brickmaker in Zanesville, to be awarded to the youngster with the best scientific exhibit—with the exception of Lloyd.

Lloyd’s exclusion was phrased subtly but unmistakably, based on a condition of entry the family could not argue with: the number of days of school attendance in the past calendar year. No one was in doubt, however, about the real reason. If Lloyd was allowed to enter, there would be no contest. The other children would look ridiculous and the school itself would be revealed for the backwater log chink box of birds and mud pies that it was.

And there was another point at issue—one that no one involved, not even Lloyd, saw at the moment. Although progress was being celebrated, there was an inherent fear of it as well. Throughout all America this was true—but nowhere was that fear sharper than in a realm like Zanesville, which was neither an eastern bastion of culture and emerging convenience nor a frontier town anymore, on the edge of the wilderness. It was a crossroads town, torn between two worlds, resentful and anxious regarding them both.

The Sitturds were stung by the unfairness. The prize money seemed a small fortune to them, and any award for excellence, intelligence, and innovation had Lloyd’s name on it—and the whole town knew, despite Hephaestus’s efforts to keep the boy’s genius hidden. Rapture insisted that they go along to the showcase, anyway, as a matter of pride. Hephaestus agreed but was still so angry and so hurt by what was happening to
them that he had to take on a good load of elderberry brandy for the occasion. When it came time, they could not find Lloyd anywhere and concluded that it was perhaps just as well. Why should he want to see what to him was idiocy being celebrated?

A large crowd was on hand at the schoolhouse, some clapping, others gawking sympathetically when Sterling Riddle battled his speech impediment to present a swollen bladder worm that he had cut out of a Poland China sow all by himself. Millie Rambush introduced a charming, novel method of caring for small plants by using eggshells as flowerpots, but then went off on a tangent about where her sixth finger used to be, and how her daddy had removed it with a violin string. Hermione Witherspoon and Lucy Dalrymple had no exhibits. They had cooked rabbit pie for the judges, and as Mrs. Witherspoon pointed out, “Progress is very fine, but you can’t throw out tradition.” (To which Rapture telepathed to Hephaestus,
“Na, w’ich tradishun she be sayn ’bout?”
)

Caleb Holcomb was awarded the cash prize for his simple but effective idea of installing a Paint Can Hook on his Uncle Shute’s ladder. However, when the applause died down something unexpected happened, which would trigger the Sitturds’ end in Zanesville.

The “thingum” (to use the cogent phrase of Burgess Fluff) made its way across the floor with a telltale ticking sound and a distinctive wiggling motion. One man, the draper Herman Moody, would have reached for his pheasant gun if he had had it with him (remember, in those days some men refused to go anywhere, including church, without a firearm), but instead he was reduced to shouting, “Jehoshaphat! It’s … it’s … a … 
beaver!
”

And he was right. It was a life-size, fully operational mechanical beaver. Cunningly made of corset ribbing, fencing wire, and the spokes from two umbrellas, with gears and chains cannibalized from a range of devices (including the late grandfather clock), it inched across the floor in a kind of waddling
crawl and, every two steps, raised and lowered its tail. The detail was remarkable—right down to the prominent incisors, which took the form of old piano keys.

The arrival of the mechanical creature caused pandemonium to break out (which, among other results, led to Reverend Lightbody’s stepping into the rabbit pie). Everyone knew who was responsible and all eyes turned to Rapture and Hephaestus, who had been taken as much by surprise as the rest of them. Lloyd was nowhere to be seen, but in the minds of many people in that room it was his presence that animated the beaver, not the gearwheels and the clicking chainworks. It was just like that little Sitturd to show up the other children, people thought. “I don’t want my Andy a-goin’ to school with him!” Clara Petersby hollered. “That boy is evil!” Obedict Renfrew pronounced.

Lloyd’s parents slunk out of the hall. The beaver was not so fortunate. It was not quite crushed, but it was beaten into mechanical submission. Stalwart Crane, the furnace man at the kiln, had the decency to return it to the Sitturds that evening. He took off his slouch hat in respect when he knocked on their door to hand over the trashed contraption to Hephaestus. Lloyd was hiding just out of sight when the visit was paid.

“I just want you all to know,” Crane said. “Not ever-body thinks like ever-body else. I reckon this is—or it was—a damn fine thing. Opened my eyes, it did. Doan you fret about them that says ‘the Devil’s work.’ They’re just green with the demon of envy. If I could make something like this, I’d set it loose, too. And the hell with the consy-kwences. This little critter gave me some new hope. I hope it duddn’t bring you all more trouble. Try not to let it.”

Oh, but that was easier said than done. The next morning, old Tip was found dead in the barn. Most likely it was just chance—the dog was very old and there were no signs of violence. But the timing was suggestive. Rapture saw “homens.”
Had one of the infuriated townspeople taken his revenge? The intentional poisoning of animals was not an uncommon way of making a point in places like Zanesville. Lloyd wanted to do an autopsy, but Hephaestus insisted on keeping Tip’s dignity and body intact. He was an old dog that had lived a good life. Maybe it was just his time to go. Besides, if anyone was to blame …

Despite Crane’s good-intentioned support, which would not have been popular just at that moment if it had been voiced in public, Hephaestus felt inclined to reprimand his son for causing such a ruckus when they were in such heavy debt. But the compulsive inventor in him was curious about how the boy had made the creature. Lloyd shrugged, as if there were no more to it than making a daisy chain. He showed no sign of regret, and felt none, although he was angry and depressed about Tip. He retreated into his own labyrinthine section of the barn—the lamentable workshop designed to restrain him, which he had turned into a subtle machine and in which he had constructed the beaver every bit as easily as he said he had.

It was at the burial of dear Tip, with fleas still departing the carcass like the proverbial rats fleeing a sinking ship, that Lloyd conceded that immunity from Time was beyond his present capabilities and Hephaestus announced his plans to curtail work on the Ark. “Let’s hope Farmer Miller got his arithmetic wrong.”

When the old dog was in the ground, wrapped in his favorite blanket, Hephaestus, Rapture, and Lloyd, with the help of Pegasus, their splay-backed cream draft horse, tugged the Time Ark across the wreck of their farm and, on Lloyd’s suggestion, toppled it into the pit where Grady Smeg had endured his enforced therapy.

Lloyd insisted that the moment should not be considered a defeat but a release, and so the family filled the sphere with items that had been important to them during their latest trials. Rapture added some of her root bags, Hephaestus the broken
clocks and one of his old wine jugs. Lloyd laid the remains of the beaver to rest inside. It was a kind of time capsule, in the end, and it tumbled into the earth as if it were pleased to be there, free too, at last, reprieved from grand ambition.

William Miller was indeed proved wrong, as many had been before him. October 22, 1844, arrived, and with it the Great Disappointment for Millerites around the world. In November, the dark-horse candidate from Tennessee, James K. Polk, was elected to the presidency on the platform of annexing Texas for the purpose of expanding slavery. Lloyd turned six and had his first wet dream.

But the Sitturds’ world kept ending. A cold Christmas came, and the family dined on their last pig and was forced to break up and burn much of their furniture to stay warm. Even Lloyd’s airship got laid on the fire, much to Hephaestus’s distress.

“It won’t be the last one I make,” Lloyd said to console him. The old man may occasionally have been miffed at the boy’s precocious abilities, but he had always been proud of them, too. Or, perhaps, just in awe.

At last there came a hint of spring. For the Sitturds it brought an eviction notice for failure to pay their land tax, threats of seizure of property and chattels to repay debts—and a gut-shot Anglo-Nubian goat. There was no mistaking that sign. Perhaps Miller had been right after all, at least as far as the family was concerned.