Enigmatic Pilot (7 page)

That same week a traveling Methodist minister came to town, or at least a man who called himself a minister. He delivered no sermons. He did, however, deliver a packet that took their minds off all other matters, for its contents were exceptional in the extreme: a small knotted bag of gold, a hand-drawn map, and a letter addressed to Hephaestus from Captain Micah Jefferson Sitturd of the Texas Rangers, dated eight months earlier, from “Forever the Great Republic of Texas.” It read:

H
EPHAESTUS CONFIRMED THAT BOTH THE LETTER AND THE MAP
were evidence of his brother’s handwriting. None of the Sitturds could sleep or eat (which was just as well, because there was precious little for the pot). The proposition that the letter advanced, with its combination of familial support and an invitation to adventure, was, in their current state of finances and mind, irresistible. Still, it left them with what Rapture could not stop describing as a “big’un recishun!”

Despite their avowed intention of mulling over the matter in detail, come the next morning, by the time Rapture had prepared their daily dose of tansy bitters to keep off the ague, Micah’s proposal had been embraced by the whole family with the unquestioning conviction that desperation can bring. There was no “recishun” to be made. They had to leave Zanesville. That Texas lay a long distance away, and a war with Mexico could break out any day, did not dissuade them. This was an offer and a request that could not be refused. Not in their present circumstances—and not in Hephaestus’s heart, either. There was about the communication a suggestive timeliness and a hint of redemptive possibility that hooked him as cleanly as the sturgeon he used to pull from the head of the falls.

With a door of refuge open, it was their lot “ta tek ’e foot een
’e han,” as Rapture put it (which was not a concept that Lloyd thought was sound from an engineering point of view). What to try to salvage was not so clear. The gold that Micah had sent was sufficient to cover only the debts they felt most honor-bound to pay, and, given the financial claims their neighbors wanted to impose upon them, removing any of their remaining possessions would technically have been stealing. None of their farm animals would make it out of Ohio except the draft horse Pegasus, and the one suitable vehicle was an old humdinger night-soil wagon that Hephaestus had traded for a pile of corncob coal. The wagon had been airing out among the snares and spring-loaded traps of Lloyd’s minefield maze garden all winter, but it still retained a pungency that announced its history well before arrival. No matter. If embarking on a journey to a promised land (however “sabbidge” and under threat) had to be started in a cart that reeked of dung, so be it. Better to risk life, limb, and olfactory discomfort than remain in Zanesville as outcasts and debtors.

They considered rafting down the Muskingum to its intersection with the Ohio River at Marietta and catching a steamboat to Louisville and then St. Louis (if they could earn some money along the way). Hephaestus could get work in the cities, and with any luck they could save enough to take a steamboat along the Missouri River to somewhere like Independence and head south across the wild Indian country from there. But the Muskingum was a difficult river to navigate in spring, running high with ice melt and prone to flood, plus unsavory folk were rumored to live along its banks waiting to prey upon the flatboats and their cargoes of grain, lumber, and livestock. The other obvious alternative was the National Road, or the Old Pike, as it was called—the original interstate—which ran through Columbus all the way to Vandalia, Illinois.

Fearing that their creditors might try to pursue them on so open a route, they opted for the more difficult but less predictable plan of making for Cincinnati overland via the Great
Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, which had been a place of good luck for them in the past—the place where Lloyd and Lodema were conceived, back when nothing but love seemed to be in the air and hope grew like the sparrowgrass. Pegasus and the humdinger could get them that far, Hephaestus felt. After that, they were in God’s hands.

They took blankets and oilskins and the drunkard’s path quilt Rapture had made. For provisions they took a sack of cornmeal and one of flour, a small side of bacon, a bag of snow apples, one jug of wolf-mint tea, one of homemade whiskey, a bottle of taproot beer, coffee, sugar, salt, some bottled preserves, and taters. They took their old Kentucky rifle and the horse pistol that Parson Shide had used in his famous duel with the alcoholic tobacconist Daniel Christ (who later cut his own throat with a razor in his smokehouse), which Hephaestus had been paid in return for repairing a mill wheel, along with powder and shot, and what Rapture called, “de t’ings fuh mek we libbin’.”

In addition to the richness of Rapture’s phraseology, they took Hephaestus’s blacksmith tools (except for the anvil), his main woodworking tools, an ax, some rope and drag chains, a bolt of twill plus needles and thread, and matches, candles, a lantern, Rapture’s midwife bag, and Lloyd’s notebook. The rest of his dreams and inventions the boy had to leave behind—but, unlike Hephaestus, he felt that he carried them with him in his mind. All these provisions they loaded on the humdinger, but Lloyd’s mind was more loaded still.

Early one morning, while the mist was still rising from the pastures, like the ghosts of all their memories, they each said a silent goodbye to the family farm that was no longer theirs. One last look behind the muddy, rutted road that led either into town or into the woods and the past was gone … a final farewell to the animals buried on the property, the vegetable patches, and the shrouded fruit trees … to Lodema … the hidden Time Ark and its tragic treasure trove.

Even with the promise and the challenging journey ahead of them, Lloyd’s mind lingered behind long after the bend that took the farm out of sight. He vowed that he would rebuild Lodema’s shrine in Texas. He would one day build a city in her honor—a city of cyclones, so full of energy and life it would be. A place where only marvels were allowed.

If anyone saw the family leave, they didn’t shout or wave. The whole countryside had a sleeping, dead stillness to it, so that the wheels of the humdinger and the steady clop of Pegasus’s heavy hooves echoed in the mist.

By the time the sun was high enough to burn away the dewy fog, they were on the poor excuse for a post road through the rolling Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, corduroy at the best of times, now sloppy and treacherous with the slow spring thaw.

Calamity after inconvenience beset them as they made their way through pastureland into thin forest and then into rugged stretches of hardwoods. Sometimes they had to chop down small trees and hitch them to the hind part of the wagon to slow their descent down hills (an endeavor that left Rapture “skaytodet”). Skirting creeks and ravines, they passed mounds and prehistoric earthworks. The trees and undergrowth were fleeting with reemerging wildlife—white-tailed deer, gray foxes, pileated woodpeckers, and hosts of woodland songbirds—but they saw few people: an Indian who vaporized into the budding trees and a mean-looking white man in dirty clothes, who looked as if he had been startled answering the call of nature. Whenever they grew tired or afraid they pulled out the letter from Micah (which Lloyd was given charge of) and savored the enticing conundrum of promise that lay ahead for them in Texas—if they could get there.

It was this hope that got them through the woods and back into farmers’ fields and pumpkin patches and down to the Great Serpent Mound, which was in what is today Adams County, near the town of Locust Grove. Three times the cart
had threatened to overturn. At every moment they expected trouble. But they arrived.

Still, it did not fill them with the joy and renewal they had hoped for. Both parents were shy and bumbling, recalling the passionate lovemaking that they had once known there—that had brought Lloyd into being, and Lodema almost.

Lloyd, meanwhile, went into a deep funk after their visit to the Mound, which Rapture attributed to some hypersensitive connection with his “sperit” twin. Hephaestus was of the view that constipation was the cause, and that a large dose of cod liver oil would help. In truth, both parents noticed that the boy was less fixated on Lodema—as if the connection had been broken by their removal from Zanesville. Perhaps that was a good thing, Hephaestus thought. Rapture was less sure, knowing from her own experience how helpful a relationship with ghosts could be. Lloyd kept his thoughts to himself and said not a word to allay their apprehension. In truth, he did not know himself what bothered him. It was some indefinite form of foreboding—as if they were being followed by something of much greater concern than had ever plagued them in Zanesville.

The rains came and they got bogged down for two days, only to pull free of the sucking mud and resume their journey to be struck with another violent thunderstorm and a lashing downpour that forced them to huddle on what high ground they could find while they watched their possessions get drenched. Several they were forced to leave behind. They had overpacked and did their best to keep their optimism from being ejected, along with soaked salt beef and ruined tea leaves.

Back on the road, a filthy-faced man with a spongy goiter and a woman without teeth tried to beg from them. Rapture made hardtack for them, but they continued lurking about, so that Hephaestus had to take a potshot at them with the horse pistol. By lantern light they discovered weevils in the flour.

The next day the horse pistol wasn’t enough. Coming into a clearing, they were surrounded. It was more an extended backcountry
family than an organized gang of robbers, but robbery was what the interlopers had in mind. As outraged and aggrieved as the Sitturds felt, they were all in silent agreement that it was a blessing that the clan had no more malicious intent, for given the number of them and their pocky, lice-ridden appearance, their desires might have taken a very different and considerably nastier turn.

The leader, a gnarled salt-and-pepper-bearded git with a scar that ran from his left temple deep into his mess of grizzle, spoke in a broken-toothed accent they could barely understand, like a wild hill preacher, directing with a musket a weasel-quick boy of about sixteen and two older men with gopher teeth and eyes like toads, each armed with long, cruel skinning knives shoved in their rope belts.

With an unsettling politeness, they plundered the wagon of food and the best and most important of Hephaestus’s tools as three moonfaced women in sack dresses and threadbare shawls, and another fidgety male with an eyepatch, looked on without expression down the long barrels of well-used squirrel guns, and then melted back into the woods as suddenly as they’d appeared.

When it was over, Rapture burst into tears and stamped her feet, while Lloyd’s locked jaws clicked with fury. Hephaestus summed up the situation. “We’re still alive. Let’s keep moving. While we can.”

And so they did, making do with what they had left, eating wild game they caught along the way, and pushing hard to get through the hill country.

Easter found them in Cincinnati, or Porkopolis, as it was being called—a booming new metropolis of 150,000 energetic souls, many of them German immigrants, Irish, Scots, and Poles. The family was able to find temporary lodging and employment with a man named Schloss, who made knockwurst and sculpted pigs’ heads of offal and jellied marrow. Lloyd’s grasp of German came in handy, and he was assigned the task
of taking orders and assisting with deliveries. Rapture did laundry and cooking, while Hephaestus got work with the Cincinnati Steamship Company repairing machinery. At night they snuggled amid the pork fat and candle smoke and pored over Micah’s letter, which Lloyd kept hidden in his precious bag along with his notebook.