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 Sitturds 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 reassurances 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 Schelling had led him to the night that he met Mother Tongue … to the box of the Martian Ambassadors … 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 passed outside, then a thin white cat. In the starlit space 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 glass 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