meaty-smelling slop kitchen in a frame-house-and-vegetable-plot district running up from the river, where the smell of kettles full of boiling shirts mingled with the fumes of schnapps. The sounds of polka music (which was relatively new then) alternated with the lieder and the occasional hatchet fight. During that time they sold Pegasus and what was left of the humdinger to an Irish-Shawnee giant named Mulligan Hawk. Despite his fearsome appearance, he gave the impression of knowing horses and appreciating animals. Their goodbye to this, their last living friend from the farm, was less moody as a result. Old Pegasus would be looked after—perhaps much better than they would be.
The combined sale, along with a good word from the giant, yielded enough money for rough-deck keelboat passage in the company of a cable-armed Serb named Holava, who carried a bowie knife strapped to his belt that he called a “genuine Arkansas toothpick,” and made his living hauling coal, nails, timber shake, and sacks of milled corn to Louisville.
Just over 110 miles of twisting river, it was. Sometimes swollen and foaming around them, other times snagged and vicious with overhang from the banks. The flow could rise three feet in the night, frothing with driftwood, fallen timber, and rubbish. And the bizarre people! Jug-swilling maniacs calling out from fortified bluffs—the last of the beaver trappers drifting like leaves in long birchbark canoes—flatboats covered in skins, writhing with children and clattering pots.
Hephaestus read, whittled, and chewed to pass the time (trying to keep ideas for new inventions from filling his mind),while Rapture would point out to Lloyd the hollyhocks and the yellow spikes of toadflax.
By the time they reached Louisville and Holava had traded in some of their Ohio cargo for a load of burley tobacco and cured meat, Lloyd had filled his notebook with elegant scribbles of ospreys with shad clutched in their talons and an idea for a huge barge to be pulled by swimming buffalo.
But the farther the family got from Zanesville the more strained their sense of family became. Hephaestus missed his tools and his inventions. Rapture missed her herbs and concoctions. Lloyd missed his secret link with his dead sister, and the ability not just to draw things but to make them. Texas seemed a world away. They reread the magical letter and hardened themselves for the next phase of their journey, each of them wondering where the elusive presentiment of deepening shadow came from—whether it came from within them or moved on larger, darker wings across America itself.
There was something in the wind that no one quite understood, and so could not talk about in any of the mélange of languages that swirled around like junk in the river.
The Sitturds were puzzles to themselves even. Were they intrepid adventurers reaching out for the bounty of a new day? Or cowardly bankrupts fleeing like frightened beasts?
It is sometimes hard to tell the pilgrim from the fugitive, just as dawn always has a hint of the gloaming. In every opportunity, there is an invitation to failure and defeat. And in every defeat there is an opportunity … for …
CHAPTER 4
River of Secrets, River of Mercy
LOUISVILLE WAS A TOWN OF EXTREMES. THE THICK SMELL OF horse piss alternated with gentle sniffs of blooming wisteria. Newly rich planters mixed sugar into their bourbon while slaves hauled tobacco and cotton crops to market, and the streets flurried with open-air stalls that sold live animals along with dried catfish, mud turtles, and skinned rabbits swarming with yellow jackets—a sight that fascinated Lloyd and disgusted Hephaestus (stirring memories of Phineas the rabbit). There was a friend left behind in Zanesville that the family never spoke of, and the blacksmith rather feared that Lloyd gave more thought to the mechanical beaver he had made than to the life he had taken.
Desperate again for funds, the family hocked most of their remaining possessions for food and lodging, and for raising enough money to cover waterline passage on a stern-wheeler called the City of Paducah all the way to Cairo, where the Ohio melds into the Mississippi. There they found planks and piers, mule-lined dust streets, and frame houses peering across the river to Kentucky.
Amid hanging sides of bacon and buckets of nails that smelled like dirty rain, the Sitturds negotiated passage to St. Louis on board a paddle wheeler that had been christened the Festus in a Memphis shipyard but which its prudent new owners had renamed the Fidèle. The steamboat was crowded with all manner