that doesn’t mean anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn’t be anything to fly if it was easy,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Even for birds.”
“Seen a plateye affer!” she hissed, by which she meant an apparition.
“Murruh, you can’t go around thinking you see ghosts all the time,” he told her, but he thought that his voice seemed to lack conviction. The ghost of his lost sister, Lodema, had been very real to him back in Zanesville. And now he was coming to think of ghosts in a new way yet again, as that familiar ghost slipped further into the past. The trouble was, it was in a ghostly way—not fully formed, just out of clear sight. Yet present somehow. Active. Intent.
“He be haa’dhead. A hebby cumplain. Bit Ah’s sponsubble.”
“No more than I am,” Lloyd replied solemnly. He knew that his father resented his talents, even as he so very much appreciated them. The old man was like a crib-sucking mule you forgave for doing damage. But the boy did not like to see his mother ornery and blue at the same time. And he did not think it was wise for her to lapse so completely into her native dialect, even if she was addressing a sack of onions. The walls in St. Louis had ears. Strange things were afoot.
“Here,” he said, reaching down to the floor. “Here’s your hengkitchuh.”
His accent was authentic and sharp. She bristled at it.
“Ain’t gwine crya!”
He made a move to embrace her, but she shoved him away.
“Git ’way, l’il swellup!”
That hit Lloyd in the lights. He would rather have fallen from a rooftop.
But his own tar boiled up inside and he struck at her, landing his child-boy blow just about where she had given birth to him.
Rapture gave out a dreadful wheeze but still retained her “tan’ up.” Then they both gave into hugging and crying—softly—for fear of the church matrons in their Balmoral skirts and their shush-shush disapproval of anything vaguely human.
“It’s going to be all right,” Lloyd heard himself saying. “It will. I will make it all right.”
They kissed, for the first time in a very long while, and he slunk off to the chaos of the dormitory to prepare for another night of alley-cat scavenging.
Like his mother, Lloyd wanted to believe that Hephaestus was passing the jug and sopping gravy maybe two miles below, but he could not escape the possibility that an accident had befallen him. Of course, even if this was the case, it did not mean that the followers of the Claws & Candle were involved. His father was, after all, more than capable of doing himself harm. And there were always the knife houses to consider—floating brothel-saloons based in firetrap launches and decommissioned steamboats that renegade whites ran or that freed blacks were able to negotiate, smoke-filled mobile roach pits where men of all colors gambled on barrels and dance girls would put their legs up to knock over the whiskey. Then the razors would come out. There were rumors that a gargantuan woman named Indian Sweet ran one of the most popular and violent boats on the river. After his father’s foray with Chicken Germain—and given his weakness for sour mash, blackened fish, and raucous music—Lloyd could imagine all too clearly his sire facedown in the Mississippi as the morning sun rose.
It was then that he would take from their hiding place Mother Tongue’s terrible green eyes. He could not return them. He could not discard them. Some moments he thought that he should just accept her offer of help and be done with his family—perhaps that was the way to really save them. The problem was that he did not believe he could trust the old witch—or Schelling, either, for that matter. Mother Tongue might give him gifts of education and money, but then he would be forever beholden to her and her hidden officers. Once initiated into either the Spirosians or the Vardogers (assuming there was any true difference between them), he knew that he could never leave.
Rapture became more and more distraught, muttering to herself and to the onions, which sometimes sprouted long green shoots, and which in his troubled dreams Lloyd imagined stretching out to strangle her. He did not like to see how carefully and methodically she washed her hands and arms in the tin basin after returning from work each night. Where else did she wash so diligently when no one was looking?