points of view. He would have observed that when the commotion began other men who had not been seen before appeared below and began taking charge. It was one of these men, moving with practiced skill, who hustled Mulrooney into an alley, where he woke up hours later lying in a masonry wheelbarrow with a taste in his mouth like copper wire.
By the time Lloyd overshot the courthouse and made his attempt to bring himself around to land, there were not that many people left on Fourth Street to see it. A subtle but relentless force had been unleashed to quash the slave upheaval and coerce the potential witnesses from the scene. Only Mule Christian seemed immune to these efforts. Whip leather slashed across his shoulders, but this just served to encourage him into the middle of the street, where he braced, with outstretched arms, forming a tiny post-noon shadow in the thoroughfare, as Lloyd whisked down and toward him.
Lloyd tried to swerve, which spoiled the stalling power he tried to call on—his vision blurred, his reflexes jangled. He had a faint greenish flash of his sister’s face—she who had never had a living face. A rush of doom and shame whooshed through him, and his wind-filled wings ripped away as he tumbled headlong into the dark man who stood before him with open arms.
Even if Brookmire had still been at his station and watching then, he would have found it impossible to say for sure what happened next. For a few seconds, an ancient cart nag stood draped with the remnants of Lloyd’s parawing. Cudgels thudded. A broad-brimmed hat lay mashed in the street. And toppled at the foot of the stairs was the auction podium, a ledger book trodden on the ground beside it. But no one saw what happened to the boy or his flying harness. Mule Christian, the most expensive field nigger on sale, had seen a miracle coming for him out of the sky, and he had stepped forth to embrace it.
CHAPTER 5
Fleeing from Grace
PERHAPS IT WAS A KIND OF BLESSING THAT MULE FOUND. HE WAS certainly released from bondage. There was no pain. His neck snapped on impact. In giving his life, he cushioned Lloyd’s fall and the little giant from Zanesville rose out of the wreckage of the giant black man in the hot Missouri sun, like some part of Mule Christian that had lain hidden all the hard years of his life.
Lloyd managed to gain his feet for a moment and then crashed for true. The brick façades, the courthouse dome, Mulrooney, Brookmire, thoughts of his mother, his father, and his ghost sister—all swirled into a spiral that seemed to take him with it, and he remembered nothing more at all until the agitated face of Schelling yawned down into his like a pit that had learned the art of looking back.
Smelling salts were applied, hands groped and tugged at him, voices were raised and then stifled into whispers, stars—or things like stars—seemed to whiz past his head. He glimpsed his mother—or glimpsed her smell—his senses muddled. Then there was cold water and warm candlelight. He remembered one man with a face like a snapping turtle and a tall, thin white man cradling him into a passageway of dirt behind two shuttered buildings … the aroma of pumpernickel bread.
Every so often he regained enough coherence to imagine that he was still flying, higher and higher up to heaven to meet his dead sister, who waited in the dandelions at God’s feet, flying a kite with his face painted on it. Then the face on the kite would change. It would be his father, bright and ebullient as he once was ages ago back in Ohio. Then the image would change again, into the mangled bodies of Urim and Thummim. Someone stuck a rag down his throat to keep him from biting his tongue. Fragments of memory haunted him: the sight of Mulrooney’s hat in the crowd … skiffs along the esplanade … the mirror burn of Brookmire’s spyglass.
It was nightfall by the time Lloyd regained full consciousness. He was out on the water, in a larger version of the kind of boat that Schelling had used to take him to meet Mother Tongue. A tallow candle beamed out of a battered lantern hanging on the side of the pilothouse. His mother was there, looking perplexed and horrified, chattering and sobbing over him in her gumbo accent, any fussy white pretense stripped away.