To his profound shock and relief, his sack of personal things lay beside him on the deck, tied up tight just the way he had left it stuffed inside his excuse for a shuck pillow back at the mission house. He longed to claw it open to see if Mother Tongue’s eyes and the Ambassadors’ box, and the precious letter from his uncle, were safe in hiding. Everything came back.
His body ached, from his skull to the legs that had slammed into Mule Christian. The slightest movement brought back sickening waves of falling. Along with Schelling, there were two large black men, but not the same men he had met before. His stomach felt like a mess of cogwheels and syrup. He wanted to throw up, but nothing came out of his gullet. The dark, thick air was hot and still, and smelled of wood smoke and river muck.
The joyous power of the wind came back to fill his smarting bones. He saw the city laid out beneath him … the ineffable experience of flight … then the shadows rose up to snatch him—the accusing face of the showman—and at last he did vomit, over the side of the boat, his bile mingling with the Mississippi as the launch chugged upriver.
Silently, his mother sidled over and put her arm around his shoulder. He realized that he was wearing some other boy’s clothes. Whose? And what had become of Brookmire? Rapture crooned sad nonsense words in his ear, as she had done when he was wee. Why did everything go so wrong for them? Was he cursed? Would there ever be a home full of peace and belonging? Schelling scowled at him. The boat churned on.
They were headed north to the junction of the Missouri River, hugging the shore. In about two hours, they had melded into this other flow and arrived at their apparent destination, a clutter of what in the dark looked like drying sheds and some sort of chandler’s warehouse at the end of a sagging pier. The boat docked and up on the bank a hound moaned. A hard-looking white woman in a plain black frock appeared, carrying a bear rifle. With her was what Lloyd first thought was a boy, perhaps the boy whose clothes he was wearing. The lad hoisted at arm’s length the kind of lamp Lloyd had seen dangling on the bows of the fishing boats, but when the couple got closer Lloyd saw that he was in fact a midget—with a tight dried-apple face that rose up out of dirty flannel like the head of someone who had drowned. The pair spoke not a word.
“Where are you taking us?” Lloyd asked Schelling.
The humpback cast a glance at him, like a chunk of gristle to a mutt.
“You will stay here the rest of the night, then be on your way tomorrow.”
“Where?” the boy queried. He tried to reckon the number of days since he had last seen his old patron, but the midget’s face distracted him.
“Where you were heading before you created such trouble.”
Lloyd flinched at this remark but grabbed at his satchel and hugged it to his chest. Schelling gestured them off the boat and accompanied them down the rickety gangplank. The midget and the rifle woman led them up a cut-clay path through a tangle of unlit buildings. They passed a chicken coop, coming to a windowless chinkwall cabin. A drainage trench ran around the place like a moat they had to step over—and when they did, a towering but emaciated deerhound ambled out of the shadows, assuming horselike proportions up against the midget. One of the black men who had been with them on the boat was left outside on guard.
Inside, the floor was packed dirt and the only light came from the hearth, where a spunk of resiny pine was smoldering and popping. The cloistered air was oppressive with mosquitoes. Lloyd’s eyes shot around the room. A pewter jug and a stack of scratched tin plates stood on a turned-leg table with two milking stools beside it. Another chair was a rocker like the one he had sat in during his interview with Mother Tongue and, next to it, a pathetic-looking child-size wheelchair. In the corner rose a jailhouse bunk with a patchwork comforter laid over each bundle of ticking. A polished cherry-handled dueling pistol lay on the bottom bunk.
Schelling spoke to the woman and the midget in some language that sounded to Lloyd like German but was not.