A cold leg of poached chicken, corn pone, and some black-eyed peas were served to him and Rapture, along with a lopsided bottle of birch beer to share. He felt as ravenous as the insects and as dry as the air. When he had finished gnawing his bone, Schelling ordered him toward the bunk. Carefully, the boy laid the dueling pistol on the hardened mud floor, which had been swept smooth by a stiff broom and strong arms.
Lloyd lay back on the ticking but kept his eyes on Schelling and his ears open, the mosquitoes whining around his head. The humped man whispered to Rapture for quite some time as the woman and the midget crouched in their respective chairs, staring hypnotically into the fireplace as if they were all by themselves. At last the bookseller reached into a pocket and produced a sheaf of paper money. The notes he pressed into Rapture’s hand. Lloyd caught a hint of the calcium-stained tooth, and then his old patron’s face marbled over into blankness once again.
Soon after, Schelling left without saying anything more to Lloyd. The beer had softened and slowed the boy’s thinking, and the whirring of the skeeters and the hissing of the sap in the lump of pine eased his alertness away from its moorings and out into the current of slumber. Only once did he stir—some upsetting dream about the midget watching him in his sleep—but fatigue and despair got the better of him again, and it was not until the light of a sullen morning spilled through the open doorway that he woke up properly.
His mother squatted on one of the milking stools, and beside her, hunched over the table, was what might have been a scarecrow that had been plucked out of the river and left to dry on a line. Schelling glowered at the boy.
“Here is your father,” he announced acidly. “Or what is left of him. Very soon now a steamer will put in. You are all going to be on it. Do you understand?”
“Where are we going?” Lloyd mumbled, rubbing away the crust of sleep.
“Far away, I hope,” Schelling said, shrugging. “And never to return. Don’t you remember you were going to Texas—before you took to trying to fly? Or did your brains get scrambled when you crushed that poor fellow?”
Rapture squirmed at this remark, but the huddled figure beside her did not respond. The woman and the midget were nowhere to be seen. Despite Lloyd’s native self-possession, he felt that he might cry. He climbed to his feet instead, too curious about the derelict plopped on the stool.
“Keep to your cabin as much as you are able,” the bookseller commanded. “Use the money I have given you and pay the bursar direct. Talk to as few people as you can, and tell no one your plans. You are a little boy, after all, Lloyd. A dangerous, selfish,foolish little boy. In spite of your genius, your stupidity is matched only by mine for watching over you and not taking action before you did. I thought I was protecting you. Already it seems the better question is who will protect the world from you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess.”
Rapture sat speechless, propping up the figure that Schelling had called his father—rousty with chiggers and alcoholic delirium (a condition that Mother Tongue’s lieutenant treated with an injection from a horse needle). The skeletonized tramp slumped with the shot as a riverboat whistle tooted in the distance.
“He will rest for a while now,” Schelling rasped, his hump twitching. “I recommend that you restrain him—and keep his head turned. Plenty of water and time can get him through this. Now go. And be gone.”
Moving toward the gray light, Lloyd could see a paddle steamer pulling into the ramshackle wharf, where a man in a buckboard loaded with sacks of flour waited. The air was greasy-warm and smelled like dead fish.
He tried to imagine where Mulrooney was at that moment, but he could not bring the showman into focus. What would Brookmire tell his father? And what of the Ambassadors?
The steamboat let out another whistle that reminded him of the screech owl in the slave cemetery the night that Schelling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue—a cry from out of the stillness, between the land of the living and the brilliant darkness of the dead.
CHAPTER 1
Awakening West
IT WAS NOT THE SLURPING OF THE PADDLE-WHEEL WOOD WHACKING