Lloyd wore a knitted skullcap that Schelling had stuck on his head to make him less recognizable, with an orphanage long shirt over short cotton sack pants and rough leather shoes. The blacksmith’s mind flitted back to the horror in the eyes of Phineas, the vivisected rabbit. At last he found his voice.
“I’m sorry, Lloyd,” he said. “I’ve—I’ve made a mess of things. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I do,” the boy returned, but despite the blankness of his tone his father spied a flicker of something warmer and human in the cold green eyes.
“It won’t ever happen again,” the scrawny blacksmith vowed with a clearer voice. “Now, tell me what has happened and we will make a plan. A new plan.”
Rapture’s eyes darted to her son, and then and there she decided an issue that had been weighing on her soul since boarding the boat. They would say nothing about Lloyd’s misadventures in St. Louis. There was nothing she could say that she understood herself anyway. Maybe the black times behind them would drift into obscurity like some washed-away raft they passed in the night. There was at least no use in troubling her troubled husband with uncertain details now. Now was the time for simple known things, and for coming together.
She was relieved when Lloyd assumed an Indian squat on the floor amid their few belongings and remained still but far more attentive than she had seen him in days, as she recounted in broad, general terms her conclusion that getting them out of St. Louis and back on their way to Texas and whatever lay ahead for them was their best course, and so had brought about their departure. Lloyd’s face betrayed no emotion as she steered around the prickly matters, hoping that her husband’s clouded memory would stay clouded. The money they had now, she said, she had stolen from one of her employers—a desperate act that she was not proud of but which seemed necessary given Hephaestus’s fragile condition. His discovery and retrieval were credited to a free Negro who frequented the fish market in town, who had found him passed out in a shack downriver. The senior Sitturd seemed too exhausted from his ordeal and too ashamed to inquire further. Like his wife, all he found himself caring about and able to face up to was where they were at the moment, and where they were going.
In truth, their current position had to be deemed a significant improvement over the near-end of the world in St. Louis. They had lower-deck cabin passage paid to Independence, Missouri, on board a side-wheeler called the Defiance, built in Louisville fifteen years before and overhauled one too many times. Just under two hundred feet long, with a thirty-five-foot beam and a cargo capacity of five hundred tons and carrying six hundred, it was a “floating palace” that had been forced to earn its keep. In its heyday the Defiance had transported explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, mountain men, and missionaries, but more recently it had given passage to settlers and would-be western travelers, some laden already with overloaded wagons and visions of vast expanses of free land to turn into farms. Its cargo manifest was as miscellaneous as its passengers: Hudson’s Bay blankets, indigo cloth, frock coats, flannel shirts, Marseilles vests, and fancy calico shirts; Indian trading trinkets (like wampum moons and medals featuring a representation of John Jacob Astor on one side and peace and friendship on the reverse), horse bells, yellow bullet buttons, gun worms, awls, padlocks, oval firesteels, black-barley corn heads, octagon brass barrel pistols, hunter’s clay pipes, tinned rivets, iron kettles, refined borax, powder horns, oakum, pitch, pilot bread and Havana sugar; violin bows and Manila rope, emery paper, twist tobacco, sealskin trunks and sealing wax, rattail files and trap chains, sturgeon twine and silver gorgets; ladies’ Moroccan heel pumps and men’s thick brogans, ivory combs and silk handkerchiefs, bags of shot and pounds of chalk-white beads; butcher knives and boxes of thimbles, ground ginger, Seidlitz powders and lucifer matches; cod fish and pepper sauce, lime juice, Lexington mustard, bacon, rosin, foolscap paper, salted mackerel, and barrels of molasses (and, for Fort Atkinson and Fort Benson, plenty of alcohol and gunpowder).
The Sitturds’ fellow passengers included such a motley assortment of failures, fanatics, coarse-shirt dirt growers, and the odd silk-hatted scoundrel, they had been able to go relatively unnoticed so far, and God willing might yet arrive