blue-sky believers, runaway thieves, and would-be saints mixed up like nails and raisins in a jar. On nights before, he had heard the men playing. He had smelled their smoke and cheap whiskey, and caught the occasional loud oath or imprecation giving way to murmured bluffing and wagering. More than once he had felt the pang of memory, pondering where St. Ives and Miss Viola were—itching to be able to join the game and clean the shaving brush—bearded simpletons out of every pot. The thought of having to live in hiding even for the duration of their river journey sickened him, the stupid skullcap pulled down tight on his head like a badge of shame. And what about the future? Would he and therefore his family always be looking over their shoulders, shuttered up in claustrophobic spaces while the bright, teeming world grew faster and ever more luminous outside?
Old mud-rut routes and plank toll roads were giving way to macadamized causeways. Lloyd knew that the world would one day soon be speaking the firefly language of the telegraph (like the kind he had designed back home). Mechanical marvels would rumble over the earth and city-size balloons might rise like new suns. He wanted a part of it—to lead it, to steer the future. To soar above the flour mills and the distilleries like a lord of innovation. To him, it seemed that they had only appeared to leave Zanesville. The truth was it had followed them—or, rather, he had managed against all intention to re-create it.
The roof of heavy dry cloud weighed down upon him. His mind kept zooming back to the night he had met Mother Tongue in the grotto beneath the graveyard—the miraculous lights that had illuminated the cavern. If he had accepted her offer, everything might be different. Even if she had exaggerated in her story about the Spirosians and the Vardogers, he was convinced now that she was telling some species of truth. He could have had a rich, sparkling education. He could have shared in deep matters and worked with others more like himself to solve complex riddles. There would have been fresh meat and vegetables, scientific instruments—and the acquaintance of women, not girls but grown, knowing women like Viola Mercy. For the life of him, he could not recall what had blinded him to the epic opportunity he had been offered.
He saw not a single star or night bird. Only blank, cheerless clouds reflecting back the blur of lights from the foredeck and the pilothouse, and the intermittent flickers from the shacks and settlements along the shore. The dimness he glimpsed all around was surpassed only by what he felt inside. What did it matter if they did reach Texas, as unlikely as that still seemed? There would be no books or microscopes or dynamos there. (Note: the term “dynamo” had yet to be coined at that point; Lloyd’s term for such a device was an “electrogene.”) His desire was not to plow fields for cotton or wheat but to harvest the treasures of magnetic fields. To master lightning. He had no yen to raise snap beans and hogs like a high-ranking beast of burden. He yearned to penetrate the mysteries of minerals and numbers—and the secret machinery of the mind. To invent new forms of power—new vehicles, new hybrids of intelligent light.
What he foresaw for them in Texas was dust and wind and poverty, the perpetual seclusion of guilt and disgrace. “This is no way to live,” he told the thick Territory night. And yet, as he expressed this verdict, he saw that perhaps for his parents things could be different. If it was true that he was the principal cause of their troubles—and there was a strong argument that this was the case—then would not his parents’ lives, now that Hephaestus had recovered from his alcoholic debauchery, be happier without him? Of course they would grieve, he acknowledged, but ultimately they would worry less. The sorrow would pass, and then they would be free. Perhaps they would have another child in time, a child less likely to cause heartache and destruction. A child less gifted but not damned—or, at least, not dogged by shadows and perverse ambitions.
The more he dwelled on this notion the more it formed in his mind. Another bitter bite of shock for his father and mother, yes, but then release, maybe forever. Besides, since the old man was back among the living Lloyd had no place at the