her doubt wavered. There was no gainsaying his guilt over the deformed twins—and, like her descriptions of plantation life, she heard in his words the unmistakable accuracy of the authentic.
She chided him about what he had done, and yet when he made mention of them having apparently, at least, fallen out of a tornado, she posed another surprising question. “How you know they wasn’t taken back?”
“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, eager, of course, to find any mitigating circumstance.
“Mebbe, you didn’t do ever-thing. You was just the way it happened. The way you talk about ’em, they wasn’t from here.”
“No,” Lloyd agreed. “They were from Indiana.”
“I doan mean that, fool! I mean from somewheres else.”
“Like Mars? I don’t think so.”
“Mebbe, more places to be from than you think.”
Lloyd heard the wisdom in that.
“Some kines of knowin’ just doan answer ever question. My Papa, he had a sayin’:
I seen what the sun, the moon
And the lightning do
But no one sees the thunder
Till they learn how to
Indeed, thought Lloyd.
Learning to see the thunder is what he should have told Schelling when asked his greatest aspiration.
CHAPTER 4
Fetish
LLOYD PUT TOGETHER FOR HATTIE A SIMPLE YET VERY FUNCTIONAL all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace apron, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he stitched himself with a heavy bagger’s needle that he had kept from St. Louis, while his parents were preparing food. (His experience with the kites had taught him a great deal, and he had the artificial hand of St. Ives in mind.)
The kit included a general lock pick that he had sharpened out of harvested wire, a jimmy made from some window flashing, a miniature hammer he had fabricated from a hickorybarrel hove and one of the large bolts from the boat rigging, a carving knife and whetstone, along with a flint and striker from the cabin crew’s quarters, an adjustable wrench he had nipped from the engine room, some lady’s sewing implements that had been left about, a small hatchet that had dropped below the boilers, a magnifying lens he made from some plucked spectacles, and an assortment of bandages and a bottle of iodine wrapped in cotton wool so that it would not break, which he had nicked from a doctor’s bag.
From this same bag he took a vial of laudanum and added to the kit the one bottle of LUCID! that survived from his medicine-show career, in case she became injured and needed pain relief. What he did not find in the bag was an item that he felt was important, and so he made one himself from one of the extra steam valves in the engineer’s room—a stethoscope.
“What’s this for?” Hattie asked, when he proudly laid out his offerings.
“That’s for listening to sounds,” he said. “To hearts—and to the other side of walls, if you have to. I didn’t have time to make a good one. But you’ll hear better than you would on your own. And this, this is for making sounds—music—if you’re alone and need to make noise, instead of shushing all the time. To cheer yourself up.”
The final inclusion was a crude bunch of short, tensioned metal rods screwed into the base of a burgled clock with a hollowed-out hole for a resonator, which Lloyd, in what remained of his innocence, believed at that point he had invented. It was in fact a very old kind of musical instrument—what today we would call a kalimba, or African thumb piano—like a Jew’s harp but with a much wider range of tones. He had at least adjusted the rods in the precise order to create a true musical scale, and the simple strumming of these vibrating keys produced a quiet yet pleasing sound.
To his surprise and delight, she played a plaintive yet charming melody on it. She had seen and heard many such instruments in the secrecy of plantation cabins, and was herself surprised that Lloyd knew what one was.
As to the whole of the gift—for it was a whole—she did not know what to say. Not since her father had anyone given her anything but a belting or a form of torture, and even her father had not given her things he had made himself. And so many things! Each with a sense and a purpose, but with flexibility—the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. She admired the things stolen as much as the items made, because she intuited that everything would have been made