did examine the container again—and saw in the intricate alien characters that it displayed a message for his life that he knew he must do everything in his power to understand. So Hattie’s gift, no bigger than a berry, served both to free him from his horror of losing her and as a seed. He cried when it dawned on him that he must say goodbye to her. But when the tears were gone he felt refreshed and full of her spirit, as if she had given not only her body to him but all that she had—all that she was. And so, he gave her a gift to remember him by, to watch over her and link her to him.
“Is this a jewel?” Hattie asked when Lloyd put one of Mother Tongue’s eyes in her hands.
“It’s a species of jewel, I believe—and a very great mystery,” he answered. “A very powerful, very old white woman who helps the slaves gave it to me. It’s a match of this,” he told her, holding up the mate.
“They’re eyes!” Hattie cried. “Made eyes!”
“Yes, but who they were made by is the thing. The old woman, who is a kind of witch, you’d say—before she took them out she could see with them, I swear. And I’ve thought I’ve seen things in them, too. There’s some sort of magic to them, just like there is to your fetish. I want you to keep this, then we will each have one.”
Hattie had no doubt about the sincerity of the gesture, and was warmed inside to have something of Lloyd and his past to take with her. There was indeed something touched about the sphere, a talisman to match her skull. She cupped it lovingly in her hand, then hid it away inside her clothes.
The steam whistle blew.
“Do we say goodbye?” Lloyd asked.
“Not folks like us,” Hattie replied.
Lloyd did not look for her when the family stepped off the gangplank at their destination, for he knew that she would not be seen, but that she was moving forward with a will stronger than any river current could ever be.
But God he missed her. The Brown Recluse.
CHAPTER 5
Reliable Omens
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI, IS A PLACE RICH IN HISTORY. IT BEGAN as a fort when Osage Indians would come to trade furs and pause at the window of Agent George Shipley’s house to listen to his daughter play the piano. A little log courthouse was later built, which doubled as a pig pen and became so infested with fleas that it was necessary to invite sheep inside while the court was in session, to give the bloodsuckers something else to feed on. In the 1830s, the Mormons settled here and for a time prospered, only to be tarred and feathered and eventually burned out. Much, much later, Harry S. Truman would go to high school here, the man whose middle initial stood for nothing—“Mr. Citizen,” who became a judge without ever having been a lawyer, the first and the last United States president to run a failing men’s clothing store, and the man famous for his belief that “the buck stops here.” (He apparently gave the two most important military orders in the history of Western civilization, carried through on August 6th and 9th of 1945.)
What the Sitturds found when they landed was, of course, a very different scene. As the family disembarked, there were a few raised eyebrows about Hephaestus’s appearance, but there was so much activity in this western Missouri “jumping off place” (where many folk, indeed, looked as though they had hurled themselves off the precipice of reason and restraint) that no one in the family, including Lloyd, worried much about who might be watching them just then. There was too much happening.
It was midafternoon and saddles and harnesses poured off the Defiance in piles. Goats, mules, horses, and oxen raised a thick cloud along the long dock road running alongside the mule-drawn railroad link leading to the actual town. Barrels rolled, crates trundled, dry hides flopped. While huge numbers of western emigrants bound for Oregon to the north or Santa Fe to the south had departed months earlier in the year (the moment sufficient spring grass had grown to feed their animals), still others had poured in since, intending to hunker down for winter and either trade their stores or accumulate more for a prompt decampment come the first thaw the next year. It took six months in those days to make the two-thousand-mile trek